All-time Top 10 by position - coming soon

[TruffleShuffle]

In the next day or two, I'm going to start up the historical top 10 baseball players by position. I'll provide a link to their stats on baseball-reference and baseball prospectus (which has stats like WARP3, EqA, etc. for free, if you're sabermetrically-inclined). How it will run:

 

-I'll give a list of names in alphabetical order to help. I'll probably select the top 20 on the Bill James player register, along with any Hall of Famers who are not on his top 20, and any current players who merit inclusion as well.

 

-I will not be including any players from the Negro Leagues or any foreign leagues. If there were a good way to compare Josh Gibson to Johnny Bench, I'd love to do it, but so much of what we know about players in the Negro Leagues is anecdotal, and it would take a ton of research to have any shot at giving these players a fair ranking. So while you can certainly make mention of excluded players in the various threads - Josh Gibson probably being the best catcher ever, should be mentioned - please stick to just MLB players for your final list.

 

-Rank your top 10. At the end of a given period, I'll total up all the choices, giving points on a 12-10-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1 scale. Then I'll give the NSBB consensus rankings for the position. I'll probably give about 1.5 or 2 weeks for each position.

 

-Players will be listed at the position at which they played the most games. If you want to penalize a SS for moving to 1B later in his career, that's fine, but do please consider them as a SS in this case.

 

-For starting pitchers, we can expand the list to include more than 10 players. I'm thinking 20 or 25... thoughts?

 

-I think relief pitching has been a big enough part of the game that we can now include top 10 for relievers.

 

-The order of positions: C, 1B, 2B, 3B, SS, LF, CF, RF, SP, RP

 

-After we've finished with relief pitchers, I'll then do a top 25 overall, regardless of position.

 

-Debate is fine - just be respectful of the opinions of others. Standard board rules apply, blah blah blah.

 

-If a moderator could be kind enough to sticky the active threads, that would be greeeeeat.

 

 

I'll start putting together the catcher list tonight; hopefully by tomorrow or Wednesday we can get going. Enjoy!

[Mephistopheles]

*yawn*

Best SPs

1. Kerry Wood

2. Randy Johnson

3. Roger Clemens

[Omar]

*yawn*

Best SPs

1. Kerry Wood

2. Randy Johnson

3. Roger Clemens

 

I bet someone $5 this thread would end in a female dog fight. Great start.

[Mephistopheles]

actually under the restrictions on the thread

 

its possibly the most accurate answer.

[Omar]

actually under the restrictions on the thread

 

its possibly the most accurate answer.

 

possibly. but we all still have that "oh here we go..." feeling.

[TruffleShuffle]

*yawn*

Best SPs

1. Kerry Wood

2. Randy Johnson

3. Roger Clemens

 

i respectfully disagree with your rankings. No way Randy Johnson should be ahead of Clemens.

[Mephistopheles]

it was purely comedic value.

 

the rationale is that theres nothing saying its over the course of a career or whatever. arguably the four best single game pitching performances are owned by those three men. none of them were PGs, but they were the most dominant performances of all time. Wood probably is #1 without the PG considering he was an inch away from it.

[Mephistopheles]

*yawn*

Best SPs

1. Kerry Wood

2. Randy Johnson

3. Roger Clemens

 

i respectfully disagree with your rankings. No way Randy Johnson should be ahead of Clemens.

 

see above. it was because clemens gave up 8 hits in the two games.

[Derwood]

it was purely comedic value.

 

the rationale is that theres nothing saying its over the course of a career or whatever. arguably the four best single game pitching performances are owned by those three men. none of them were PGs, but they were the most dominant performances of all time. Wood probably is #1 without the PG considering he was an inch away from it.

 

by this logic, Mark Whiten is one of the top 3 hitters

[bhogg]

Don't forget. Joe Morgan played for the big red machine.