Joe Posnanski's Top 100 Players in Baseball

Randy Johnson just got better and better controlling the strike zone:

1988-92: 5.7 BB/9 (range: 2.4-7.9)
1993-98: 3.3 (2.7-3.8)
1999-03: 2.5 (2.1-2.8)
2004-09: 2.1 (1.6-2.9)

His K/9 never dropped below 10.0 from '91-02, peaking in Arizona.

Johnson was definitely amazing. Way better pitcher than Ryan even was.

randy would've had ten consecutive 300k seasons without the strike and injuries.

and w/ryan, his three best WHIP seasons came during his first three seasons in texas (his age 42-44 seasons!)

i mean really if he'd learned to pitch earlier in his career he could have been one of the top five pitchers ever.

It wasn't just Ryan though, the changes in BB/9 and K/BB rates were a general trend in both leagues. A 2.5 K/BB used to be excellent, and plenty if good pitchers got away with walking 3-4/9IP. Some of the changes had to be driven by the hitters. Lineups used to be more unbalanced, so pitchers could get away with walks more easily because there were three or four banjo hitters in every lineup. That changed during the 80's and was definitely over with by the 90's, and pitchers had to adjust.

lol - banjo hitters?!

Used to be a common term, not sure of the origin. Maybe if you couldn't hit, you tended to swing the bat like Pete Seeger.

http://www.fangraphs.com/leaders.aspx?pos=all&stats=pit&lg=all&qual=0&type=1&season=2011&month=0&season1=1901&ind=0&team=0%2css&rost=0&players=0&sort=0%2cd

League-wise there's not an enormous difference in BB/9 or K/BB rates between Ryan's first year and his last, AFAICT.
The big drop in BB/9 comes in the mid-50s.

TT is assigned to read the Dickson Baseball Dictionary over Christmas

Starting in 1973 (when the late 60's/early 70's pitchers' era ended, runs/game spiked and continued rising steadily throughout the 80's), pitching went from roughly 5 K/9, 3.3 BB/9, and 1.5 K/BB (holding steady for most of the 70's), to 5.6 K/9, 3.2 BB/9, 1.75 K/BB in 1989 (with many year to year fluctuations). I guess it's more correct to say that K's and K/BB went up steadily but not BB/9, which is really just an increase in K's.

Obviously the changes aren't as drastic as Ryan's numbers, but he's an extreme case. Still, the same trends occurred with other great pitchers of the time. Steve Carlton became a better control pitcher in the 80's (until he got too old), Jim Palmer won Cy Young awards with K/BB ratios that were far worse than the best pitchers of the late 80's, etc.

Just wanted to make note of 1970, which was one of the weird offensive blips you occasionally get (1987 being another). Much more drastic in the NL, but the AL spiked too. It's a year that's always fascinated me because it was the year I became a fan.

1969 AL: 4.09 RPG, 1649 HR, .246/.321/.369
1969 NL: 4.05 RPG, 1470 HR, .250/.319/.369

1970 AL: 4.17 RPG, 1746 HR, .250/.322/.379
1970 NL: 4.52 RPG, 1683 HR, .258/.329/.392

1971 AL: 3.87 RPG, 1484 HR, .247/.317/.364
1971 NL: 3.91 RPG, 1379 HR, .252/.316/.366

There were a bunch of huge offensive years in '70, some of them real flukes:

Yaz -- .329/.452/.592, 44 HR
Billy Williams -- .322/.391/.586, 42 HR
Tony Perez -- .317/.401/.589, 40 HR

Aaron, Bench, McCovey, Rico Carty, Dick Allen, long list--but also Jim Hickman, Bernie Carbo, Dick Dietz, Wes Parker, players who didn't do much hitting for the rest of their careers. None of which takes away from your point--pitching again dominated in '71 and '72, and it was '73 when things started to shift. Not sure what happened in '70. Same teams (almost--Seattle moved to Milwaukee in '70); new Astro-turf parks were opening around then, so maybe that figured in.

i'm loving this series so much

Great entry on Shoeless Joe.

Discussion on Willie McCovey post about whether MOST feared hitter tag has a big racial component with a lot of people naming a bunch of amazing African-American hitters and then struggling to remember if white players from the same era were also called feared (part of me looks at someone calling Dick Allen, Willie McCovey the most feared hitters and thinks duh those dudes were crazy great hitters). I think any racial significance/connotation has largely melted away now (certainly in recent years McGwire, Giambi, Piazza were all called feared hitters, not to mention Brett and Boggs from when I was a kid) but what do you think? Was it a thing?

http://shirtssince09.spreadshirt.com/the-preeminent-slugger-of-our-time-A7091470

most feared pitchers always have to have a 'stache is all I know

That McCovey discussion is really interesting. For me, I think the idea of being a feared hitter might be tied in with left-handedness. In the '80s, the two guys who scared me most against the Jays were Brett and Mattingly; didn't get to actually see as much baseball in the '70s, but the guy that came to mind was Parker. They're all left-handed, as was McCovey. I don't know that it makes rational sense, but there's something about the way a left-handed hitter is coiled up the plate that presses a button with me.

Allen though was a right-y (as were McGwire and Piazza and Thomas and Pujols). I don't know it's interesting. I can buy that in the sixties-seventies there might have been a racial component to the tag, but at same time were Mantle, Mathews, Yaz and Schmidt for example really not referred to as "feared"? Seems hard to believe somehow...

Even just a cursory google search of Eddie Mathews and feared comes up with 204K hits (50K more than McCovey and 20K more than Allen) so now I'm thinking this whole thing is bullshit.

My left-handed thing was purely subjective--it's just an image I've internalized of left-handers like Brett and Mattingly coming out of a coiled-up stance and crushing line-drives all over the place.

If you used IBB, you could probably study this. The thing that would be difficult, though, is controlling for who comes up after these hitters, which obviously figures in to the decision to issue an IBB.

You should post the results of your Google search on Posnanski's site, Alex, in response to the guy who put the theory out there.

continuing to love this countdown. i was already familiar with arky vaughan, but it was nice to read about his apparent defensive skillz.

you know what would make the countdown even better? just one photograph to go along with each entry.

(Provided Don Mossi or Willie McGee don't show up.)

http://maxcdn.fooyoh.com/files/attach/images/1068/926/212/005/etpicture_33.jpg

lol

I wouldn't be surprised if there was a racial component but the 60's and 70's were the peak for African-American involvement in baseball (I think a quarter or a third of the players were non-white) and nearly all the very best position players were African-American. There weren't enough superstar white power hitters around to even make a comparison. When the best hitters were white, they were also feared, e.g. searching "mickey mantle feared hitter" turns up a billion hits. However, I'd have to go through those and see if he was "feared" when he played or if he was described that way when his career was over.

what about "loathed"...
i want to know what ethnicity made up the most "loathed" people in baseball.
i'll bet it was the fucking dutch.

He's really emphasizing peak value and "potential" in this series ... Duke Snider was great but could have been even better, Monte Irvin was great but imagine how he would have played if he'd been in MLB from the very start, and so on.

Thinking Juan Guzman might show up then: "If only he could have clocked down to 45 seconds between pitches."

Yeah he's clearly very focused on peak for some of these picks. Based on that it's hard to argue against Snider whose for a time was pretty awesome (just unfortunately less awesome than the two CFers in the same city at the same time).

In keeping with all that, Sadaharu Oh at #69--and the expected sniping in the comments section. Myself, no idea. If he'd played a little closer to Hideo/Ichiro's time in Japan--there's a 10-year gap there--I'd feel more confident in assessing him.

His numbers were certainly awesome:

http://www.baseball-reference.com/japan/player.cgi?id=oh----000sad

Roy Campanella post seems to have brought out the trolls but I'm not clear what's controversial about him (admittedly you do have to kinda assume that that from 20-25 he was also the best catcher in the world, but given the fact that most independent observers THOUGHT exactly that not sure what issue there is either). In fact all it's doing for me is indicating how fucking weird C WAR is.

Yeah, I don't know why some of the commenters (a couple especially) don't take this in the spirit in which it's written, which is more like a combination of the 100 Best Players and the 100 Best Stories. Having said that, it was interesting to find out that Campanella's home/road splits were so drastic; Snider had a moderate split, Robinson didn't have much of a split at all.

The entire list is full of assumptions about how good some of the Negro League players really were (including the ones that later played in MLB), I figured his readers would have accepted that by now. When he puts Josh Gibson in the top 20 the trolls will have a field day.

Right but these are not huge assumptions since a lot of these dudes were pretty great when they did get to mlb and best African-American players of next gen were clearly equal or better than white contemporaries. Oh is as clemenza points out biggest leap since there is no baseline.

No question they were great but trying to assign them a ranking in a top 100 is very speculative, or like clemenza said, a combination of greatness and storyline. Like for Monte Irvin, Pos assumes that he would have had at least another 7-8 seasons that were at least as good as the few he had in MLB, and ranks him more or less according to that assumption. And he was more or less done as a star player by 35, which might or might not mean anything (plenty of HOFers declined quickly in their 30's). There's just no way to know, but at the same time you can't leave these guys out of a discussion about the best players of all time. Basically I don't envy anyone who tries to rank that generation of African-American players.

Right but by the same token you have to do adjustments of all the pre-integration MLB ballplayers as well. The whole exercise is very speculative and single out Negro Leagues ballplayers seems a bit odd.

I too btw find Campanella's H/R splits fascinating.

It's not the same thing though. You could say that in an integrated league, Babe Ruth would have been 10% less productive and correct his career numbers based on that. That's different than inventing ten prime-level seasons for a guy who wasn't playing (=was barred) in the league at the time. They're both speculative but to very different degrees, IMO. f

But yeah, there's no real way to be sure, etc.

They were playing in another league though at a very high level. 10% less productive (and it could be more than that really) is also kind of a big too because a lot of the big larger than life "records" are ones that were from that era. If Ruth only has 600 home runs and/or hit 54 in single season then I think it would diminish his stature definitely.

If you were applying a universal yardstick over all time, 90-95 of the greatest 100 are likely playing right now.

xpost

They were playing at a high level but their stats aren't reliable (or weren't kept at all), so we need to rely more on first hand accounts, which are probably as inaccurate and prone to exaggeration as stories about MLB old timers are. It's not a big deal if you're trying to find who the best players were, or even who deserves to be in the HOF. But if you're making a list of the top 100 players of all time and trying to compare players across different leagues and eras, then you need to look at the numbers or else it's mainly just guesswork.

I pulled the 10% number out of thin air, it could definitely be more than that.

disturbing thought: pete kozma may be one of the top 2000 baseball players who ever lived

*shudders*

I would say the whole exercise of ranking the 100 best players is mainly guesswork. :D I mean really how do you compare Ty Cobb and Rickey Henderson? They were playing completely different games.

Story of Ty Cobb carrying Kid Nichols stats around slaying me.

Great comment on that post that can apply to our discussions on this board too (new board description?)

How dare you rank this player so low or so high!
WAR
So much better than player x who I presume you’ve ranked much higher
So much worse than player x who I assume hasn’t made your list
Morris! Garvey!
(If you don’t like it why do you read)
(Park effects, stories!)
I have ranked so and so in this spot.
My rankings are perfect!
Your rankings should match mine exactly
EXACTLY!
blah blah blah blah
yadda, yadda, yadda
(stop posting your opinion)
(adjustments for player quality)
Negro Leaguers shouldn’t be ranked
The Japanese play baseball?
PEDs, PEDs, PEDs!
(Amphetamines!)
More Home Runs is all that matter
(more walks is all that matters)
Strikeouts
(teams with bad defenses)
RBI, RBI, RBI, FEARED!
(Teh Fear!)
(Stop capitalizing)
This list is biased!
This list is not consistent with other lists
STATS
STATS
STATS
(Stories)
(Fun)
(Publish a book)
Grammar error!
typo!
Uninformed!
(thanks for writing so much!)
This player was the worst, doesn’t belong in the top 200!
Look at my list! Use MY LIST!!
Jack Morris!

Murray so relatively high has surprised me more than anything so far. I'm fine with it, but I'm sure there'll be lots of pushback in the comments. A real mystique player when such things ruled the day, right in the middle of the pack of HOF first baseman by newer metrics. But, again, a great story for Posnanski.

Yeah that's not where I see Murray at all.

I'm OK with it. He's been favouring peak over career but the career guys still belong somewhere on the list.

At least 5 more dudes should be ahead of him at first base though (Gehrig, Foxx, Pujols, Bagwell, Thomas) and then maybe some turn of the century guys. That seems like a lot of first baseman.

manny ramirez (best player)

Down to #6 on the pre-season rundown that put the famous-player countdown on hold (I get the feeling he was rushing to get rundown finished before Opening Day and missed). In his Astros entry for today, there's this little bit--I've had this same theory for a while and have posted about it somewhere on ILX:

OK, I’ve been wanting to unveil this thought I have about 1970s sitcoms, and maybe I can pull it off here. Maybe not. But I’ll try. So you probably know that 1970s sitcoms were, pretty much without exception, filmed in front of a live studio audience. Well, one of the features of this is that after a show had been on the air for a while, the studio audience would cheer the mere appearance of Fonzie or Latka or Laverne.

But what struck me, even as a kid, is that the longer the show would go on, the more characters the studio audience would cheer for simply showing up. I mean, it was one thing when the audience cheered for the Fonz. It was quite another when they cheered for Ralph Malph. That, to me, that was living proof that a show was going on too long--the fans started applauding simply because they recognized someone from the old show. Hey, look, it’s Chachi!

this is a classic clemenza post, ty <3

but has joe posnanski ever been in a live studio audience? i mean, they literally prompt you to applaud! also does he really think 70s sitcom producers adhered strictly to audience reactions rather than using canned laughs when it suited their purposes?

Happy Days was the worst offender by far.

The first two seasons of Happy Days (1974–75) were filmed using a single-camera setup and laugh track. One episode of season two ("Fonzie Gets Married") was filmed in front of a studio audience with three cameras as a test run. From the third season on (1975–84), the show was a three-camera production in front of a live audience (with a cast member, usually Tom Bosley, announcing in voice-over, "Happy Days is filmed before a live audience" at the start of most episodes), giving these later seasons a markedly different style. A laugh track was still used during post-production to smooth over live reactions.

A laugh-track, yeah, but I don't know whether the entrance applause for characters was coaxed or not. It's almost a moot point as to how embarrassing it was to hear that watching at home.