Reasons why Bonds should be our DH next year

[Flosman]

RZNJ, I think you are missing the point of how these comparable stats work. It does not matter who is playing or not. It is how they did realitive to the other performances of the day. Ruth hit more Homeruns in a season than some teams no one is doing that today. It would be the same as a guy hitting 125 hrs today. He was clearly one of the best ballplayers ever (I think the best). The other think is wasn't Ruth a pretty big man, I see posters saying that he was smaller than today's player and I am not sure that is true. Now he definately was much bigger than average for his Time than the big guys are compared to average today. In other words his advantage due to size and stregth was greater.

Another question say the MLs gave lifetime bans to 40 players for PED use. Would you then say Pujols was not as good of a player becuase 40 MLers where not allowed to play? No he would be the same player.

[DrungoHazewood]

Open your mind for a second. If you took away all of the black, Latin, and Asian players from the game today, and replaced them with white ballplayers from AAA, you don't think the very best hitters and the very best pitchers would greatly benefit from this? The best players would have greatly inflated stats because the talent gap from the very best from the very worst would be much, much greater.

But we already know what effect integration had - it happened, and people witnessed it, and they wrote down the statistics before, during, and after. I guess you could argue that Gibson and Charleston and the other black players from the 20s and 30s were miles better than Aaron and Mays and Frank Robinson. But to me that's illogical, almost ridiculous. So if you go with the reasonable assumption that there weren't a lot more good minority players in the 20s than there were in the 50s and 60s then we have a very good idea of how good Ruth is.

Lots of people saw Oscar Charleston and Josh Gibson and Hank Aaron and Babe Ruth and Willie Mays. They all tended to say Charleston and Gibson were on par with the other big stars. Nobody seriously suggested that there was some kind of otherworldly Negro league in the 20s and 30s that would render our assumptions invalid.

[DC Oriole Fan]

Overpaid and over the hill

PASS

[El Gordo]

RZNJ, I think you are missing the point of how these comparable stats work. It does not matter who is playing or not. It is how they did realitive to the other performances of the day. Ruth hit more Homeruns in a season than some teams no one is doing that today. It would be the same as a guy hitting 125 hrs today. He was clearly one of the best ballplayers ever (I think the best). The other think is wasn't Ruth a pretty big man, I see posters saying that he was smaller than today's player and I am not sure that is true. Now he definately was much bigger than average for his Time than the big guys are compared to average today. In other words his advantage due to size and stregth was greater.

Another question say the MLs gave lifetime bans to 40 players for PED use. Would you then say Pujols was not as good of a player becuase 40 MLers where not allowed to play? No he would be the same player.

Ruth is listed as 6'2" and 215 in Baseball Reference. Gehrig was 6' 200. Josh Gibson played from 1930 -1946, Ruth 1914-35 so their careers overlapped less than 5 years. We dont know how many HR's Gibson had, close to 800 most likely, but he was undoubtably the best hitter of the Negro leagues. Also for what its worth McGuire hit 5, 500+ft. HR's during his 70 HR season and Bonds hit none during his 73 HR season. His longest, 488. Bonds 6'1" 230. McGuire 6' 5" 225.

[DrungoHazewood]

Everything you argue still hinges on the argument that it made virtually no difference that Ruth played against just whites.

All I'm saying is that we know that Ruth played in a league that was missing something like 25% of the best available players. Maybe 33%, I don't know. People have accounted for that. There are measures that show that the majors in 1925 were some fraction of the quality of the majors in 1960 or 1990. Things like WARP3 take this into account. It doesn't matter if Charleston was a little worse or a little better than Ruth. Or Gibson. We have no stats on them - we can never know with any certainty if they were the best. With Ruth and Bonds and every other major leaguer we can know who was the best within that subset of all baseball players.

I will readily admit that I don't know if Gibson or Charleston were better than Ruth or Bonds. But I set that aside and work to figure out who's best among the guys we know about.

[DrungoHazewood]

I'm not saying there was an otherworldly Negro league. I'm saying there was a Negro League whose best players were likely the equal of the best white players of that time. Ever since integration, has there been a white player who was head and shoulders above every other player, including blacks? I don't think so. And yet, you want us to assume that during this time when blacks couldn't play that there was a white player head and shoulders above all of the black players.

No. I'm not saying that at all.

I'm saying that players who only played in the Negro Leagues are part of another baseball universe that doesn't include reliable stats against the major league universe. Unfortunately we'll never know just how good they were in any objective sense.

But we can know an awful lot about the major league universe, enough to know who was best among them.

Just because Ruth didn't play against everyone and Bonds did doesn't make it impossible to say Ruth is better.