Thread: ESPN Top 100
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Old 02-07-2022, 08:36 PM
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"I don't think anyone thinks Schilling was a better baseball player than Dimaggio"

Nobody thinks he was, and WAR doesn't say that he was. WAR is a measure of value, not ability. If you want to measure ability you'll need something like WAR/PA or something like that. (Tricky here, since Schilling was a pitcher and DiMaggio was a position player.)

Anyway, by WAR they're tied in total career value. (The difference is less than one WAR, which is totally meaningless over the course of a player's career.) And the only reason that DiMaggio isn't ahead of Schilling is that his career was so short. He only played 13 years - or really only 12.5 since he missed half of 1949. If you want to give him any credit for the years he missed during the war, he'd pull way ahead.

The Trout rating is obviously based on some expectations of what he'll do in the future. I think it's pretty likely that he ends up being a top-20 player, although obviously he isn't there yet.

As for the rest of the list: it's so bad I'm just going to ignore it. Half of it looks like click-bait, and the other half looks like whoever put it together didn't bother to check the players' records (for example, check out how much daylight they put between Matty and Pete).
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