So who was better ( Kaline or Clemente) ?

[Peter_Spaeth]

Discussing Clemente's HRs and walks as I posted about before might be more interesting than a lot of invective?

[G1911]

Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth

Discussing Clemente's HRs and walks as I posted about before might be more interesting than a lot of invective?

Well, looking at the math isn't "logical" apparently, as it might not produce the only outcome that is allowed to even be considered.

[Peter_Spaeth]

Originally Posted by G1911

Well, looking at the math isn't "logical" apparently, as it might not produce the only outcome that is allowed to even be considered.

I'm still stumped on why a player can't be great and overrated, but that's me. I would put a fair number of people in that category including another who died young, Kobe.

[G1911]

Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth

I'm still stumped on why a player can't be great and overrated, but that's me.

He makes so many weird, illiterate, and nutball arguments that I'm having a hard time moving past that first one as well and getting to his follow-ups.

In other matters, I tried but couldn't find a single baseball card that pictures both Clemente and Kaline, during their career or after. I'd have guessed Topps would have paired them up in one of their thousands of combo cards at some point over the last 25 years of nostalgia sets. The closest I could find is that they were on the same box in 1962 Bazooka.

[Peter_Spaeth]

That's a cool item for sure. I think at least for 50s and 60s most of the multiplayer cards are same team or at least same league?

[Peter_Spaeth]

Re overrrated, I have a logic question. Nobody of course has any trouble with the concept of being underrated. Is it a zero sum game? If 10 players are underrated, does that necessarily mean 10 are overrated?

[G1911]

Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth

Re overrrated, I have a logic question. Nobody of course has any trouble with the concept of being underrated. Is it a zero sum game? If 10 players are underrated, does that necessarily mean 10 are overrated?

I don't think it is; because the two aren't on an even scale. Both terms are unspecific, general measures that are not tied to a standard delineator, so there's no 'slider' where putting 1 player from a pool into a bucket necessitates another player being put into the opposite bucket on the scale. Even if we remove the 'not tied to a standard delineator' aspect, we can still end up with a non-zero sum game. If we evaluated every player in baseball and correlated them to "average", we probably would not have an equal number above and below the average. While the total performance of the two halves below and above must be equal, extremely good or extremely bad players account for multiple players performance gaps who are slightly better or slightly worse, and so our numbers will vary based on the extremely good and extremely bad.

I would guess though, that if we looked at a large group of players, we would end up with more in the underrated than the overrated categories. I think there's a 'soft sum' effect; the attention fostered onto a handful of players takes away from many others; the top 10 overrated will account for significantly more underrated players who don't get the attention they deserve because the focus is always on the same 10 or so players. Our bias towards representative examples will usually produce this effect in such a dataset of people, whether it's overrated or underrated baseball players, generals, physicists, or middle school janitorial staff. The extremes lean to overrated, so quantity of underrated tends to be higher.

But that's just my opinion