I would go with the following 5 righties:

Foxx
Hornsby
Mays
Aaron
Delahanty

I would not put Pujols in the top 5. Pujols, for his career, started out as a monster. His dominance in his first 10 years was very similar to Trout's. (Both had 3 MVPs. Pujols finished in the top 5 10 times, Trout 9. Their OPS+ was very close.)

But in his years with the Angels, Pujols was not productive at all. In his 10 years with the Angels, he was basically Eric Hosmer. He hit only 222 homeruns, and slashed .256/.311/.447, with an OPS+ of 108. Eric Hosmer's career so far is 196 HRs, .277/.336/.428 and an OPS+ of 108.

Overall, Pujols' career OPS+ of 145 is tied for 51st all time, and just 19th among non-juicing, modern-era right handers. Putting him in the top 5 is a reach. Frank Thomas and Frank Robinson were feared hitters in their primes, and also were feared hitters well into their 30's. They are both deserving of the top 5 more than Pujols.

I think it's also important to discuss Peak Vs. Longevity/Consistency when it comes to this debate. Just food for thought.

Nailed it.

Living out here has taught me that the famous (and misappropriated) Mark Twain quote, "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco," is a huge understatement. Even playing softball in these parts on a windswept 'summer' (Ha!!) day is a nightmare.

New quote proposal:
"In New York, they have the wind chill factor in winter. In San Francisco, they have it in summer!" (Take that, fake Mark Twain!!)

I think Dimaggio was a bit of a jerk from what books I’ve read. And I’d bet his anti-social whatever disorder helped him to basically have ice in his veins. 56 everyone… and then another 20…

And throw in 9 rings in what, 13 years in cavernous old school yankee stadium. 9 rings! We shower Jordan with his five rings, and rightfully so. Bro’s, I hear you all. Never struck out. Don’t ever forget how meaningful it is to put the ball in play. There’s a good argument that Joe D was the best player ever. Again, he was not a good person. Dude was a winner on par with basically no one…

Rings is about the worst measure of an individual baseball player ever.

My bad. It was a coincidence…

How many rings does DiMaggio get if he's the leader of the St. Louis Browns.

How many rings does Ted Williams get if he was a Yankee?

So maybe coincidence is a little strong, but not much.

He was a regular Mr. October, what with that [checks notes] .271 average and 0.8 home runs per year.

Based on what? He hit 21 homers the year before his military service and then 25 & 20 after.

Yep, that's pretty......... "regular".

He had a 147 OPS+ and then didn't play baseball for three years and had a 142 OPS+ upon his return. I’m also basing it on the fact that he won 2 MVPs before he left and another two seasons after he returned.

If you go by offensive WAR, it's Mays and Aaron.

For me it's a tough call between Aaron or Mays but I am leaning a bit towards Hammerin Hank since the post says best hitter and not best all around player.

Those two were great hitters for a long time.

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But the three seasons surrounding his military service were not "monster" seasons. I'm not saying he'd have had bad seasons - just that the evidence suggests they would not have been "monster" seasons.

Dimaggio's MVP in 1947 is a joke and shouldn't be used to make a case for anything. Ted Williams CRUSHED him in everything that year, winning the Triple Crown.

There's a bartender in CenLa that swears it's Manny Ramirez.

I told my brother to ask Chatgpt who was better at 2nd base, Horsnby or Altuve, and it equivocated, talking about different eras. I told him to ask it to compare Hornsby and Jose Oquendo, and it begrudgingly admitted that Hornsby was better.

I would say Aaron, although I did not see him in his prime. I saw Kingman hit a homerun in the Astrodome that was unreal. I'd say Kingman or Madlock.

If you say so. He won the MVP, finished with a 147 OPS+ the next year and then joined the military. He comes back from the military to put up a 142 OPS and wins the MVP the following season.

His career OPS+ is exactly the same as Aaron and Mays so I do believe with three prime seasons he would have surpassed their OPS+.

Who was the all time best right handed base stealer?

Among right handed players, who was the all time best at hitting home runs?

Among right handed players, who was the all time best at getting on base?

Among all right handed players, who was the best at scoring runs?

Among all right handed players, who was the best at contributing Wins to his team above a replacement level player (WAR)?

Now... get all of that out of your head... And consider the question at hand, who was the best all time right handed hitter? Rogers Hornsby.

I think DiMaggio is sort of the Sandy Koufax of position players. The stats will never come close to supporting it, but there is a certain kind of romantic fan who will always insist he is the best there ever was, just because.

Derek Jeter!

Has anyone attempted to figure out how to properly weight hitting stats in the 20s and 30s when pitching was pretty bad v.s. the 50s and 60s when pitching was much better? I find it hard to compare Hornsby and Mays/Aaron because Hornsby faced so many bad pitchers who wouldn't have been in the league in the 50s and 60s.

Not the best but a great one for sure.:)

Watching his last game now. It is at the bottom of the 2nd inning.

It’s all so silly. Aaron, Mays, or Dimaggio. Throw in Rogers Hornsby if you want. There is no definitive answer. They were all great. Who on earth can dis those players? From a baseball career perspective that is. But I still hold with the guy who has nine rings. Nine. Not one, not three, 9! And he had everything to do with most of them. Go read Summer of ‘49. Again guy was a jerk, but might have been the best player ever…

OPS+ does a poor job of adjusting for home parks. Yankee Stadium was a completely different park for righties and lefties. Left handed hitters could hit cheap HRs into the short porch in right while who knows how many HRs DiMaggio lost hitting into the cavernous left center field of Yankee Stadium. Joe only hit 148 HRs at home vs 213 on the road.

Compare that to Jimmie Foxx, playing in hitters parks, who hit 299 at home and 235 on the road. On the road, DiMaggio hit a HR one in every 16.25 AB, Foxx one in every 18.08. They both hit .325, but Foxx's 30 point advantage in SLG is more than offset by their difference home parks. Joe was the better power hitter, even missing 3 prime years serving in WWII. I have DiMaggio as a slightly better hitter overall than Foxx.

I don't know if it does a good job or a poor job...but supposedly OPS+ does adjust for ballparks.

Joe also won three MVP awards. His second MVP two seasons before he left and his third MVP two seasons after he came back. You can't assume an MVP award, but if he had played those three extra seasons and won another, he'd be the only player other than Bonds with 4 or more MVPs.

Good classifications.

I would add one more era, a combo era; 2nd Live ball/Modern era 1990's-present. You can add Pujols, Cabrera, Trout, Frank Thomas etc to get their proper due as they played in a much different era than Mays too.

Originally Posted by rats60 View Post
Dead Ball Era - Honus Wagner
Pre-integration Live Ball Era - Rogers Hornsby
Modern Era - Willie Mays

I agree and really like that classification by era and would potentially have no problem with adding a 90's to Present

However, as a based purely on the Best Righty Hitter I am sticking with Hornsby above the rest

Hornsby doesn't get his proper due. Overall, Hornsby out-hit Cobb and Cobb is always mentioned in the greatest ever hitter convo.

Cobb .366/.433/.512 OPS+ 168
Hornsby .358/.434/.577 OPS+ 175

Very well agreed and here is card in on honor of this

I'm not sure I understand the connection between greatest right handed hitter and World Series wins. Many people consider Ted Williams the greatest left handed hitter and he has no World Series wins. If they had been switched between the Yankees and Red Sox, it's not hard to imagine their individual numbers of World Series wins also being switched even if they had the exact same stats. In baseball, winning a World Series is more about the overall team than 1 player.

Unless I've missed it, I'm going to throw out a name that absolutely belongs in the discussion, and may in fact be the top guy: Josh Gibson. His entire stat sheet on baseball reference is just bold everywhere.

Edit - I missed it, one other poster mentioned Gibson previously. The rest of my point stands.

Isn't it obvious? Having better teammates, especially pitchers, makes you a better right-handed hitter.

OPS+ does fine adjusting for parks. It just has a problem adjusting for right-hand hitters in Yankee Stadium. Your points there are valid.

Still, Dick Allen had it worse. He played his home games at Connie Mack, Comiskey, Veterans, Chavez Ravine, and Busch Memorial. All big parks, most with high walls and lots of room in foul territory.

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It does a good job if you are willing to accept a 10+% error rate and that two players within 20-25 points may be equal hitters.

There is some truth to that statement. 20-25 may be a tad high though.

Dick Allen was brought up above and how he played in pitchers parks.

Here is the dilemma. Was Allen really hurt by his parks?

Allen's lifetime Home OPS was .932
Allen's lifetime road OPS was .892

Players generally have a littler better hitting in their home park(independent of park factors), but here Allen has more than a little better hitting at home.

So the question is, was Allen really hurt by his home parks being that he did much better at home, or were his home parks suppressing that .932 and it really would have been .950 if his parks weren't so tough....but if it were to be .950 in a neutral park, then why was it only .892 when he did hit in all the rest of the parks? A dilemma.

Park factors do exist. Nailing them down to 100% accuracy is impossible. They are certainly pieces to the puzzle though.

On the flip side, Larry Walker hit at home waaaay better than what the park adjustments show. He may have been helped MORE than the park factors are already 'deducting' when they take Coors into account.

Same with Wade Boggs at Fenway. He was a completely different hitter outside of Fenway. Fenway factor deducts this a little, but it is possible it should deduct it even more for Boggs.

Really talented hitters are able to take advantage of their surroundings more effectively than others. Players like Boggs, Walker, Mel Ott were better at taking advantage of their home parks than other players on their team. Ultimately, OPS+ needs to adjust a player's home field advantage evenly across players.

Not sure if anyone on this board knows the inner workings of OPS+, but I'd be interested to know how OPS+ accounts for batting right handed at Fenway vs. being a left-handed hitter. Either way, should Boggs be penalized because he was better at hitting doubles off of the Green Monster than his right handed contemporaries?

I agree that Hornsby, Gibson, Aaron, and Mays are top. But I think more deserving than Pujols is a name I think nobody mentioned yet, Manny Ramirez.
He was a very good right handed batter.

It's a little misleading to just go with home/road splits for Allen since he played for 5 teams during his career. Instead, let's go with his "home parks" and his "road parks" - that is, the 5 parks he called home at any time and then the rest of the parks he played in.

Doing it this way, his "home parks" result in an OPS of .934 and his "road parks" result in an OPS of .887. Actually, not all that far off your numbers now that I look at it :)

His numbers are significantly boosted by his Chicago numbers where Allen put up a 1.026 OPS during his career.

So, was Allen hurt by playing in pitchers' parks? No.

Is it….? Team sport, yes, but 1 player can swing the entire series.



Actually it does…. Being surrounded by elites raises ones game. If it doesn’t, you’re out. When a team gels they all become better.

Saying Ted would have been amazing on the Yankees is overreaching. Ted on the Yankees is an unknown.

One player can't get them to that series in the first place though. Especially in the era of only two teams play in the post season.

You're really making the case that having better pitchers on your team makes you a better hitter?

Yeah, and rings have become an exponentially worse measure of a player's quality as the number of rounds in the playoffs have increased. Nobody's winning 9 championships in MLB anymore.

Are you really making a case that championships aren’t a good measure of a players quality?

If you look at the list of top 20 players with the most WS rings, 19 of them won all or most of their rings with the Yankees. Only Eddie Collins made the list without the help of being on the Yankees.

No Cobb, Williams, Mays, Aaron, Mathewson, Young, Koufax, Foxx, W Johnson, Clemente, Trout, Bench, Schmidt, Morgan, Seaver, Ryan, etc.

Over half of the top 20 championship ring holders are not even in the HOF. Johnny Murphy who?

Looks to me like you just had to be on the Yankees sometime from the 1930s to the 1950s and collect your rings.

And as far as the OP's question, I'd list, in order:

1. Aaron
2. Mays
3. Foxx
4. Hornsby

Since 'The Greatest' is not a counting stat, it depends on how you weigh certain things like average vs power, peak vs. longevity, runs produced vs on-base percentage, etc. With so many great players, there is no single right answer.

100% yes.

So your answer is no then.

Yes, I'm making the case that championships aren't a good measure of a player's quality. Marty Castillo and Tom Brookens have more championships than Ernie Banks and Ted Williams.

Rogers Hornsby.