I don't see the case for him. dWar loves Carter and so WAR rewards him heavily, but I am not seeing the argument in his favor as the GOAT. I don't think he was a vastly better defensive catcher than Bench.

My handle is named after Carter and I’d love for him to be in the discussion. I love using WAR but Berra is one of those guys where I look at his stats and just don’t understand why it’s as low as it is. I consider the catcher to be the general and Berra was the general of the most WS winning teams by far so I’ll still consider him underrated. His stats are seriously legit. 3 MVPS and the league leader in a lot of categories. My man Carter, awesome as he was, tied for the league lead in RBIs once and that’s it.

Maybe I am looking at the wrong website, but what did Berra lead the league in?

Funny quotes.

You are correct. My website highlighted the wrong columns. Did he have 3 mvps? Yes.

Good point, he never led the majors, or even the AL, in anything in regards to batting or fielding stats during his career. But for someone to play such a physically (and somewhat mentally) demanding position for as long as Yogi did, and to be selected an All-Star for 15 straight seasons, as well as receiving MVP votes in 15 straight seasons (including getting voted #1 three times, #2 twice, and #3 and #4 once each), catching for the most WS winning teams in history (as previously pointed out), along with the cherry on top possibly being the catcher of the only perfect game ever thrown in a WS, and I'd say he had a pretty damn great career, and screw the advanced statistics. He appears to be another case where these modern advanced stats once again fail miserably to do a proper job of measuring a player's overall ability and contribution to their team's success and ability to win. My so-called intangible "It" factor, for which pure statistics can prove worthless in measuring in many cases.

If these advanced statistics are so good at determining who the very best baseball players are, how come the supposed Godfather of the use of such stats in baseball, Billy Beane (that title should actually/probably go his predecessor Sandy Alderson IMO), has never brought a single team he's been the GM of to a WS, let alone even be an AL championship team. I know the naysayers will jump on and say stuff about how he's never really had the money behind him, and/or how other teams quickly followed suit to look at advanced metrics to evaluate and choose their own players as well. So are those reasons/excuses for him never finally winning anything, or are these advanced stats truly reliable indicators of who the winners and champions will be?

I thought Ray Fosse was the greatest catcher ever.
Right, Bob ? :D:D:D

The Red Sox hired Bill James in 2003. What happened in 2004, I can't recall?

Great discussion and all opinions are just that. However, no chance that Gibson is better than Bench, Campanella or Berra. No real way to even know what his stats or greatness was. Campy’s career was cut short by racism on the front end and the accident on the back end. 9 years played and THREE MVP’s in the 50’s over Musial. Snider, Aaron etc. No one else comes close that. 1/3 of the years he played he was MVP.

Instead of answering a question with another question, why not actually answer the question I asked first as to why Beane has never really been successful? Be careful, you might just answer your own question in the process. You do tend to do that, answering a question with a question, quite a bit though. :D


And to more directly answer your question, one of the biggest things the Red Sox also did was to pick up David Ortiz in January of 2003. And while James was for picking up Ortiz, so were most of the other people in the Red Sox organization, so that isn't a James only call where he gets all the credit when they initially were able to sign Ortiz for only $1.25M. But as for the most important thing of all in 2004 to happen to the Red Sox........they hired Terry Francona. And I really doubt James had a damn thing to do with that hiring. And then Terry led them to the World Series championship in 2004........not Bill James!!!!

Was he the one that gave all of the Red Sox players steroids?