Quote:
Originally Posted by rats60
So, instead of answering my question, you set up a strawman arguement and then claim I'm wrong. However, I just edited out the garbage to show I'm right. If you want a guy that played at a high level for a long time, but was never truly great, Aaron's your guy. I never said he wasn't one of the best, he's just not on the level of Mays, Mantle and Williams. No triple crowns, no .400 seasons, no 50 HR seasons.
In fact his best HR season was because the fence was moved in. Of his 47 HRs, 31 were in Atlanta, but he never benefited from a friendly home park, with fences moved in and the highest altitude in baseball at the time. There's a reason it was called the launching pad. Lol.
Nice try on Ted, but his .344 lifetime ave. laughs at you. Also, did the Red Sox move the fences back after Ted retired like the Braves did when Aaron left? It's pretty obvious when your team moves the fences in right where you like to hit the ball so you can make a run at Mays and Ruth on the all time HR list and then when you leave, they move the fences back.
In Atlanta, Aaron hit 47 more HRs at home than on the road. Want to guess how Ted did at Fenway? 25 more HRs ON THE ROAD. Some great advantage, not. By the way, Ruth also hit more road HRs than home, 20. So now tell me again how Aaron didn't get an advantage playing in Atlanta?
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You just "edited out all the garbage" to show you're right. More like, completely glossed over all the points that repudiated your rather hard-to-fathom position. People that know a bit about baseball have a different, enlightened opinion. 97.8% of Hall of Fame voters thought Aaron was a first-ballot Hall of Famer. When he was elected in 1982, only Ty Cobb was ever elected by a higher percentage of voters at 98.23%. Aaron also beat Williams, and Mays, too. Sure, you could say that Cobb and Williams were disliked by the media, and therefore their percentages were lowered because of some kind of bias. Well, Aaron was black. Forget bias. As Aaron was approaching Ruth's previously unbreakable mark, he received death threats in the mail. Yet still, he managed to out-gain even Babe Ruth, the man he passed on the all-time home run list. You can't tell me that there weren't some sore Yankees fans in that list of some 400 voters. Yet only 15 people out of 421 thought Aaron wasn't worthy of Cooperstown on his first ballot. Maybe they thought he was an all-time great. Maybe all the lists that name the greatest baseball players to ever play the game know something. Hank Aaron is consistently ranked in the top 10, or top 5 all-time when lists are published of the 100 best to ever play the game. Not because he was some "compiler", but because he was a special talent that played at an elite level for almost two decades.
The arbitrary numbers you select as a sign of "greatness" are head-scratching. 50 home runs...all-time great. 44, 45 or 47...not an all-time great. Tell me, do you consider Prince Fielder an all-time great? Or his daddy Cecil? They hit 50 in a season. So did Brady Anderson, and Luis Gonzalez. Were they "truly great"? A Triple Crown makes one a true great? Mickey Mantle won the Triple Crown in 1956. If Al Kaline had driven in 3 more runs, he wouldn't have. But Mantle would have still been an all-time great, no? Frank Robinson had a Triple Crown. Is he better than Aaron? Aaron put up several Triple Crown worthy seasons. All it takes to cost somebody a Triple Crown is a flu bug, or a broken finger. You need to be great to win a Triple Crown, no doubt. But you
also need a lot of luck. Over the course of a 154 game season (back then), missing a game or two, or even a few at bats, could be the difference between winning it, and not. Willie Mays, for all his greatness, never won a Triple Crown. In fact, he never led in any two of the three categories in the same season. Aaron led in home runs and RBIs three times. In 1957 he finished fourth in batting, and in 1963, he finished third. In his twenty-two years, Mays never once led the league in RBIs. Yet he has over 1,900 in his career. Talk about accumulating stats. And he won only one batting title. He did lead his league in home runs four times. But so did Aaron, twice in Milwaukee, and twice in Atlanta. Aaron led the league in RBIs four times (three of those in Milwaukee), and won two batting titles in Milwaukee.
But Mays hit 50 home runs in a season. Yeah, he did twice. He hit 51 in 1955, playing his home games at the Polo Grounds, where he hit 22 of his homers at home. Jesus, all you had to do at the Polo Grounds was hit a pop fly down the left field line to get a home run. The foul pole was 279 feet! And Candlestick? The dimensions in left-center and center were 397 and 420 feet. His first three years in San Francisco, Mays hit 29, 34 and 29 home runs (three years after hitting 51!). What happened? In 1961, they moved the fences in, left-center by 32 feet to 365, and center field from 420 to 410. Lo and behold, "Say Hey" was a 40 home run hitter again in 1961, and then hit 49 in 1962. In 1960, Mays hit 12 home runs at Candlestick. They moved the fences in a whopping 32 feet in left-center, and boom, he hits 21 at home in 1961, and 28 at home in 1962. So please...cut the crap about the Braves moving in the fences for Aaron. It turns out a lot of teams moved the fences for their great players.
Back to Aaron's home run totals. Did you look at any of his other seasons, or just his single season best? What about the twelve years he played in Milwaukee?
In 1957, he hit 44 home runs to lead the NL. He hit 26 of those on the road. 18 at home. Aaron led the NL in RBIs, too. He had a Triple Crown-caliber season. Only Stan Musial's .351 and Willie Mays' .331 bested him. But he hit nearly 60% of his home runs on the road.
In 1963, he led the NL again with 44 home runs. 25 on the road, 19 at home. 57% of his homers came away from County Stadium.
In 1962, he hit 45 home runs, second in the NL. Mays hit 49. Aaron hit 18 home runs at County Stadium, and 27 on the road. 60% of his home runs were on the road. See a pattern here?
In 1960, Aaron hit 40 home runs. 21 at home, 19 on the road. Pretty much even.
He had
no advantage at home while a member of the Milwaukee Braves, where he played his prime years. In 1960, they actually moved the fence in left field back, one foot in straightaway left-center field, and seven feet in Aaron's power alley, between the left field line and left-center. In the next four years, he hit 163 home runs, averaging 43 homers per 162 games played. In fact, while a member of the Braves in Milwaukee, he hit 185 home runs in Milwaukee, and 213 on the road. So, he hit 28 more home runs away from County Stadium. And the air in Milwaukee is not thin. I know, having lived there for 19 years. So, while they were moving the fences back slightly in Milwaukee, they were bringing them way in at the 'stick.
You know what OPS + does. It measures on base and power, and an adjustment is made for the player's ballpark.
Willie Mays had a career OPS + of 156. Know what Hank Aaron's was? Aaron's OPS + is 155. Willie Mays has a career OPS + that is one whopping point higher than Aaron's. Funny thing, that metric takes into consideration where Hank played all his games, and where Willie played all his. And it finds that the two were almost identical as far as their offensive production is concerned.
And as far as your brief WAR comparison, yes, Mays led ten times. Aaron led once. Aaron was second in the NL in WAR three times, third four times, fourth twice, and fifth twice. Eight times he was one of the best three players in the entire league (by WAR), and twelve times he was one of the best five. If you don't lead the league in WAR, you're not an all-time great? Were both Ruth and Gehrig not all-time greats? Yet when they played, unless they tied, one of them had to be second (or lower). Remember, too, that a center fielder (Mays) gets a positive 7.5 run adjustment while calculating, and right fielders (Aaron) get a 2.5 run deduction while calculating WAR. I completely understand that center field is a more demanding position, and that Mays, in putting up the numbers he did in center field, created incredible value. But it makes, in my humble opinion, an erroneous assumption. Consider the comparison of Mays and Aaron. The assumption is made, by WAR, that Aaron is less valuable because he plays right field. If he is incapable of playing center field, than this would be true, as Mays would add value because he produces at the same level offensively that Aaron does, while playing a position that is more demanding, one that Aaron could not.
But Aaron was a three-time Gold Glove winner in right field. And his string of Gold Gloves only ended because of the emergence of arguably the greatest defensive right fielder to ever play the game, Roberto Clemente. Was Aaron a very good to outstanding fielder, at least early on in his career? Yes. I will state again that I have some issues with defensive metrics as they are calculated for historical players. Aaron would one season have a -1.1 dWAR (1959), then a + 0.8 (1960), and a + 2.0 (1961). Those were followed by a 0.3, and a -1.3. I don't see how one player, when healthy, and in their prime, would have such variance in their defensive performance across multiple years. However, Mays is clearly one of the greatest center fielders to ever play the game, in both the offensive and defensive realms. I do not believe that Aaron would play center field as well as Mays. But I feel he could play it at a high level. Just not at Mays' astronomical level. Adjustments to dWAR should be made based solely on performance. If you have to give individual plays a higher score by a center fielder because of the ground covered (uZR-type ratings), fine. But to automatically adjust before any performance is taken into consideration, in my opinion, skews WAR needlessly.
One final thing to consider, not looking directly at the numbers.
Top 3 in MVP vote:
Aaron 8 times in the top 3, won once.
Mays 7 times in the top 3, won twice.
The men that watched these players day in, day out, saw them in person, talked to other players and sports journalists--they voted in a manner that puts Aaron and Mays in the same upper echelon of players in the National League. Both were among the top three players in the entire league in MVP voting about the same number of times. Mays won one more, Aaron was in the top 3 one more time. That's pretty darned close. When you consider their career stats, their OPS +, their WAR, MVP finishes, Hall of Fame votes, I just don't know how a baseball fan could consider Mays an all-time great, but not Aaron. I respect that you know your baseball, rats60, but I vehemently disagree with your conclusion.