Quote:
Originally Posted by darwinbulldog
That in itself is a good empirical question. I just took the top 100 players as listed by popular fan vote over at ranker.com and compared them to my sabermetric rankings as a comparison of "old school" vs "numbers geek" rankings.
The lists begin the same (Ruth is #1) and disagree about everyone else from #2-#100. Their #2 (Gehrig) is my #15. Some other notable discrepancies:
Ernie Banks is their #18 and misses my top 100.
Yogi Berra is their #22 (#1 catcher) and misses my top 100 (#8 catcher [or #7 if you exclude Josh Gibson, but you shouldn't; anyway, Gibson did make both lists]).
Barry Bonds is my #4 and misses their top 100 (#105).
Roger Clemens is my #5 and misses their top 100 (#124).
Kid Nichols is my #10 and misses their entire published list (which goes through #150).
Eddie Collins is my #17 and their #74.
A-Rod is my #21 and misses their entire published list.
Mike Schmidt is my #24 and their #93.
Only 55 players made both lists. One could calculate a Spearman rank order correlation if so inclined, but it's clearly not going to be nearly as high as I would have expected. I assumed the Yankees would be systematically overrated by the voting, and that is correct, but since I figured only baseball fans would bother voting on the rankings I wasn't prepared to see Barry Bonds at #105 (right between John Smoltz and Robin Yount) or Kid Nichols outside of the top 150.
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Not sure what your sabermetric ranking looks like, but my first take is that that ranker list may be...not very good. Bonds at 105? Clemens 124?
I mean, if you look at the top 100 players all time by WAR (I used BBR variety), I count 16 who aren't in the hall of fame.
That list includes:
- Five active "likely inductees" (Pujols, Trout, Kershaw, Verlander, Grienke)
- Four steroid guys (Bonds, Clemens, Arod, Palmeiro)
- Two Players on the ballot currently or soon with a good shot at induction (Schilling & Beltre)
- Four players often cited as deserving (Grich, Whitaker, Dahlen, McCormick)
- Pete Rose (I *bet* you know why he's not in)
Of the 16, time should see 7-10 of them should get in, maybe more if the thinking changes on the steroid crew.
Of course, the HOF has something like 235 players, not 100, so you'd get a bigger gap as the list grows.