Quote:
Originally Posted by cjedmonton
This has been a truly enjoyable thread, even if I’m out of my depth with much of the analysis.
Can’t help but wonder how the narrative would’ve unfolded with just the slightest tweak to the title:
Best Most revered lefty of all time? My vote is (still) Koufax!
Despite the iron clad arguments for Robert Moses, Warren Edward, and Randall David, none…and I mean none carried the mystique and the aura of Sanford. Metrics cannot adequately quantify that.
Also, his peak fell during a perfect storm of West Coast expansion, the end of the Golden Era, and the ushering in of the pitching era. It was the right time and the right place for a guy like Koufax to dominate the scene like he did. There were so many great pitchers during his time, but Koufax’s artistry was unmatched…even if his stats don’t support it.
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CJ
Great points and interesting thought by slightly changing the question like that. Problem I can see in answering it though is that it gives an unfair bias/advantage to modern pitchers, like a Koufax, who we may have grown up with, or maybe our Father did and told us how great he was. We can read and learn about earlier players, but I fear for the vast majority of people, they're much more likely to throw their reverence towards a player they'd actually seen and grew up watching. Just basic human nature. And you can't really base a question like this on just people here on this forum. Let's face it, we're mostly a bunch of pre-war baseball card collecting nerds, and an extreme outlier when talking about the public in general. LOL