Take Note, Ty Cobb Fans

[Snowman]

I've mentioned this before, but it's probably worth noting here that I'm a statistician, since we're having a discussion about statistics. What I find most ironic about this conversation is that seemingly everyone wanting to overlook or downplay the accomplishments of the negro league players are somehow also operating under the assumption/delusion that the early MLB stars were playing in leagues that were every bit as competitive as the game is today or even during the golden era.

I've got news for you. If Josh Gibson's stats (or any other NL player's) shouldn't count because the overall skill level was lower, then Ty Cobb's stats shouldn't count either. If you think Ty Cobb would have put up numbers even remotely similar in the post war era, you're delusional.

That said, from a statistical theory viewpoint, there are very good reasons that minimum plate appearance rules are in place. Baseball statistics are extremely volatile and take a very long time to converge to represent a player's true skill level. So much so that most years in the MLB the player who wins the batting title usually wasn't the best hitter that season but rather was the luckiest of the 10 or so best hitters. Even a full season with 600 AB still has a significant amount of luck involved. And if you were to take 185 plate appearance samples from every player throughout history, you'd see some remarkable stats. Probably even multiple players hitting over 0.500 in those spans.

But if we're going to include deadball era stats with modern stats, then it's hard to argue that we shouldn't include NL stats as well. Everyone knows the games and circumstances were different. We don't place an asterisk next to Ty Cobb's name. Why place one next to Gibson's? People aren't stupid. They know Gibson wouldn't hit 0.450+ in today's game. And they also know Cobb wouldn't hit 0.400 either. But that doesn't take away from what they did. They all deserve their flowers. At least now they have a vase to put them in.