Poll - Greatest Living Player

[G1911]

Originally Posted by packs

Are the picks for Ryan a result of that nostalgia aspect discussed earlier? I understand he was a physical freak and his strike outs and no hitters are very impressive, but he never won a Cy Young and lost almost 300 games.

Nah, the guy who performed 12% better than league average for his career is definitely deserving once we cross out the generation we don't like.

Greatest and favorite are not synonyms. There is no honest statistical way to put Koufax and Ryan on top. Popular opinion polls are almost always useless because people will just vote for whoever or whatever they like without any real rational basis; they are not a tabulation of real analyses.

[BillyCoxDodgers3B]

I don't understand why people are so keen to point out Ryan's flaws as opposed to his achievements. Sure, the entire picture is needed for anything, but the man pitched for mostly bad teams pushing 30 years. What do you expect his W-L record to look like? He couldn't carry those teams all by himself.

A guy who gets tons of love around here for greatest of all time also lost 279 games and pitched for one of the historically poorest teams. While I understand the differences between the two men, the point being that they didn't have too much help! Nolan far less so than Johnson.