Barely OT: ESPN Ranking Greatest Players

[WWGjohn]

Not to belabor the point on the "roids & HGH" players but when comparing the effect of amphetamines to roids and HGH there is no comparison. Amphetamines are antifatigue agents but do not enhance strength, promote tissue growth, or accelerate healing. HGH especially can increase the amount of fast twitch muscle fiber which in turn would translate into faster bat speed. It's a serious step up in artificially boosting your performance.

[cyseymour]

What a baffling list. Clemens over Cy Young? I will defend the Pedro Martinez ranking, though. I saw him in his prime and he was absolutely sensational. It was fireworks. Pretty much all the guys in Boston who've seen him will defend him. There will never be another one in our lifetime like that.

[z28jd]

Originally Posted by WWGjohn

Not to belabor the point on the "roids & HGH" players but when comparing the effect of amphetamines to roids and HGH there is no comparison. Amphetamines are antifatigue agents but do not enhance strength, promote tissue growth, or accelerate healing. HGH especially can increase the amount of fast twitch muscle fiber which in turn would translate into faster bat speed. It's a serious step up in artificially boosting your performance.

Doesn't matter, they're all against the rules. If those players from the 60's had the same rules in place as they do now, the numbers would've diminished. If they had HGH available, you can guarantee the numbers would've went up. They had amphetamines, and they used them freely from what we have heard. You want to hold the players from the "steroid" era to high standards when no rules were in place, then you have to hold the older players to the same standards because both groups were breaking later rules.

What you have to do is be able to compare the players to their own generation, and that is how you figure out who is the best. Steroids don't make you an all-time great, in some cases they can hurt. Rondell White, Ruben Sierra and Carlos Baerga all bulked up a lot over one off-season and all of them slumped badly because they were too bulky.

No one here knows who was actually clean during the steroid era, so how do you rate any of them high? If you want to eliminate a few, aka the usual suspects, then you have to eliminate them all.

Since I can't positively name one clean person from the 60's on, and unless there is a clean baseball player on this board we don't know about, no one else here can either. So I go back to the method of weighing the players against players from their own time period. The early 2000's had big stats all around, so a 50 home run season doesn't hold as much weight as a 50 homer season from the 1930's, etc

It's amazing that in hindsight, the steroid era was actually 4-5 bad guys beating up on all the clean guys, or at least that is what the story has been changed to...

[cyseymour]

One thing to remember about Pedro, Maddux and Randy Johnson is that they were going up against all those juicers. The league ERA's were astronomical, and they were still putting up incredible numbers.

[Gecklund311]

Originally Posted by cyseymour

One thing to remember about Pedro, Maddux and Randy Johnson is that they were going up against all those juicers. The league ERA's were astronomical, and they were still putting up incredible numbers.

Agreed - that same kind of context also makes Lefty Grove and Carl Hubbell look even better than they were at first glance. Pitching in an era where a .300 batting average wasn't particularly impressive can put a big hurting on a pitcher's numbers.

[EvilKing00]

Originally Posted by Gecklund311

Agreed - that same kind of context also makes Lefty Grove and Carl Hubbell look even better than they were at first glance. Pitching in an era where a .300 batting average wasn't particularly impressive can put a big hurting on a pitcher's numbers.

soooo u dont think Johnson was on the juice??? or hgh?? come on man - piazza was too, so were most of them, its all good

[Gecklund311]

Originally Posted by EvilKing00

soooo u dont think Johnson was on the juice??? or hgh?? come on man - piazza was too, so were most of them, its all good

My point was that Maddux, Pedro, and Randy Johnson look more impressive given that they pitched in an era that favored hitters, in the same way that Hubbell and Grove did. Pitching under those circumstances was harder than it was to pitch in the early 1900s or the 1960s, and should be taken into account when ranking them.

I have no idea whether Randy Johnson was on steroids/HGH or not - I did see him pitch against the Cubs when he just came up with the Expos, and he had great stuff right from the start, it was just a matter of him learning how to pitch rather than trying to overpower everyone. No doubts at all that Piazza was on it though.