Who is the greatest baseball player of all time?

[BobC]

Originally Posted by Carter08

I hear you. There’s no truly wrong answer. The reason I go with Ruth is comparing him to his contemporaries. He was so far above anyone else it’s basically absurd. Mays was so far above his contemporaries it’s almost as absurd but not quite as much. That’s why I go Ruth.

Exactly why I think if you're going to really talk about the "greatest", you almost have to restrict it to the different periods/eras to more properly be able to compare all the different changes in rules, equipment, context, and so on, that have occurred since baseball began. So maybe just look at the 19th century (1869-1899) as say one era. Then look at the modern dead ball era (1900-1919) as another, followed by say the early live ball/pre-war era (1920-1941), then maybe the vintage post-war/pre-expansion era (1942-1960), and so on. In that case it seems to me it is much easier to get wider agreement among people about who was maybe the greatest player during each of the particular eras/generations. So, if you said something like Cobb was the best player in his era/generation, Ruth in his, then Wiliams in his, followed by Mays in his, and so on, I think you'll get a lot more agreement among baseball fans.

It is when you start trying to compare these great players across generations and eras that you run into issues caused by differences in rules, equipment, context, and all the other variables in how the game has changed and morphed over time. And don't forget the various biases that may exist, like how people often feel the players they actually saw and grew up with are the best because of their memories and a familiarity bias, or how people into numbers and statistics are possibly biased by looking at just all these modern statistics nowadays, and making their judgements based solely on those factors and numbers. Truth is, different people are going to have all different players they may have looked up to and thought of as the best or greatest, for any number of different and varying reasons. Not everyone has the exact same definition of what makes a player the "greatest" in their eyes. And none of them are wrong.

What is wrong is all the close-minded people that belittle and put others down and make sarcastic comments about or directed at them for having different thinking and opinions than they do. All I was trying to do earlier was point out that there may be different ways of interpreting and looking at things when it comes to certain players. Like how Ruth is maybe not actually as complete a player as some others in this "greatest' conversation are because he didn't necessarily have great speed, which is one of the definitively agreed upon 5-tools that great players are often expected to have.