Baseball's Greatest Living Player...who is it?

[poorlydrawncat]

Originally Posted by ksabet

I am with the Bonds crowd. Doesn't matter to me. He was light years better than the other 80% of players who also cheated during this era. We judge Ruth against his contemporaries why not Bonds as well considering they all cheated.

I feel similarly Lance Armstrong. They're both scumbags and I can't root for them, but you can't deny that they were once-in-a-generation athletes with or without the cheating, for the reason you mentioned.

Although I'm more impressed by Ruth because his contemporaries probably took better care of themselves than he did (I know everyone smoke and drank, but Ruth took it to another level and gorged himself on food to boot). I'll never understand how he was so much better than everyone else around him.

[jason.1969]

I love Frank Robinson. He would never get a top two vote from me since he seems to lag behind Aaron and Mays in pretty much every category. I suspect his 586 HRs have been greatly devalued as a result of the steroid era.

[icollectDCsports]

Originally Posted by jason.1969

I love Frank Robinson. He would never get a top two vote from me since he seems to lag behind Aaron and Mays in pretty much every category. I suspect his 586 HRs have been greatly devalued as a result of the steroid era.

Yep. I'd put both Mays and Aaron above him but he's underrated, I suppose because his career was split between two teams and not in the big media markets.

[jason.1969]

Crazy to even think about the late 1950s with Mays, Aaron, Mantle, Clemente, and Robinson all roaming outfields more or less in their primes, guys like Musial, Snider, and Ted Williams still around, and the likes of Maris, Yaz, Brock, and Billy Williams just arriving or on the way.

As a kid in the late 70s, I looked at Parker, Foster, Rice, Winfield, Lynn, Jackson, etc. the same way. If you were trying to make a MLB all-star team with the three best outfielders, it was impossible to choose.

[7nohitter]

Don Mossi or Steve Balboni

[ls7plus]

Originally Posted by jason.1969

In 1969, Joe DiMaggio was voted Baseball's Greatest Living Player. In honor of Joe DiMaggio's 100th birthday (Nov 25, 2014), I lay out a case for Baseball's Greatest Living Player being Derek Jeter.

http://jasoncards.wordpress.com/2014...living-player/

Personally, despite my analysis, I would still vote for Hank Aaron. Nonetheless, my analysis was more in the spirit of who would actually win. Take a look if you're a Joe D. fan, a Jeter fan, or just a fan of really long, half-baked analyses of baseball stats. And then chime in. Who do you regard as baseball's greatest living player?

Jeter would win if we were seeking the most overrated player of all time, with his 112 OPS+ indicating he was twelve percent better than an average player offensively. In checking several years ago, he was just one point ahead of Alan Trammel in this regard. In addition, as Keith Olberman pointed out in the face of much opposition, he was actually below average defensively for about the last ten years!

Greatest living player (PED cheaters excepted, of course), based on runs created vs league average during the era in which he played is Willie Mays, and that's just offensively. Defensively, IMHO, the best center fielder ever!

It's not just opinion anymore,

Larry