Before I continue with my "What If Today’s Players Are Not Only Better than Old-time Players, But a LOT Better?" series, I thought I’d have a little fun and see what a list that reflected that bias would actually look like. I took Bill’s listings from the revised Historical Abstract (2001), more or less arbitrarily (it’s the version I have in Florida, where I’ve been lately), and started with his rankings for second basemen (again arbitrarily—it’s the position I played best in my youth, and the position of my first favorite player, Ron Hunt, and the position I typed out the first time I used a typewriter in 1962) to see what Bill’s rankings would look like if we applied the principle that today’s players could kick previous generations of players’ asses.
I divided baseball history into four periods, the clearest one being the one starting with the lively ball in 1920 and ending with the last all-white MLB rosters in 1946, a twenty-seven year span. Flashforward twenty-seven more years to 1973, and that gives us the DH, so that’s another era. Tack on another twenty-seven years, and that brings us roughly to the time of Bill’s revised Abstract rankings. Subtract twenty-seven years from 1920 and we’re in the early 1890s, which includes most of early baseball that could be considered MLB. Four eras, then, covering a little over a century.
I decided to demote second basemen who played before 1920 30 places, those who played from 1920 to 1946 20 places, and those who played from 1947 to 1973 10 places. Bill’s rankings assume that a win in 1893 is as valuable as a win in 2001, which it is when we’re ranking players competing against the quality available in their own day, but my assumption is that a win in 1893 required far less objective competitive ability than a 2001 win required. (I think that’s what I was trying to argue—sometimes I’m not exactly sure what point I’m trying to make, which helps persuade me that I’m not writing polemically, to prove a point, but just to see what I can learn.) Anyway, this revised ranking is my attempt to see what such a revisionist bias would produce in a list of the greatest second basemen of all time.
Here’s Bill’s original 2001 rankings, through # 50:
1. Joe Morgan
2. Eddie Collins
3. Rogers Hornsby
4. Jackie Robinson
5. Craig Biggio
6. Nap Lajoie
7. Ryne Sandberg
8. Charlie Gehringer
9. Rod Carew
10. Robbie Alomar
11. Frankie Frisch
12. Bobby Grich
13. Lou Whitaker
14. Billy Herman
15. Nellie Fox
16. Joe Gordon
17. Willie Randolph
18. Bobby Doerr
19. Tony Lazzeri
20. Larry Doyle
21. Chuck Knoblauch
22. Dick McAuliffe
23. Davey Lopes
24. Buddy Myer
25. Johnny Evers
26. Cupid Childs
27. Jim Gilliam
28. Red Schoendienst
29. Bill Mazeroski
30. Bid McPhee
31. Frank White
32. Lonnie Frey
33. Gil McDougald
34. Eddie Stanky
35. Del Pratt
36. Bobby Avila
37. Miller Huggins
38. Pete Runnels
39. Hardy Richardson
40. Tommy Herr
41. Phil Garner
42. Robby Thompson
43. Max Bishop
44. Steve Sax
45. Bill Doran
46. Dave Johnson
47. Tony Taylor
48. Jeff Kent
49. Manny Trillo
50. Dave Cash
As soon as I began to amend the list, according to the biased principles above, I ran into a problem I knew I’d hit at some point: was Joe Morgan’s era 1947-1973 or 1974-2001? I could just delve into the record books and see which period he had the most plate appearances in, or the most games at second base, or something, but clearly his career had a lot of any stat in each era, so I decided to split the difference, and move him down 5 spots rather than 10 or 0, thus saving myself some tedious work making an arbitrary distinction. (Most players fit neatly into one era or other.) Likewise with #2, Eddie Collins played a lot of seasons both pre- and post-1920, so I dropped him 25 places instead of either 20 or 30.
On the list below, I’ll make my new rankings and numberings, and tack on after each name the number of places that each player got demoted.
The list kept changing as I demoted various second basemen, naturally, and the modern players kept bunching up at the top of the list, as intended, while the older guys kept competing for the lower spots on the list. What I decided to do was to demote a player to the chosen spot based on Bill’s original list, but let that spot change as the numbers kept changing. That is, I demoted Joe Morgan to #6 (five spots below his original #1) but let him rise as Eddie Collins got bumped from the #2 spot to the #26 spot, allowing Morgan to rise to spot #5, rather than #6. As you can see, Little Joe eventually fought his way back to the #2 spot, just behind the greatest second baseman of all time, whom we all of course acknowledge to be Craig Biggio:
1. Craig Biggio 0
2. Joe Morgan -5
3. Ryne Sandberg 0
4. Robbie Alomar 0
5. Jackie Robinson -10
6. Lou Whitaker 0
7. Willie Randolph 0
8. Rod Carew -5
9. Bobby Grich -2
10. Chuck Knoblauch 0
11. Rogers Hornsby -22
12. Eddie Collins -25
13. Nellie Fox -10
14. Charlie Gehringer -20
15. Frank White 0
16. Davey Lopes -1
17. Frankie Frisch -20
18. Bobby Doerr -15
19. Joe Gordon -18
20. Dick McAuliffe -9
21. Billy Herman -20
22. Nap Lajoie -30
23. Tony Lazzeri -20
24. Tommy Herr 0
25. Phil Garner 0
26. Jim Gilliam -10
27. Robby Thompson 0
28. Red Schoendienst -11
29. Bill Mazeroski -11
30. Steve Sax 0
31. Bill Doran 0
32. Buddy Myer -20
33. Jeff Kent 0
34. Gil McDougald -10
35.
36. Manny Trillo 0
37. Eddie Stanky-12
38.
39. Bobby Avila -10
40.
41. Larry Doyle -30
42.
43. Pete Runnels -10
44.
45. Max Bishop -20
46.
47.
48.
49. Dave Johnson -5
50.
51.
52. Dave Cash -2
53.
54.
55. Lonnie Frey -20
56.
57. Tony Taylor -9
58.
59. Johnny Evers -30
60. Cupid Childs -30
61.
62.
63.
64.
65.
66. Bid McPhee -30
67.
68.
69. Del Pratt -30
70.
71. Miller Huggins -30
72.
73. Hardy Richardson -30
Now a couple of funny things are going here:
1) There are all sorts of blank spots opening up, so that Hardy Richardson, a very early second baseman who got demoted the maximum 30 spots for the felony of playing before 1900 ends up on this listing of the top 50 second basemen in 73rd place, which is hard to do. What happened there of course is that Bill’s original extra-crispy recipe had him in 39th place, and I dropped him 30 spots, and then some more spots opened up as other players dropped to spots below #50. But then I decided NOT to close ranks and make him #50 because I knew I would need those empty places for the players after 2001, whom I haven’t (yet) discussed.
2) And actually if you stop to think a minute, Richardson needs to move down a bunch more, according to the biases being openly exhibited here, because he not only played a little bit of his career before the early 1890s, he played all of it before 1893—I need a whole nother category for him, with an additional penalty for the era before 1893, like 40 points. Or 50. But we’ll let Hardy slide for now.
3) These lists are pretty top-heavy with the second basemen we’ve all watched play, and very bottom-heavy with the players none of us have seen, but that’s all good. We understood that’s what would happen going in. But it didn’t mean that all early players would suffer equally—I mean, Eddie Collins and Rogers Hornsby took a big hit, but then they moved up some as other players took other hits, ending up at #11 and #12 instead of Bill’s original #2 and #3, which seems reasonable to me. If you accept my premise, that second basemen (all MLB players) in the 1910s were playing against much softer competition than their counterparts 100 years later, then #s 11 and 12 is pretty good.
4) Bill included only one player truly in mid-career, Jeff Kent, who ranked 48th on his list and 33rd on mine. Kent would clearly move up some even without a timeline-bias adjustment, so on the next listing, I’m going to move him up a few spots.
5) Now the fun begins. In addition to placing a larger penalty on pre-1893 players like Hardy Richardson, I’ll consider some names from the post-2001 era that Bill was too ignorant to include in his revised Historical Abstract. Naturally by the standards I’m applying here, playing in the 21st century makes these players godlike in their ability. Who would the post-2001 Gods be?
Well, let’s see. I’ll throw out some names of the top second basemen of recent years, and you can add or subtract as you choose. In no special order:
Robinson Cano
Chase Utley
Ben Zobrist
Dustin Pedroia
Jose Altuve
Ian Kinsler
Daniel Murphy
Brian Dozier
Bret Boone
Some of these guys haven’t played half their careers yet, and of course 2001-2018 isn’t a full 27-year era, so there are bound to be additional names and stats that will go into this era before we’re done, the greatest era of them all for stellar MLB players including great secondbase men.
So Imagine these names (and a few more) interspersed in the rankings, and towards the top. Like Bill, I don’t rank players except when Bill’s ranking players. (That’s a joke—I don’t rank players at all, and no one would care if I did, so I’m just going to intersperse these names without a serious thought as to their quality of play, just spitballing here, for illustration’s sake, precisely because my opinions are irrelevant.) I’m going to fill out the blanks with some other top secondbase men from the most recent era (in bold), and maybe bump up a few guys from the previous (1974-2001) era just to complete the new top 50 secondbase men list:
1. Jose Altuve
2. Craig Biggio 0
3. Robinson Cano
4. Joe Morgan -5
5. Ryne Sandberg 0
6. Chase Utley
7. Robbie Alomar 0
8. Jackie Robinson -10
9. Lou Whitaker 0
10. Willie Randolph 0
11. Dustin Pedroia
12. Rod Carew -5
13. Ben Zobrist
14. Bobby Grich -2
15. Chuck Knoblauch 0
16. Rogers Hornsby -22
17. Brian Dozier
18. Eddie Collins -25
19. Nellie Fox -10
20. Jeff Kent 0
21. Charlie Gehringer -20
22. Frank White 0
23. Davey Lopes -1
24. Frankie Frisch -20
25. Bobby Doerr -15
26. Ian Kinsler
27. Joe Gordon -18
28. Dick McAuliffe -9
29. Billy Herman -20
30. Nap Lajoie -30
31. Tony Lazzeri -20
32. Daniel Murphy
33. Tommy Herr 0
34. Phil Garner 0
35. Jim Gilliam -10
36. Bret Boone
37. Robby Thompson 0
38. Red Schoendienst -11
39. Bill Mazeroski -11
40. Steve Sax 0
41. Bill Doran 0
42. Buddy Myer -20
43. Gil McDougald -10
44. Carlos Baerga
45. Manny Trillo 0
46. Eddie Stanky-12
47. Bobby Avila -10
48. Larry Doyle -30
49. Pete Runnels -10
50. Max Bishop -20
The number one slot is based on wild speculation that Altuve ends up with an even better second half to his career than his first half, but I had to put him somewhere towards the top, so what the hell.
The guy who ranked #51 on Bill’s original list was Danny Murphy, who played from 1900-1915, so he’s obviously going to be bumped down to spot #81 and beyond, but the Dan(iel) Murphy who played second base a century later gets onto this list in position #32, which I mention because, not to steal Bill’s thunder, when he does come out with his next rankings (if he does) we’re going to see a lot of these new names on it. I’ll personally be astonished if the newer Daniel Murphy doesn’t rank a lot higher than the older one on Bill’s next list. This list, however, my list, not only interpolates those new names but implicitly argues that the newer players are simply better than the older players—I’m arguing that Bill’s equation of a win for Daniel Murphy the First with a win for Daniel Murphy the Second is wrong, or more precisely that looking at a 1910 win as being equivalent to a 2010 win is wrong. Bill’s way is totally right, absolutely necessary for evaluating players contemporary with each other, but Win Shares paint a false picture when comparing the absolute quality of players from widely disparate eras. Or so I say.
If Bill ends up assessing Murph the First’s Win Shares in one year at 20 and Murph the Second’s Win Shares in another year a century later also at 20, what that signifies to me is that they were equal contributors to their teams’ success. A win is a win is a win. BUT I also take that data to signify that Murph the Second was a seriously superior ballplayer to his counterpart-- he was playing against much bigger, stronger, faster, more carefully scouted, more racially diverse, more well-trained etc. etc. etc. competition yet producing the same results in that much more competitive environment.
I want to stress that I’m not trying to equate the talent of Daniel Murphy the Second with that of Tony Lazzeri, whom he appears just behind on the list above, or that of Tommy Herr, whom Murphy appears just ahead of. (From the revised Historical Abstract, p. 535: "The ranking of second basemen past spot 35 is almost impossible. I’ve done the best job I could, but there are just a lot of players who are the same. What is the difference between Johnny Temple and Don Blasingame?") What I am suggesting is that, if you accept my premise that baseball is slowly but very surely getting better over time, the list above would then approximate how such an adjusted list would look, with Altuve very possibly ranking in the top half-dozen when his career is in the books, and with the half-dozen top secondbase men consisting of players whom you’ve all seen play. It’s entirely possible that such standard top picks like Eddie Collins and Rogers Hornsby and even Jackie Robinson will place about where I have them, in the #10-#15 range, instead of the very top tier.
Lists get fossilized. When I was growing up, I read in several places that Pie Traynor was the #1 thirdbase man of all time, and it took some doing for Bill to bleach that notion from my brain. My immediate response to Bill’s 2001 HBA rankings at thirdbase where Mike Schmidt was #1 and Pie Traynor #15 was "What!?" Looking over the Traynor entry, I see that Bill discussed precisely this point, that Pie Traynor’s reputation as the #1 guy was an invention of the 1950s—by the early 1960s, Eddie Mathews had already safely dislodged Traynor, who had been inferior to Home Run Baker (#5 in the HBA) all along, anyway. I’m thinking that most of us have allowed Bill’s 2001 rankings to get fossilized in our minds, and there may be a new stream of bleach headed our way.
Re-reading the revised Historical Abstract was a pleasure, and in the course of it, I realized that, to my surprise, the fossilized ranking order was less pleasurable than the accompanying mini-essays on the players. I remember being pleased by learning that, in Bill’s informed view, Jackie Robinson was the fourth-greatest second baseman of all time, despite his lack of playing time, but now I realize how little it matters whether Bill ranked Jackie #3 or #23, and that it may well turn out, on Bill’s long-awaited next ranking, that Jackie’s new rating is much higher or much lower than #4. There is no ultimate answer to the question of where players rank, and the ranking is only a jumping-off point for the discussion that ensues.
(Of Bill’s long-awaited next ranking, by the way, it’s been over seventeen years since the revised Historical Abstract, in which Bill pointed out that the revision had been done because the first HA had been published 15 years earlier—so if you think he’s due for another version, you’re correct. Of course, as I contemplate a trip to Yellowstone this summer, the massive explosion of molten lava under Wyoming is also way overdue, so let’s not rush forces of nature unduly.)
To belabor an obvious example of the irrelevance of precise rankings, take the speculations above, positing that 2018 players are markedly more skilled than the previous generation, who were likewise much more skilled than their predecessors, etc. You might reject such thinking altogether (I’m not altogether sure that I buy the gantse megillah, as we Semitic types refer to the "complete tale") but as a premise for this ranking, we can consider it provisionally valid. Where, after all, is the harm in humoring me? If it offends you to think that post-2001 players constitute the greatest 2b-men of all time, then go ahead and argue the basis for your offendedness, and maybe we’ll all learn something from your argument.
It's the argument that forms the interesting part of the ultimate answer, the reasoning behind your thinking that my rankings stink or that they’re wonderful. And it’s the reasoning behind Bill’s ranking that makes them worth reading, even if we disagree at times. I suspect that’s why Bill has explicitly reserved the right to disagree with himself whenever he issues new rankings—he offers us a whole new rationale for each ranking, making the point that our best conclusions are always subject to revision as long as we look at issues with open minds, from a fresh perspective. Bill’s rankings, like any rankings, are always in danger of getting fossilized, so Bill leads the charge in resisting that all-too-human tendency.
One very strong counter-argument to my bias towards contemporary players is "Yeah, right. The players YOU happened to see also happen to be much better players than the players you never saw, Goldleaf. Self-serve much?" And of course it’s logical that I would enjoy seeing the names I remember very well presented high in the rankings. I admit to reading with special delight the names of Mets from my childhood, and I do regret that Ron Hunt and Felix Millan appear just beyond Bill’s first 50 players (#s 57 and 60) and so are ineligible for bumping up in my new pantheon. But I’d counter that counter-argument with the notion that I actually don’t follow the game being played today with anything like the fervor with which I followed the game of the 1960s and 1970s, and I probably more know about the players of the 1950s (through reading) than I do about the players of today, which kind of sinks the argument about my self-interest here. It’s just a very interesting concept, that players are growing increasingly, perhaps almost exponentially, more skilled, and as such can’t really be compared to players of earlier times.
Someone (forget who—sorry) brought up the point that if Babe Ruth were competing against pitchers in 2018 in a contemporary ballpark etc., he also would have the advantage of scouting the pitchers via recorded footage, modern weight-training techniques, state-of-the-art equipment, better nutrition (!), and so on, but that misses my point here. I’m not seeking to demonstrate that Ruth sucked, not at all. It’s that Ruth’s superiority to other batters of his day benefited from the advantage of the pitchers not having footage on him—he must have often faced pitchers who had no idea whether it was better to pitch him low and away or high and tight, who just threw him their best pitches and hoped and prayed for the best. Of course he could have adapted to the contemporary game just fine, but his records were compiled when those advantages weren’t available, so the game of baseball, the quality of play in the 1920s, was degraded from the higher standards later on. (And that 1920s pitcher would, of course, be able to study footage of Ruth.)
It’s not that there’s a gigantic advantage in having pre-game footage of the pitcher you’re about to face, or his having footage of where to pitch you—it’s a small advantage for the both of yuz, which roughly evens out. (If it were known in Ruth’s day that his OPS+ was .025 lower on fastballs high and tight than fastballs elsewhere, then a pitcher could save up his high and tight fastball for a 3-and-2 pitch against Ruth, and that advantage might disappear as Ruth came to expect that pitch in that spot—like I say, most such advantages are small and temporary, but they are advantages.) You can’t see the differences between Ruth hitting a HR against Charlie Root and Joey Votto hitting one off Justin Verlander—a HR is a HR is a HR—but the quality of play is, nonetheless, higher and more competitive than it used to be. That’s what’s so pernicious about this theory—the fact that offense and defense is improving at roughly at same rate yields results that look almost identical over time but in fact are far different.
The prose in Bill’s 2001 rankings is a marvel of readability—as I re-read the mini-essays, I found myself chuckling or being surprised by some long-forgotten data point. I even noted with pleasure that Bill had, in passing, loosely endorsed the principle of increasing quality of the competition in MLB when, justifying ranking Mickey Mantle above Ty Cobb, he pointed out that Mantle "came along 45 years later when (in my opinion) the quality of the competition was tougher" (p. 348). Ultimately, he ranked Cobb above Mantle, but I have taken that principle to the extreme to see what fruits it yields.
As I perused the 2001 rankings, I did find a point or two that I differed from. Bill kind of ragged on Ron Hunt, calling him "about as bad a player you can be with a .400 on-base percentage," which is accurate, but he also described Hunt’s lousy personality and his unpopularity with both opposing players and fans, the last of which simply isn’t true. Hunt was an asshole, true, but he was OUR asshole—Mets fans in the mid-1960s loved Hunt’s surly aggressiveness, his edginess, his competitive spirit, and we were absolutely distraught when the Mets swapped him out for Tommy Davis, which was on the surface a pretty fair deal. (Less than two years older than Hunt, Davis was a recent two-time batting champ, World’s Champion, MVP runner-up, and All-Star, and he was a Brooklyn native to boot.) But the selective anecdotes Bill told about most players are the best reason to re-read the Historical Abstract—he managed to find stories about players’ careers, often ones that hardly relate to the players’ rankings, just interesting, colorful, oddball stories about their peculiar characteristics, that elevate the rankings sections to the level of literature. Even with Hunt, whose story I’ve followed closely since his MLB debut, there were juicy details that were new to me, such as future Congressman Larry Jackson warning Hunt about the equally-unpopular infielder Daryl Spencer who got driven to Japan (flown, probably) by his opponents going out of their way to collide with him on the basepaths, and Hunt’s pithy rethponthe to Jackson’s warning.