Final Report on the Top 50 Superstars Project

              So, my project to identify 50 players who could be identified as "true superstars" has wound up identifying 52 players.  The whole point was to make it to 50, but I only got to 52.  What happened was, in the semi-final vote I had Ichiro Suzuki matched up against Tony Gwynn, and Gwynn was leading 53-47 with about 1500 votes cast, so I figured that race was over and created a final matchup of Gwynn against Ripken.   But then, after I had started the last vote with Gwynn, Ichiro surged past Gwynn in the late voting, and won that contest 51-49.  Ripken then beat Gwynn (also) 52-48, but 51-49, 52-48; these aren’t good margins.   So I decided the hell with it, and just put all three of them on the list.  The final list is

1900s—Cy Young, Honus Wagner, Nap Lajoie, Christy Mathewson

1910s—Walter Johnson, Pete Alexander, Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker

1920s—Babe Ruth, Rogers Hornsby, Lou Gehrig

1930s—Lefty Grove, Jimmie Foxx, Mel Ott

1940s—Joe DiMaggio, Bob Feller, Ted Williams, Stan Musial

1950s—Yogi Berra, Roy Campanella, Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, Jackie Robinson

1960s—Henry Aaron, Bob Gibson, Sandy Koufax, Roberto Clemente

1970s—Joe Morgan, Tom Seaver, Reggie Jackson, Johnny Bench, Pete Rose

1980s—Mike Schmidt, George Brett, Cal Ripken, Tony Gwynn, Rickey Henderson

1990s—Greg Maddux, Randy Johnson, Roger Clemens, Ken Griffey Jr.

2000s—Barry Bonds, Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez, David Ortiz, Albert Pujols, Ichico Suzuki,

            Pedro Martinez

2010s—Clayton Kershaw, Mike Trout

              After the voting I realized that I could construct "power charts" comparing all 54 of the players by using the method we use to compare basketball teams or football teams which haven’t played each other.   Florida plays Arizona and loses 71-67, then Oregon plays Arizona and loses 84-48, you figure (based on that one matchup) that Florida is probably stronger than Oregon.   Same thing here.  Cal Ripken beats Brooks Robinson 66-34 and beats Jim Thome 85-15,you figure Robinson is a stronger candidate than Thome.  You make calculations based on ALL of the common opponents, you have power rankings.

              You have to make some assumptions.   You can’t assume there is a straight-line relationship.   In other words, the fact that Albert Pujols beats Billy Williams 90-10 doesn’t mean that Pujols is 9 times better than Williams in the eyes of the voters.  You have to make assumptions, which means that you can be wrong.  But given that, we can make power ratings for all 54 players in the competition for the final ten spots (which turned out to be 12).   The rankings are.

              My analysis of the data suggests that Carl Yastrzemski would be an even match against Tony Gwynn if they were pitted head to head, and that Warren Spahn would probably beat Ichiro.   Maybe I’ll test those names and see what happens, but anyway, that’s like any other tournament; there is luck involved in who you have to play, and the teams that make the Final Four aren’t always the four best teams.  

              I don’t really care who makes the list; I mean, my idea was that any of the 54 candidates would be acceptable to me as one of the last ten "true superstars", or I wouldn’t have put them in the vote.   I listed them because I couldn’t decide, so I thought I would let the fans decide, and they did a good job, and we had fun doing it and I wound up with a good list.   I’ve got no objections to it.

              However, I will note that when I analyzed the data, I had to admit that the "recency bias" which was much discussed while the voting was going on did turn out to be a larger factor in the results than I thought it was at the time.   I mostly matched up a player from the 1930s against another player from the 1930s and a player from the 1950s against another player from the fifties or sixties, which tends to hide the recency bias.   But when you run the power rankings, you can see that there is a concentration of 1930s candidates at the bottom of the list, and that some of the more recent stars perhaps did better in the voting than was fully warranted.   I will now use the list to study what it was that I was trying to study, which was the connection between having a superstar in his prime and the direction of the franchise.   Thank you all for playing.