The question of what is a superstar—my last article--leads naturally to the question of who is a superstar.  I was working on that one before I wrote the last article, but that research failed so completely that I abandoned it.   After publishing the What article I gained some understanding of the mistakes I had made previously, and I took another crack at the problem.   I corrected three flaws in my previous attempt, maybe three and a half.   Substantial flaws in the system or limitations to the system still exist and there is still a lot that could be done better, but I think I have something publishable now. 

              First, the estimate that 7% of "stars" could be considered "superstars" is unrealistically low, and does not comport with the way that we actually think about superstars.  "Superstars" are more like a 20% subset of "stars", rather than 7%.   I didn’t go to 20% in this effort, but I went up to more like 11% and also used a slightly increased estimate of the number of stars, thus creating a little bit more room to designate players as superstars. 

              Second, I realize now that it was foolish to say that because there is a certain ratio of stars to superstars, that that ratio applies to every season.  It was this assumption that was forcing me into the situation in which players would be "on" the superstar list in years 1, 3 and 6, but not on the list in years 2, 4 and 5.   Instead, I fixed a number of player/seasons to be designated over time, but allowed the number to go up or down in any one season.

              Third, I adopted a reader’s suggestion—not sure whether it was here on from Twitter—that some players, like Willie Mays and Babe Ruth, become permanent superstars as long as they are active, but that for most stars, superstar status fades away once the player’s skills diminish.   Now that I think about it, this seems to be obviously true.  

              And fourth, I incorporated two adjustments into my system to moderate "success" with "the recognition of success".   In a mathematical system, I’m basically stuck measuring actual success, rather than perceived success.   But I did a couple of little things. .. .I’ll explain later. 

              I ran a poll on Twitter:  "In considering who is a Superstar, does Hype count?"  873 people responded; 45% said "Yes", 55% said "No".   This was very helpful to me, because that clarifies why it is difficult to reach consensus about who is a superstar.   It is unusual for a poll about the meaning of a word to be so evenly divided.  We can’t reach consensus about who is a superstar because we have no general agreement about whether publicity invested in a player is or is not relevant.  

              But what I realized at this point is that this is not a pure dichotomy.   The key issue, in defining a superstar, is to what extent do you accept public recognition as an element of the mix?

              I accept that public recognition is an inevitable element in stardom, to a certain extent; recognition of success is the difference between "star" and "good player".   But what I realize now is that saying that we accept recognition of success as some element of superstardom does not throw open the gates to unlimited acceptance of hype.  It’s relevant, to a limited extent.  We could say, in a mathematical model, that we accept "recognition signals" as superstar credentials, up to but not exceeding 10% of the player’s total—or 20%, or 30%, or whatever, but you can’t make a player a superstar purely by hyping him.  

              Here is a critical difference between sports and, let’s say, movie superstardom or television superstardom.   In Hollywood superstardom, we accept that many are called but few are chosen, emphasis on chosen.   We accept that Hollywood has many young actors with chiseled features and winning smiles and glib personalities,  and we accept that Hollywood, not arbitrarily but somewhat arbitrarily, chooses one or two of those to give the prized roles to while ignoring ten or twenty others who are equally well qualified on a purely objective scale. 

              But the sports world could never accept this.  To accept this in sports is absolutely, unforgivably forbidden.   Nobody is "chosen" to be a major league baseball player; you goddamned earn it, or you don’t belong.   That’s fundamental to sports, to the meritocracy of sports.   That’s why those who think that magazine covers and celebrity endorsement contracts can make you a superstar need to draw a line between sports superstardom and media superstardom.   It is not actually the same thing.  Sports are a meritocracy in a way that media success is not. 

              So here’s what I did to try to identify superstars by using a mathematical model.   First, I started with the Win Shares for each player in each season—or actually, since I don’t have all Win Shares in my spreadsheet, Estimated Win Shares.   Win Shares are integers; Estimated Win Shares carry decimals.  But we’ll call it Win Shares to save a word.

              Second, I figured a "running score" for each player, which was:

              4 times Win Shares in the season, plus

              2 times Win Shares in the previous season, plus

              Win Shares in the second previous season, plus

              65% of whatever the player’s total was after the previous season. 

              Another small change; in my previous effort to do this, I did the same thing but used 70%, rather than 65%.   I thought that, in the previous effort, this tended to cause superstar identifications to arrive a little bit too late in a player’s career.   Reducing the "carry forward" reduces the time gap between the emergence of a star and his peak, thus causing the peak values to appear at a younger age.  Actually, 65% still appears to be a little bit too high.  But I’m living with it for now.

              In the previous effort, I identified the top X players in the Running Score for each season as the Superstars for that season, which, as I said before, didn’t really work.  But this time I went further, working not with Win Shares but with Adjusted Win Shares.  Adjusted Win Shares were adjusted in two ways, both of which were intended to create an opening for recognition signals. 

              First, I added 8 (8 Win Shares) to any player who won the MVP Award or the Cy Young Award, 16 if the player won both.   In the previous effort not enough pitchers emerged as superstars, so this helped (a) as a recognition signal, and (b) to get higher values for pitchers.

              Second, I figured for each player/season the ratio between the player’s Hits, and his Secondary Bases.   Historically, batting average is over-valued; secondary offensive skills (walks and power) are under-valued.   In my studies before, this tended to cause certain high-average players—Rod Carew, Roberto Clemente, Ichiro—to have difficulty meeting the standard of a superstar, while tending to cause some outstanding players who really were not superstars—Charlie Keller, for example—to identify as superstars.

              To adjust for that, if a player’s secondary bases exceeded his hits by 20% or more, I reduced all of his adjusted Win Share estimates by 5%.  If the player’s secondary bases were 20% LESS than his hits, I increased the adjusted Win Shares by 5%.

              This is an under-adjustment.   The real effect of the batting average illusion is much larger than that, but it is always better, in a project like this, to under-solve a problem than to over-compensate.   If your estimate is too small, you can do something else to further reduce the problem.  If you go too far, you create a different problem that you have to solve.  

              Anyway, those two things are recognition signals—MVP and Cy Young Awards, and high batting averages.  From there, I figured the "Superstar Score" for each player after each season, just as I did before.

              My next task was to ask "Which players should be designated as PERMANENT superstars?"   I decided to call these "transcendent stars"—a higher level of superstars; the term consistent with my earlier article.  Who are the transcendent stars, like Mays and Ruth, who remain superstars even after their production slips a little bit? 

              I am balancing two tasks here:  I am trying to create a mathematical model to recognize superstars, but also, I am trying to create an accurate list of superstars over time.  I first designated as "transcendent stars" the 13 highest-scoring players since 1900, who were Honus Wagner, Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, Eddie Collins, Tris Speaker, Babe Ruth, Rogers Hornsby, Lou Gehrig, Ted Williams, Stan Musial, Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, Joe Morgan and Barry Bonds.  I decided to accept those 13 as a list of the transcendent stars who remain superstars as long as they are playing, but with a few amendments.   I took off of the list of transcendent stars Eddie Collins, Rogers Hornsby and Lou Gehrig, and replaced them with Cy Young and Hank Aaron, giving me a list of 12 transcendent stars.

              Eddie Collins I removed because, while he was a great player and he was a superstar, I simply don’t believe that he reached a level of recognition comparable to Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb,

              Rogers Hornsby is listed as Super from 1917 to 1930, which is a long time for a player to be a Superstar.  I removed him then because his career kicks along as a player/manager, not doing very much as a player, for almost a decade after his last great year.   Most of these guys, like Mays and Ruth, the time period between when they would otherwise lose their superstar status and when they retire is just a couple of years.   This has little impact on the system; we’re just saying that Ruth remains a superstar in 1934 and 1935, when his performance would not keep him on the list.   That’s not an issue.   Hornsby hangs around the game not doing very much from 1930 to 1937, and this becomes problematic if he is designated as one of the "permanent" superstars, whereas it is not problematic if he loses his superstar status.   I just think it is more accurate to say that he is NOT a superstar in 1935 than to say that he is.

              And Gehrig is the opposite case.   Gehrig retains his "superstar" designation by the ordinary methods through 1938, and then plays only 8 games at the start of the 1939 season.   The "transcendent star" issue only concerns those eight games in 1939, but it is hard to say that he is one of the superstars of the 1939 season when he really wasn’t playing the last 95% of the schedule.  

              So anyway, Collins, Hornsby and Gehrig out as transcendent stars, super-duper stars, and Aaron and Cy Young in.    Now we have 242 Superstar seasons accounted for, which is the time period between the emergence of each of those players as a superstar, and the end of his career.  

              How many superstar seasons do we want?   How many player/seasons, over the course of the 118 years since 1900, do we designate as "superstar" seasons?

              I decided initially on 1,000.   The logic is this:

              There are, I think, 2,490 team/seasons since 1900.   Let’s say there are four stars per team, that’s 9,960 star/seasons.   Let’s say that 10% of the stars are SUPER stars, that’s 996 player/seasons to be designated as superstars.  OK, 1,000 seasons of Superstardom, of which we have accounted for 242 with the transcendent stars.   Now, how do we decide when a player has achieved Superstar status?

              The highest-scoring players in my system are those that I designate as superstars, based on the player’s running score at its highest point.  The next ten highest-scoring players are Eddie Collins, Rogers Hornsby, Lou Gehrig, Albert Pujols, Joe DiMaggio, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Nap Lajoie, Mike Trout, Miguel Cabrera and Jimmie Foxx—three active players, interestingly enough.   But how do we decide when each player BECAME a superstar, and when each player no longer was a superstar?

              I decided that each player becomes a superstar in his first season with 31 or more adjusted Win Shares.   Surprisingly, this very simple rule sees to work satisfactorily almost 100% of the time.  I think the only cases in the study in which this rule did not satisfactorily identify the year in which the players emerged as superstars were Ken Griffey Jr. and Gary Sheffield.  Ken Griffey Jr. had 30 Win Shares—not 31—in 1991, and then, because of the 1994-1995 strike and some other things, never got to 31 Adjusted Win Shares until his MVP season in 1997. 

              Gary Sheffield, on the other hand, (a) qualifies as a superstar, marginally, but he makes the cut, and (b) had a tremendous season in 1992, hitting .330 with 33 homers, 100 RBI.   Sheffield thus is listed as a superstar beginning in 1992.  

              But Sheffield did not play at anything approaching a superstar level in 1993-94-95.   In the three seasons 1993 to 1995 Griffey hit .304 with 102 homers and a 1.008 OPS.   Sheffield in the same three seasons hit .294 with 63 homers and a .924 OPS.  It thus makes no sense to say that Sheffield was a superstar in those three seasons, but that Griffey was not.   So I violated my rules in that case, and listed Griffey as a superstar beginning in 1991, Sheffield not until 1996.   But, kind of remarkably, that’s the only case I noticed in which the 31-Adjusted Win Shares total doesn’t work as the Opening Gate for the Superstar’s period of superstardom.   I’ll run the dates of all of the superstars later; you can debate them as you see fit.   (I guess I would have preferred if Harmon Killebrew’s Superstar dates had begun a little earlier.)

              While working on this, I wondered what I should do if a player reached the Superstar threshold in terms of his Running Score, but never had a season with 31 Adjusted Win Shares.   You COULD do it, if you had seasons like 28, 27, 29, 30, 29, etc.; it’s theoretically possible, but it never happened and it never happened, until I had almost filled out my chart of 1,000 Superstar seasons, and then it did.  It had to; the rule is that if something like this CAN happen, it will. 

              Richie Ashburn in 1958 reaches the standard of a superstar based on his running score, but never has a season with 31 Adjusted Win Shares.

              Thinking about it, I decided that Richie Ashburn was in fact a Superstar, in that one season.   He led the National League in batting, .350; led the major leagues in batting.   He also led the National League in Hits (215), Walks (97), On Base Percentage (.440), Triples (13) and Plate Appearances (725), and missed by one of leading the league in Stolen Bases.   It’s a tremendous season for a leadoff man, to lead the league in Batting Average and Walks and Plate Appearances and On Base Percentage and almost in Stolen Bases; it’s almost a "leadoff man’s Triple Crown."  Also, my memory of this, while vague, is that Ashburn DID receive a great deal of publicity at that time.  I was eight years old, but we had a Sunday School six-page magazine that was handed out to the kids in church, and I remember that it had an article about Richie Ashburn being a great Christian, and I remember seeing an article in some other magazine in which he was teaching kids to bunt.   I decided to designate him as a Superstar, consistent with the process, but just for that one year, since the format of the study leaves it unclear when he became a Superstar or when he ceased to be one.  He is the only one-year Superstar in the study.  

              The next question is, when does a transitional (not transcendant) Superstar cease being a Superstar?  

              Again, I used a simple cutoff, and again, it seems to work very well.   Having established himself as a Superstar, a player remains a Superstar through his last season with 23 or more Adjusted Win Shares.  That sounds so simple that you think it can’t possibly work, but I think it does.   But it’s an inherently arbitrary process, so feel free to make up your own rules and your own results if you have the time.  Let’s look at a few examples to build understanding.

              Jeff Bagwell becomes a Superstar in 1994, the year he won the MVP Award, and remains a superstar through 2001, when he hit .288 with 39 homers, 130 RBI.   Those 2001 numbers are actually down a little bit from his previous standards—first time in several years he had not hit .300, first time in three years he had not hit 40 homers—but if you are a Superstar and you hit 39 homers and drive in 130 runs, you’re still a Superstar. The next year he hit .291 but slipped to 31 homers, 98 RBI, and those are no longer superstar numbers—in 2002.   In another year those might be Superstar numbers, but in 2002 36 players drove in 100 runs.  Players were hitting 50, 60, 70 homers every year back then; it took Big numbers to be a star.

              Yogi Berra became a Superstar in 1950, hitting .322 with 28 homers, 124 RBI, and remained a Superstar through 1959.   In 1960, 35 years old, he hit .276 with 15 homers, 61 RBI, and at that point was no longer a Superstar.

              Wade Boggs became a Superstar in 1983, his second year in the majors, hitting .361 with 92 walks to lead the league in Batting and On Base Percentage, 210 hits, and remained a Superstar through 1991, when he hit .332 with 42 Doubles and a .421 On Base Percentage.   In 1992 he dropped to .259, his OPS dropped from .881 to .711, and at that point he was no longer a Superstar.

              Joe Medwick became a Superstar in 1935, when he hit .353 with 23 homers, 126 RBI, 224 hits, 46 doubles, 132 Runs Scored, all of these figures being career highs, and remained a Superstar through 1941, when he hit .318 with 18 homers, 88 RBI, 100 runs scored.  In 1942 he dropped off to .300 but with only 4 homers, his OPS dropped from .881 to .742, and at that point we remove the "Superstar" tag from him.

              Some of you will remember that Bob Creamer, in his book about the 1941 season, wrote about what a monster star Joe Medwick was at that time, contrasting him with Ted Williams.   He was trying to re-set the reader’s mind, to get the reader to understand that, at that time, Joe Medwick was a much, much bigger star than Ted Williams.   Williams became a Superstar when he hit .400; he wasn’t until then.  Our system agrees.   Our system has Medwick as a Superstar through 1941, Ted Williams as a Superstar beginning in 1941, exactly as Creamer explained in his book about the 1941 season. 

              Richie Ashburn loses his Superstar status after his 1958 season because he never had another season of 23 or more Adjusted Win Shares.   He had many very good seasons prior to 1958, but he never reached "Superstar Mass" until 1958, and then that was his last great season, so then we take the tag away from him. 

              WHETHER a player is a Superstar and WHEN he becomes a Superstar are separate questions in this system.  Yogi Berra didn’t reach Superstar Mass—Critical Mass for a Superstar—until 1953.  Someone else could have done what Berra did in 1950, and not become a Superstar.   But Berra did become a Superstar, so then we face the question, WHEN did he become a Superstar?   "1950" is a better answer than "1953"; it is a better answer than any other. 

              Occasionally a player that we have defined as a Superstar retains the Superstar tag for one year after his last season of 23 or more Adjusted Win Shares, because he still has Superstar Mass.  Superstar Mass is a running score of 550 or more by the system I explained at the start of the article.  Sometimes a player is still above that level after for a year or two after his last season of 23 or more Adjusted Win Shares. What that means is that, if we removed this season from the player’s period of Superstardom, then, because of his running score, he would be the next man on the list to be designated as a Superstar, so obviously he still is.   Johnny Bench was still a Superstar in 1976, for example, and Lou Boudreau was in 1949, and Rod Carew was in 1979.  That’s one reason the simple rule articulated before works as well as it does—that the definition of when a player is a Superstar is protected from dramatic and obvious failure by the fact that there’s a second door open for a hard case.   Rod Carew in 1977 had by far his greatest season, hitting .388 with 239 hits, 128 runs scored, 100 RBI.  It would look odd to say that he had lost his Superstar status just two years later.  The "Superstar Mass" rule means that we don’t have to say that.  

              OK, I have explained the Nuts and Bolts of the system; also the Screws and Washers.  Now I have to confess its failings.  

              This system designated 105 players historically as Superstars, and for a total of 983 player/seasons.    Of those 105 players, 90 I believe are clearly correct designations.  However, five I believe are clearly wrong, players designated as Superstars who were very good players and who had huge impact on their teams, but who should not have been designated as Superstars.  In addition, there are ten designations which I question and think may be wrong; perhaps I might not have described those players as Superstars, plus there are 18 Players who I think clearly should have been designated as Superstars, but who the system missed for some reason—meaning that the system still contains flaws and defects which cause it to fail in some situations.   And then, also there are twenty other players who I think might reasonably have been described as Superstars, but who were not identified by the system as Superstars.  So the system has somewhere between 23 and 53 failures; I’ll leave it to your judgment as to which.   This is clearly much better than my previous effort, which had an intolerable number of failures, but these are the failures:

              1.  The five players who were identified by the system as Superstars but who I think were not were Heine Groh, Frank Howard, Ken Singleton, Jason Giambi and Ryan Braun.   Groh was a long time ago; he had very high on-base percentages in a low-run offensive context, which causes him to pop off the list, and he was a star and was recognized as a very good player, but he was not a superstar. 

              Frank Howard was looked upon as being Superstarish when he first got to the major leagues because he was as big as Aaron Judge and had been an All-American basketball player in college and won the Rookie of the Year Award in 1960 and then had a big season in 1962.   As a young player he had a great throwing arm and ran OK.  After that, though, he struggled and under-performed for four and half years.  By the time he finally put his game together, in July of 1967, his speed and arm were gone and he had gone from one of baseball’s glamour teams, the Dodgers, to one of the ultimate non-glamour teams of baseball history, the expansion Washington Senators.  He was as good a power hitter for three and a half years as anyone in baseball, but he was not a Superstar.

              Ken Singleton was a very, very good player with the Orioles of the 1970s, a switch-hitting .300 hitter who walked a hundred times a year and hit 25-30 homers a year, but I do not think he was a superstar, although my system says that he was.   Giambi and Braun are recent enough that I shouldn’t need to explain anything, but I can’t see that they reached Superstar status.

              2.  The eighteen players who I think were Superstars but who the system fails to recognize as Superstars were, chronologically, Frankie Frisch, Dizzy Dean, Hank Greenberg, Bob Feller, Roy Campanella, Warren Spahn, Denny McLain, Tom Seaver, Willie Stargell, Steve Carlton, Gary Carter, Cal Ripken, Roger Clemens, Pedro Martinez, Chipper Jones, Derek Jeter, Ichiro Suzuki and Clayton Kershaw. 

              Almost all of these players are just below the standard I have used for a Superstar.  If we simply lowered the standard for "What is a Superstar", then we would pick up as many "false positives" as we would legitimate names; we would start listing Jeff Kent as a superstar, and Cy Seymour and Dixie Walker.  It’s not an unsolvable problem; there is some way to get Cal Ripken on the list without getting Jeff Kent and without causing any other problems.  I just haven’t figured out what it is yet.

              3.  In addition to the five players listed above, there were 10 players identified by the system as Superstars that I think are questionable designations.   I wouldn’t say that these players were NOT Superstars; they’re almost all Hall of Famers.   I just am not convinced that they should be considered Superstars.   Those ten players are Elmer Flick, Sam Crawford, Nellie Fox, Ron Santo, Joe Torre, Keith Hernandez, Tim Raines, Craig Biggio, Gary Sheffield and Andrew McCutchen. 

              4.  In addition to the eighteen listed above, there are twenty-one players in history who I think might be deserving of the Superstar label, but who were not marked as Superstars by the method I used.   Those 21, chronologically, are Addie Joss, Dazzy Vance, Hack Wilson, Chuck Klein, Ralph Kiner, Al Rosen, Roger Maris, Brooks Robinson, Vida Blue, Ferguson Jenkins, Eddie Murray, Don Mattingly, Kirby Puckett, Paul Molitor, Mark McGwire, Roberto Alomar, Jim Thome, Manny Ramirez, Vladimir Guerrero, Buster Posey and Joey Votto. 

              This, then, is my list of all of the Superstars, 1900 to the present.  We started with a list of 105 Superstars, generated by the formula.  I kicked five of them out but added 18, making a list of 118 Superstars.  These 118 players account for 1,126 seasons of Superstar performance. 

              One "quirk" or limitation of this method is that it sometimes leaves it up in the air whether a player is or is not a Superstar at the present moment.   Miguel Cabrera, for example, clearly was a Superstar from 2006 through 2016.  In 2017 he did not play at a Superstar Level or even at a "star" level, so his period of Superstardom may have ended in 2016.   On the other hand, he may have a couple of fantastic seasons left, and if he does, then we will extend his period of recognized Superstardom to include 2017 and 2018 and perhaps beyond.  

              You can fault the system for this, but in my view, the system has got it right:  we actually don’t know whether his period of Superstardom is over or is not.   The system says that, and it is correct. 

              On the other end, Bryce Harper.  Bryce Harper has not yet qualified as a Superstar in my system and, whatever you think, I do not think that he is a Superstar.   However, he may reach the Superstar standard sometime in the future, and if he does, we will backdate his status to his first season in which he had 31 Adjusted Win Shares.   He had 43.7 Adjusted Win Shares in 2015, a number which would have pushed him near the Superstar level if had followed through with a stronger or 2016 or 2017.  If he does get there, then we’ll say that became a Superstar in 2015—whereas in 2018, we say that he is not yet a Superstar.   

              In the chart that follows, this causes the chart of Superstars to shrink at the present moment, because of the unclear status of players like Harper, Cabrera, Kershaw, Mookie, Kris Bryant, etc.   In 2012 our chart will show there as being eight players in the game who are Superstars.   If we used the same method in 2028 and looked back at 2017, we would no doubt show 8 to 10 active Superstars for 2017.   But looking at it right now, from what we know now, we only have three.   So you can argue about that if you want to. 

              First, a chronological listing of the Players I want to recognize as Superstars:

              And here is a series of timeline charts of all of the Superstars:

              OK, one final observation, and then I’m done here.   In the companion article that I published a couple of weeks ago, "So What Is a Superstar?", I included this paragraph:

          About 1964 or 1965, someone wrote an article for Sport Magazine about the disappearance of superstars.   Fairly sure it was Arnold Hano; also fairly sure that one of you readers can identify the article and the publication date, etc.   Anyway, the thesis of the article was that Superstars were disappearing from baseball, that there used to be many more of them, but that now there were only three—Mays, Mantle and Koufax—and they were the last ones; after them there would not be any more.  The conditions that created superstars had disappeared, and they would never come back. That always stuck with me; it seemed such a curious thing to say.  It’s been 50-some years, but I still remember lines from that article like you would remember a nursery rhyme. It was the first time I became aware of the.  . .the conflict, the consternation and confusion, which has always circled around this word. 

              But having done this work, I now understand Hano’s position, Hano’s misunderstanding, a little bit better.  Hano thought that there were only three Superstars active in (about) 1965, writing off as Superstars not only Roberto Clemente (Who Hano very greatly admired) but also Hank Aaron, Frank Robinson, Billy Williams and others.    My article has concluded that there are only three players now who have proven Superstar credentials—Trout, Altuve, and the pre-injury, pre-drug test Robinson Cano.  This is ignoring Aaron Judge, Bryce Harper, Giancarlo Stanton, Mookie Betts, Max Scherzer, Justin Verander, Carlos Correa, Francisco Lindor, and others.  

              But there is this difference.  I am not suggesting that these men have fallen short of Superstardom; I am merely saying that I am not certain that they are Superstars at this moment.  I wonder if Hano was not, in a sense, following the same pathway that I have followed, only following it by intuition mixed with memory, whereas I am following it by intuition mixed with statistical standards. 

              I am reading Michael Lewis book, The Undoing Project, about the glitches in the way that we all reason about problems, the Recency Bias and the Hindsight Bias and the Availability Bias, etc..    I wonder if this is another one of those biases:  the Partial View Bias.  I just invented that phrase; I am sure psychologists must have noticed the same thing and given it some other name.

              The Partial View Bias occurs when we attempt to compare the present to the past.   Comparing Mike Trout to Mickey Mantle, we have a full view of what Mantle accomplished, whereas we have only a partial view of what Mike Trout will accomplish.   We thus naturally think that Mantle was greater than Trout, because we are comparing 100% of A to 35 or 40% of B. 

              Or, on the other hand. . .. I personally think that Mookie Betts is, for all practical purposes, a duplicate of Willie Mays.  I don’t think there is any meaningful difference between Mookie Betts now and Willie Mays in 1956.  However, while Mays is listed as a Superstar from 1954 until the end of his career, Mookie is not on the list.  I recognize this as a Partial View Bias.   The difference between Hano and myself, essentially, is that Hano did not realize that he was dealing with a Partial View Bias.  You might think, instinctively, that any moron would realize that there was that bias, but in fact it is exceedingly common for people to be deceived by the Partial View Bias into incredible misjudgments.  People be-rate the present and exalt the past all the time. 

              The Partial View Bias is, I would argue, merely one of several biases that complicate political and cultural debates in which the past is contrasted with the present.  When we compare the politicians of NOW, the politicians of our own time, with the leaders of the past, we almost always favor those of the past.   I remember thinking, in the 2016 Presidential Contest, that the choice between Hilary Clinton and Our Beloved Leader had to be the sorriest set of options of all time.   But then, I’m old; I remember thinking the same thing about George Bush and John Kerry; I remember thinking the same thing about Bill Clinton and Bob Dole; I remember thinking the same thing about Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale.   I remember thinking the same thing about Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon. 

              A second present-to-past distortion is the fear of the unknown.  People hated Reagan, in part, because they were afraid that he was going to lead us into World War III.  Since we know now that he did not, that worry is not relevant.   The dangers that he represented to his own time are not an element in how we judge him now—whereas the fear of the uncertainties of the future is always an element of our thought processes in choosing our next President. 

              On the other side, of course, unrealistic hopes.  The future may prove that back in 2018 I had unrealistic hopes about Mookie Betts.   That’s a third past-to-present distortion. 

              A fourth present-to-past distortion is, of course, selective memory.   We see our President’s untruthful statements day to day; we have forgotten 99% of LBJ’s, but frankly, the man couldn’t tell the truth to save his soul.  His failings no longer matter, so they are no longer remembered. 

              This is not the last word about Superstars; it is merely the last paragraph of this article.   There is some way to compare Mookie to Willie Mays which is better than what I have done here.  Thanks for reading.