best baseball player of all time

And this is where readers angrily storm off and prepare angry comments. 41 in its top-100 list. The Giants ace worked at least 266 innings in 14 consecutive seasons, six of which he earned an ERA of 2.00 or lower. Had the Cy Young Award existed, he would have won plenty. Gehrig, who made the famous retirement speech on July 4, 1939, due to an amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) diagnosis, died on June 2, 1941. He's one of 10 players with over 700 stolen bases, and although he never belted more than 10 home runs in a single season, he offered plenty of power, socking 643 doubles (640 according to FanGraphs) and 252 triples. Pitching during a powerless era, Christy Mathewson's 2.13 ERA may oversell his dominance. Everyone has their personal preferences and varying standards of greatness. The Major League Baseball All-Time Team was chosen in 1997 to comprise the top manager and top player in each of 13 positional categories across Major League Baseball history. In 1986 he became one of the rare starting pitchers to win a league MVP award after he posted a 24–4 record with a 2.48 earned run average (ERA) and 238 strikeouts for the Boston Red Sox. The scarcity of the card is a big reason why it can fetch upwards of $2 million in a sale, but it wouldn’t be nearly as valuable if the person depicted on it was just a run-of-the-mill player and not one of the best to have ever stepped on a diamond. Unlike his godson Bonds (whose father, Bobby, was Willie Mays’s teammate from 1968 to 1972), Mays needs to be subjected to no mental gymnastics to justify his place on this list. That figure ranks best among all active players by more than .500 points (Joey Votto, .9407), and eighth all-time, less than only Ruth, Williams, Gehrig, Bonds, Foxx, Greenberg, and Hornsby. The consistently great Aaron was selected to the All-Star Game 21 straight years and hit at least 30 home runs in 15 seasons. Although Hank Aaron was also born in the state, it’s hard to make an argument that Willie Mays isn’t the best baseball player to be born in Alabama. This list, however, cares more about results than reputation. Two of them included a top-10 RBI tally for a single season in MLB history. Mays 4. Congratulations, Jeff Reboulet, you're the best utility infielder of all time. "The Hammer" holds the all-time records for runs batted in, extra-base hits and … Although not always earning the recognition of home run hitters or ace pitchers, excell Besides, Joltin' Joe has quite the excuse for his depreciated counting numbers; he spent three of his peak years serving in the U.S. military during World War II. Those numbers pale in comparison to the 232 walks, 120 intentional, he yielded in 2004. He did so with a 2.63 ERA and 138 ERA+, so he hardly just ate up empty innings. Walter Johnson posted an ERA below 2.00 in seven-straight seasons. If playing today, the eight-time batting champ would have probably converted that gap power into fence-clearing pop, but that adjustment wasn't necessary to cement his legacy as an all-time great player. ”The Splendid Splinter” (see what I mean about the nicknames?) Roger Clemens posted ERAs below 2.00 in two seasons separated by 15 years. Among all outfielders, FanGraphs only credits Andruw Jones with providing more defensive worth. After debuting with a .240 average in 41 games, he never batted below .316 through 23 seasons. Putting him at No. 8 times MLB All-Star; 11 times MLB Strikeout Leader; 2 times MLB NL ERA Leader; Major League Baseball All-Century Team Member; Former Major League Baseball player Nolan Ryan is currently serving as the chief executive officer of the Texas Rangers and also serving as an executive advisor of the … In 1913 he won 36 games with a 1.14 ERA and an eye-popping 0.78 WHIP (walks and hits per inning pitched; a WHIP below 1.00 is considered stellar) to win the Chalmers Award, the equivalent of the modern MVP. Negro League legends Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson were seriously considered, but both fell short due to an inability to properly compare the leagues' talent levels. Johnson’s 3,509 career strikeouts set a record that lasted 56 years, and his win total of 417 is second only to Cy Young’s 511. Sticking around until age 44 helped his counting numbers but sapped some points from his rate statistics. A manager's dream leadoff hitter, "Cocky" amazingly drew 1,499 walks while submitting a minuscule 286 strikeouts. Ned Williamson held the record for most home runs in a season at 27 before Babe Ruth belted 29 in 1919. Nolan Ryan. He also produced a 3.24 ERA and 308 strikeouts in a career-defining season which signaled his maturation into an all-time ace. With apologies to Derek Jeter, those six rings—although awfully impressive—couldn't carry a 115 OPS+ and debatable defense into the super-elite tier. A four-time All-Star, the first baseman produced at least 37 homers and 104 RBIs in 10 of 11 seasons from 1993-03, and he may have reached those marks in ’94 as well, if not for a strike that halted the season in August. Rogers Hornsby (left) won seven batting titles and two Triple Crowns. Eddie Collins was the definition of a team player, which is probably why he won four world series in his career. The Atlanta Braves ace snatched four NL Cy Young Awards and four ERA titles, buoyed by magnificent marks of 1.56 and 1.63 in 1994 and 1995, respectively. So yes, Foxx was really good at hitting baseballs. A solid, yet wildly erratic starter early in his career, the Big Unit finally lowered his walk rate to a passable 3.49 per nine in 1999, his age-29 season. Be on the lookout for your Britannica newsletter to get trusted stories delivered right to your inbox. Rickey Henderson stole an MLB-high 1,406 bases, 468 more than second-placed Lou Brock. Nobody else hit 300. Despite joining the Philadelphia Athletics at age 17, Jimmie Foxx didn't earn his playing time until turning a ripe 20 in 1928. The outfielder has a strong case for top-10 inclusion, as he ranks in the top nine in both fWAR and rWAR. Hank Aaron ranks third in all-time hits and second in home runs. Nevertheless, he recorded the sixth-best wRC+ (170) and OPS+ (172) despite perhaps playing much of his career with a torn ACL. He also, however, batted .333 with a .424 on-base percentage. You’ve made it this far, so here they are: The lists. But, well, he was already a surefire Hall of Famer before he allegedly began juicing, and steroids would have had no effect on the unparalleled eye-hand coordination that produced an all-time high 2,558 career walks and staggering .444 lifetime on-base percentage. Eddie Collins compiled 3,315 hits and 744 stolen bases during a Hall of Fame career that doesn't receive enough attention. If Mike Trout and Clayton Kershaw continue along their current trajectories, they will eventually merit prominent billing among the best ever to play the game. Choosing the premier pitcher between Young and Johnson was a tough call, but Johnson provided enough longevity to receive the slight edge with his superior rates. The flame-throwing Walter Johnson was a generational talent who defined dominant pitching for decades. Nothing says summer quite like baseball, the American national pastime. The former gives him five more hits, bumping him above Yastrzemski to eighth on the all-time hits leaderboard with 3,420. Willie Mays contributed elite contact, power and defense in center field. No starting pitcher with at least 1,000 innings amassed racked up more strikeouts per nine innings than Johnson (10.57 K/9), who trails Nolan Ryan for the all-time mark. Counting numbers are nice, but popular benchmarks for evaluating greatness (3,000 hits, 500 home runs, 300 wins) are only part of the puzzle. Maybe he's not flashy enough to share the spotlight with other all-time legends, but the numbers support his standing on that level. The first and last of his record seven Cy Young Awards came in 1986 and 2004. Despite authoring a career 0.97 postseason ERA, the Giants fell short in three straight championships from 1911 to 1913. Moreover, the charismatic Ruth was the first transcendent American sports superstar, routinely garnering headlines across the country for both his on-field exploits and his off-field celebrity. And now here’s possibly the greatest humanity drop-off in list-item history. To borrow a bit from John Oliver, Roger Horsnby is a legend you think about so little that you may not have realized his actual name is Rogers Hornsby. Other Links > Baseball > All-Time Baseball Player Rankings Visit Our Patreon Page to … Give your opinion and join the debate about the best 10 players at each position. His homer tally dipped to 46, but he encored the historic season by hitting .370/.582/.799. His play with the storied New York Yankees teams of the 1920s catapulted baseball to the prominence in the national consciousness that it still enjoys today. Munching on Cracker Jack while trying to avoid being splashed by the massive beer barely clung onto by the inebriated fan sitting behind you. Yet it slid below 2.00 six times, including twice during his 40s. Advanced stats like weighted on-base average (wOBA) weighted runs created plus (wRC+), adjusted OPS (OPS+), adjusted ERA (ERA+) and fielding independent pitching (FIP) matter as much, if not more. Note: All statistics courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com and FanGraphs. So let’s just appreciate the incredible statistics Bonds piled up: an unsurpassed 762 home runs (including a single-season record 73 in 2001), a record seven career MVP awards, and 688 intentional walks, which is more than double the amount given to the player with the second most of all time and a striking testament to the unparalleled fear Bonds instilled in opposing pitchers. Randy Johnson won four straight Cy Young Awards in his late 30s. I've always wondered this and I wanted some people's opinions. Yet it's impossible to discuss Cobb without rehashing stories of a bitter, racist man who allegedly sharpened his spikes to hurt opponents on slides. He was such a prodigious power hitter that his astounding .690 career slugging percentage remains the best of all time, and the gap between his mark and second place is larger than the one between second place and ninth. His career 143 ERA+ finished just outside of the top 10 in MLB history, but his 3.09 FIP in 4,916.2 innings give him FanGraphs' highest WAR among all pitchers. If not for injuries, Mantle likely would have made the top 10 easily. Amazingly, these didn't all align with his three MVP trophies. Remember him as the guy who kissed his reflection in the mirror, slapped the ball out of Bronson Arroyo's glove and got abruptly pushed into retirement by a franchise that had recently hosted two season-long farewell tours. This led to workhorse aces such as Grover Cleveland "Old Pete" Alexander, one of 13 hurlers to exceed 5,000 career innings. A fun fact noted noted by ESPN.com's Mark Simon: Musial evenly split his 3,630 knocks at home and on the road. He also missed most of the 1952 and 1953 seasons due to the Korean War. Spending most of his time at first base, which cost him a few spot in the rankings, Foxx scorched American League pitching to a tune of .325/.428/.609. Cy Young's name is now synonymous with pitching excellence. We’ll start with the 20 greatest position players of all time. Despite all the accolades (or perhaps because of them), he had a notoriously prickly relationship with the public. Both sites particularly differ on grading pitchers, with the former preferring superior strikeout and walk rates and the latter focusing on run prevention. Baseball’s place in the American zeitgeist comes, at least in part, from its long history and the general consistency of the game over decades—it’s quite likely that your great-great-grandfather would be able to easily follow a modern game if he were magically plopped into the stands. Who Was the First Woman to Run for President of the United States? In baseball’s rich history there have been many players that have excelled in the defensive aspects of the game. Yeah, I get it. Maddux fittingly leads all pitchers with 13 Madduxes since Lukehart started recording them in 1988. In eight of his final 14 seasons, Greg Maddux recorded fewer or as many walks as games started. (Most of the best players, even at the time, were at least 5’11”, including the legendary Ty Cobb who stood at 6’1”.) Third in all-time strikeouts behind Ryan and Johnson, "The Rocket" earned MLB's highest pitching honor at least once at all four stops (Boston Red Sox, Toronto Blue Jays, Yankees and Houston Astros). Agree or disagree? Having tossed 435 complete games, he can claim authorship of those 373 victories. Despite losing his all-time hits record to Rose, Ty Cobb still sports the game's best batting average at .366. Trout has logged at least 27 homers, 67 walks, an on-base percentage of .377, a slugging average of .550, and an OPS of .939 in every season of his career. First Basemen “The Big Hurt” Frank Thomas leads off our list of “Best Black Baseball Players of All-Time” as one of the greatest first-basemen ever. We're looking for the best individual players, not the guys who benefited from competing alongside superstar teammates. He still, however, maintained an above-average 108 wRC+ due to a keen batting eye. Top 10 Major League Baseball players who ever lived. When Yankees teammate Roger Maris hit a then-record-setting 61 home runs in 1961, Mantle finished second in MVP voting despite sporting a 10.5 rWAR. Charles Leerhsen, author of Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty, found no evidence to back most of these claims against Cobb's character. For the old-school readers, he garnered six 20-win seasons and 354 over a durably dominant career. These 5 Goya Paintings Range from Horrifying to Regal. The .345 hitter ties Dan Brouthers for 10th in wOBA (.436), just trailing Joe DiMaggio and a tick above Mickey Mantle. Despite losing his all-time hits record to Rose, Ty Cobb still sports the game's best batting average at .366. Joe DiMaggio hit safely in a record-setting 56 straight games. Any hurler who achieves the increasingly rare feat of tossing a complete-game shutout in under 100 pitches is unofficially credited with pitching a Maddux, coined by Jason Lukehart. Upon returning from the military in 1954, the Say Hey Kid didn't have a bad season until 1967, when he still recorded a 124 OPS+ and 4.3 rWAR at age 36. He tossed over 1,000 frames more than runner-up Pud Galvin, who narrowly eclipsed 6,000. His legacy lives on as a hallmark of efficiency. Anyone can make their own list of the best ballplayers ever to play the game, making this crowdranking a true consensus on who's the best baseball player of all time. A stout defender during his younger, slimmer years, Bonds has eight Gold Gloves to accompany his seven MVP awards. “The Flying Dutchman” (god, they came up with such good nicknames back in the day) led the National League in batting average eight times over the course of his career and retired with a stellar .328 average despite having played during the offense-killing “dead-ball era.” At the time of his retirement in 1917, he had tallied the second most hits (3,420), doubles (643), triples (252), and runs batted in (1,732) in major-league history, and all of these totals still rank among the top 25 of all time. I am basing this purely on stats. Although not a traditional power hitter, Tris Speaker ranks first in doubles and sixth in triples. He took a second MVP in 1924 as he led the Senators to their first World Series championship. Pretty remarkable career. Hall of Famers all around. Back when strikeouts were still viewed as a cardinal sin, he whiffed or got rung up in 17.3 percent of his plate appearances. The following year, he won MVP with a 5.9 rWAR diminished because of defense. Not content with simply being the best hitter ever, Williams has also been called both the best fisherman and best fighter pilot ever. From 1996 to 2003, he batted .247 with a .357 slugging percentage. Metrics are not as kind to the center fielder's glovework as tales of his rousing athleticism, but this only cost him a spot or two. "It's unique that all the really bad stuff about Cobb started in 1961," Leerhsen told. With versatility on both sides of the ball, the Say Hey Kid won 12 Gold Gloves, was a 4-time home-run leader and stolen base leader, NL Rookie of the Year, two time NL MVP, and he once jacked four homers in one game. Yet he did so in order to foster a 17.5 walk percentage and elite power. Palmeiro took some time to find his power stroke, but when he finally did, he was one of baseball’s most consistent sluggers. Everyone's infatuation with power has once again manufactured an underrated legend. From 1907 to 1919, Walter Johnson posted a 1.65 ERA and 1.86 FIP. But as famed author John Updike put it when Williams refused to come out for a curtain call after hitting a home run in his final career at bat: “Gods do not answer letters.”. In pursuit of the fullest careers, Joe DiMaggio almost missed the cut. The 20 Greatest Position Players of All-Time. Of the 19 players with 534 or more long balls, he's the only one with a strikeout percentage (9.9) below 10.0. Before transitioning into a full-time outfielder, he tossed 650 innings in 1916 and 1917 combined, earning 47 wins and a 1.88 ERA. One sportswriter started an avalanche of lies.". Widely considered one of the 10 … Stan Musial won seven batting titles over 22 glorious years with the St. Louis Cardinals, but don't overlook his power. If their numbers merited inclusion, players with ties to performance-enhancing drugs were included. If not for lending his services to the Navy and Marine Corps, he would have easily eclipsed 3,000 hits and 600 home runs. Of the older all-time legends, Mantle feels most like a modern superstar. Oh, and he also was a great pitcher during his early years, leading the AL with a 1.75 ERA in 1921 and pitching 29 and two-thirds consecutive scoreless innings across two World Series—because when you dominate the game as much as the Babe did, you may as well do so in all facets, right? Remember that Rodriguez won two Gold Gloves at shortstop before shifting to third base when joining the Yankees in 2004. He didn't give the New York Mets much in his final two seasons beyond 40, but nobody should hold that against a durable star who played in 2,992 games. And that’s the thing about steroids—you can never definitively say exactly what impact they have on a baseball player’s performance. From 1918 to 1931, he led or tied the AL in home runs 12 times. As a result, the namesake for an award honoring pitching excellence accrued the most wins and losses. He reached new heights in 1948, batting an astounding .376/.450/.702 with a career-high 39 home runs and 11.1 fWAR and rWAR. Wagner 3. Top 20 Defensive Baseball Players of All Time. The Man of Steal most notably brandished power over five seasons with the Yankees, for whom he notched a .455 slugging percentage. As the owner of the title Home Run King for a generation, Hank Aaron is often thought of as simply a tremendous power hitter, albeit arguably one of the best ever. Fearful pitchers walked him 198 times, 68 intentionally. Since no international league is deemed an equal competitor to MLB, other foreign stars—most notably Japanese slugger Sadaharu Oh—also fell short of inclusion. He also has three Gold Gloves. Even so, representing the NL for 25 straight years—only the final two amounted to lifetime-achievement awards—speaks volumes of Aaron's remarkable consistency as an elite slugger. Nolan-Ryan. Those Cy Young Award seasons are arguably the most dominant four-year stretch ever. Another player on a Cooperstown track later this decade, Guerrero was a five-tool wonder early in his career and he was still a feared power hitter later. Most of his Fall Classic memories are fonder, as he carved out a 2.37 ERA in eight World Series starts. Best MLB Defensive Players of All Time. In terms of adjusted OPS, those are the three best offensive seasons of all time: Again, the season where he smacked 73 dingers ranks third on this list. The Sultan of Swat smacked 602 long balls during that timeframe. Without enough certainty to tackle the moral conundrum of celebrating the bad person Cobb has been portrayed as, let's simply honor Baseball Hall of Fame's first member with prominent positioning. It's a countdown of the top 10 players in baseball history at each position. Despite the steroid accusations and ensuing legal battle, his portfolio is too hefty to ignore. And he even redeemed that blemish, riding into a sunset with a .316/.451/.645 end-of-career performance in 1960. Considering his No. It should surprise nobody to see Babe Ruth atop this list. (He still hit .330 that year.) Over the course of his illustrious 24-year career, Roger Clemens amassed a record seven Cy Young Awards as the best pitcher of the year in either the American or National League and threw 4,672 strikeouts, the third most of all time. The Pittsburgh Pirates honored Honus Wagner with a statue outside PNC Park. Breaking Hank Aaron's home run record, Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants rounding the bases as his son, a batboy, celebrates at home plate, August 7, 2007. He was so great that he led the AL in strikeouts more often than not, topping the league 12 times over the course of his 21-year career. Perhaps history will one day prop these burgeoning studs alongside the game's all-time greats. Mel Ott made a Hall of Fame career out of his unconventional swing. If not such a late bloomer, he would belong in the top 10 as the highest-rated hurler. However, his 755 career homers (a record for 33 years) are just the tip of the iceberg for “Hammerin’ Hank.” His all-time-best 2,297 runs batted in and 6,856 total bases are, of course, indicative of his legendary power, but he also put up a solid career .305 batting average and won three Gold Gloves for his play in the outfield. Players with transcendent but shorter primes (Ken Griffey Jr., Pedro Martinez, Sandy Koufax, Hank Greenberg and Joe Jackson) missed the cut alongside durable studs (Pud Galvin, Phil Niekro, Cal Ripken Jr., Pete Rose and Carl Yastrzemski) whose rate stats don't quite pop enough.

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