What is your best All-Time team?

[KevFu]

CF - Willie Mays (R)
RF - Ted Williams (L)
1B - Albert Pujols (R)
DH - Barry Bonds (L)
SS - Alex Rodriguez (R)
LF - Ted Williams (L)
3B - Nolan Arenado (R)
C - Johnny Bench (R)
2B - Joe Morgan (L)

Bench:
Rickey Henderson, Ty Cobb, Jackie Robinson and Pudge Rodriguez.
(Gotta add some speed to the mix and cover all the positions)

SP - Tom Seaver, Greg Maddux, Bob Gibson, Sandy Koufax, Nolan Ryan, Pedro Martinez
Bullpen - Mariano Rivera, Billy Wagner, Trevor Hoffman, Goose Gossage, Sparky Lyle, Aroldis Chapman


The hard part is comparing eras. Like, would Ruth and Gehrig still be 1000 OPS TODAY? Or were they playing a modern game vs antiquated game, when the RF wall at Yankee Stadium was 296 feet away?

I avoided the really old pitchers for that reason. Bob Feller and Walter Johnson were the fastest pitchers of their eras, but they were throwing a lot less hard compared to modern times.

 

[Cas]

CF - Willie Mays (R)
RF - Ted Williams (L)
1B - Albert Pujols (R)
DH - Barry Bonds (L)
SS - Alex Rodriguez (R)
LF - Ted Williams (L)
3B - Nolan Arenado (R)
C - Johnny Bench (R)
2B - Joe Morgan (L)

Bench:
Rickey Henderson, Ty Cobb, Jackie Robinson and Pudge Rodriguez.
(Gotta add some speed to the mix and cover all the positions)

SP - Tom Seaver, Greg Maddux, Bob Gibson, Sandy Koufax, Nolan Ryan, Pedro Martinez
Bullpen - Mariano Rivera, Billy Wagner, Trevor Hoffman, Goose Gossage, Sparky Lyle, Aroldis Chapman


The hard part is comparing eras. Like, would Ruth and Gehrig still be 1000 OPS TODAY? Or were they playing a modern game vs antiquated game, when the RF wall at Yankee Stadium was 296 feet away?

I avoided the really old pitchers for that reason. Bob Feller and Walter Johnson were the fastest pitchers of their eras, but they were throwing a lot less hard compared to modern times.

Nolan Arenado? Ted Williams twice? Nolan Ryan over Carlton and Niekro? Koufax over Randy Johnson (for that matter, Ryan over Johnson)? Six relievers when you can use a few starters in a bullpen role?

 

[KevFu]

Nolan Arenado? Ted Williams twice? Nolan Ryan over Carlton and Niekro? Koufax over Randy Johnson (for that matter, Ryan over Johnson)? Six relievers when you can use a few starters in a bullpen role?

Oops, that should be Hank Aaron in RF.

I went Arenado because of the glove. (I mean, does a team with Williams, Bonnds, Ruth and Mays really need Mike Schmidt or Larry Jones at 3B?).

You're right that Randy Johnson should absolutely be on the team. I listed six relievers because a team has 25-26 guys on it. Everyone else was just listing 20.

 

[Cas]

Oops, that should be Hank Aaron in RF.

I went Arenado because of the glove. (I mean, does a team with Williams, Bonnds, Ruth and Mays really need Mike Schmidt or Larry Jones at 3B?).

You're right that Randy Johnson should absolutely be on the team. I listed six relievers because a team has 25-26 guys on it. Everyone else was just listing 20.

Mike Schmidt was almost as good a fielder, but a much better hitter. You score more runs with him than you prevent with Arenado.

I'd also flip Williams and Bonds. Bonds is arguably the greatest defensive left fielder of all time. Ted Williams was not.

 

[KevFu]

And Nolan Ryan is a great pick, BTW. He never gets mentioned among the best of all time because he never won the Cy Young award and was just "one of the top 5 pitchers" of the era... but that spanned like four different eras.

Do you have any doubt that Ryan could pitch in any era? He could throw 300 innings like Feller and Johnson in a four-man rotation, and he threw 100 in every era. The documentary Fastball showed all the experiments trying to measure pitchers, and Ryan's 100.8 mph would be clocked at 107 using today's method. And it was the ninth inning on his 135th pitch. Nolan Ryan was a nine-inning Aroldis Chapman.

Mike Schmidt was almost as good a fielder, but a much better hitter. You score more runs with him than you prevent with Arenado.

I'd also flip Williams and Bonds. Bonds is arguably the greatest defensive left fielder of all time. Ted Williams was not.

Honesty, I should probably go Miggy there instead.

 

[Cas]

And Nolan Ryan is a great pick, BTW. He never gets mentioned among the best of all time because he never won the Cy Young award and was just "one of the top 5 pitchers" of the era... but that spanned like four different eras.

Do you have any doubt that Ryan could pitch in any era? He could throw 300 innings like Feller and Johnson in a four-man rotation, and he threw 100 in every era. The documentary Fastball showed all the experiments trying to measure pitchers, and Ryan's 100.8 mph would be clocked at 107 using today's method. And it was the ninth inning on his 135th pitch. Nolan Ryan was a nine-inning Aroldis Chapman.



Honesty, I should probably go Miggy there instead.

Nolan Ryan is regularly mentioned among the best of all time - undeservedly, because he was not nearly as good as numerous other great pitchers at preventing runs.

Ryan was a great pitcher - he still might not be among the five best of his generation alone (Seaver, Niekro, and Carlton were certainly better, I'd probably take Perry and Blyleven before Ryan, and there are reasonable arguments for Jenkins and Palmer). That's just among Ryan's generation of great pitchers.

I don't doubt that Ryan could pitch in any era. The thing is, that's not that unique - I don't doubt that Walter Johnson or Cy Young or Christy Mathewson or Lefty Grove or Bob Feller or Warren Spahn or Greg Maddux or Randy Johnson or Justin Verlander or Clayton Kershaw could also have pitched in any era. Yes, Walter Johnson probably topped out at around 92-95 (which would be fine today anyway) - and he did that without the benefit of sixty years of improvements in training, technique, equipment, medicine, and nutrition that Ryan benefited from. Give the Big Train those, and I think he throws as hard as Ryan, or close to it - and with much better control. Same thing for all of these guys, or in reverse - if Nolan Ryan had been born in 1887, he wouldn't throw any harder than Johnson or Young; had he been born in 1907, he wouldn't throw any harder than Lefty Grove or Bob Feller.

Ryan was a great pitcher. He was extraordinary at throwing a fastball. He was also pretty wild and allowed a lot of runs - more than a number of his contemporaries (still much better than an average pitcher, but that's not who we're comparing him to).

...

Cabrera would be an even worse pick. Yes, he could hit, but you're giving away a lot in the field (compared to Schmidt, 20-40 runs), and on the bases, and not gaining enough at the plate (Schmidt was a pretty great hitter and decent runner himself). Cabrera was terrible at third base.

 

[KevFu]

I don't disagree with you, but I was taking a much different approach than everyone else.

The best example of this is my bench. Everyone's "bench" was their opinion on the SECOND BEST guy at each position. In your "this guy is better than that guy" you don't mention that Rickey Henderson is definitely not the 4th or 5th best OF of all-time.

You just don't need to pinch hit for Ruth, Williams, Pujols, etc. But actually playing a game with the team, you might need to pinch run as a ton of those guys in all our starting lineups are slow. Hence the best basestealer of all-time, and two of the main people you think of for small ball in Cobb and Jackie Robinson (plus I just thought it would be funny to list those two guys side by side on the bench).

If you're building an ACTUAL TEAM instead of just naming the best at each position, I probably need to be even more well rounded. Using the same principle of "I don't need the best 3B of all-time hitting 7th; let's take Arenado's glove, he hits better than Brooks Robinson..." I should have gone for more speed/better D and put Ichiro in my starting OF, moved Ted to DH and dumped Ruth for Banks.

 

[KevFu]

I don't doubt that Ryan could pitch in any era. The thing is, that's not that unique - I don't doubt that Walter Johnson or Cy Young or Christy Mathewson or Lefty Grove or Bob Feller or Warren Spahn or Greg Maddux or Randy Johnson or Justin Verlander or Clayton Kershaw could also have pitched in any era. Yes, Walter Johnson probably topped out at around 92-95 (which would be fine today anyway) - and he did that without the benefit of sixty years of improvements in training, technique, equipment, medicine, and nutrition that Ryan benefited from. Give the Big Train those, and I think he throws as hard as Ryan, or close to it - and with much better control. Same thing for all of these guys, or in reverse - if Nolan Ryan had been born in 1887, he wouldn't throw any harder than Johnson or Young; had he been born in 1907, he wouldn't throw any harder than Lefty Grove or Bob Feller.

Here's the thing with that... I think you're probably right, but we don't know. The modern training techniques that lead to a massive rise in velo could easily sacrifice command for the old guys -- or simply snap all their UCLs multiple times. Maybe it's because I'm a Mets fan and watched Jacob deGrom look like the best pitcher in baseball history... for half a season at a time before going on the IL

That makes me want a superhuman freak of nature who actually did throw over 100mph for 300 innings in a season across multiple eras of baseball, without tearing a ligament until he was 46 years old.

Topics like these have this magical aspect of "What if Willie Mays and Ken Griffey Jr played together? Nolan Ryan faced both. He's faced about 55% of all the hitters mentioned in this thread. He has the least amount of questions about how'd he do vs everyone else.

 

[Cas]

Just an aside, I don't think Ty Cobb and Jackie Robinson would have any problems next to each other on the bench. Cobb was apparently not the ultra-racist he is often remembered as (he was probably ess racist than your average American of the era, let alone the average white southerner), and vocally supported integration in baseball (at least as early as 1952, when we have verified quotes; given what else we know or can infer about Cobb, I suspect he supported integration as soon as Robinson was announced as a Dodger).

Cobb basically got viciously slandered by Al Stump, a charlatan and thief. Cobb probably was kind of a thin-skinned, short-tempered jerk, but he was probably much less racist than many of his contemporaries (perhaps in part because he came from a long line of abolitionists).

 

[DaaaaB's]

Here's the thing with that... I think you're probably right, but we don't know. The modern training techniques that lead to a massive rise in velo could easily sacrifice command for the old guys -- or simply snap all their UCLs multiple times. Maybe it's because I'm a Mets fan and watched Jacob deGrom look like the best pitcher in baseball history... for half a season at a time before going on the IL

That makes me want a superhuman freak of nature who actually did throw over 100mph for 300 innings in a season across multiple eras of baseball, without tearing a ligament until he was 46 years old.

Topics like these have this magical aspect of "What if Willie Mays and Ken Griffey Jr played together? Nolan Ryan faced both. He's faced about 55% of all the hitters mentioned in this thread. He has the least amount of questions about how'd he do vs everyone else.

Speculative stuff like that doesn't matter when discussing the best players of all time. How they did in their era is the only thing that matters and Walter Johnson was better than Ryan in every way possible. Nolan Ryan while great is the most overrated pitcher in baseball history and how does Clemens not make your team if you're going with modern players?

 

[DaaaaB's]

I'll use who I have seen TV or live:

C Ivan Rodriguez
1B Keith Hernandez
2B Roberto Alomar
3B Mike Schmidt
SS Omar Vizquel
LF Barry Bonds
CF Devon White/Jim Edmonds
RF Larry Walker
DH Edgar Martinez

SP Pedro Martinez, Roger Clemens, Roy Halliday, Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine
RP Mike Timlin, Tom Henke, Norm Charlton, Mariano Rivera

You never saw Pujols play on TV? Ripken? ARod? Trout? Griffey?

Devo is one of my favourite players ever but he's probably not even in the top 300 players of all-time and you had to have seen dozens of relievers who were better than Timlin.

 

[KevFu]

Speculative stuff like that doesn't matter when discussing the best players of all time. How they did in their era is the only thing that matters and Walter Johnson was better than Ryan in every way possible. Nolan Ryan while great is the most overrated pitcher in baseball history and how does Clemens not make your team if you're going with modern players?

That's the thing... I'm NOT discussing the best players of all-time. I'm building the best all-time TEAM. Huge difference.

 

[DaaaaB's]

That's the thing... I'm NOT discussing the best players of all-time. I'm building the best all-time TEAM. Huge difference.

Well, actually you were discussing Ryan being better than the old guys using a bunch of what ifs. As for your best all-time team, it's not even close to being that. Arenado instead of Schmidt is laughable. As Cas already said, Schmidt's bat would score a lot more extra runs then Arenado's glove would prevent. A bullpen full of closers makes no sense and Clemens was better than your entire rotation.

 

[KevFu]

Well, actually you were discussing Ryan being better than the old guys using a bunch of what ifs. As for your best all-time team, it's not even close to being that. Arenado instead of Schmidt is laughable. As Cas already said, Schmidt's bat would score a lot more extra runs then Arenado's glove would prevent. A bullpen full of closers makes no sense and Clemens was better than your entire rotation.

Nah. Discussing how good guys are wasn't whether they were the best of all time, but if they're best suited for any era. I totally said Ryan wasn't among the top 5 all-time starters, but among the top 5 of his era in multiple eras and that translates to the games we're trying to play better than the old guys, so "I want that on my team."

I never said Arenado was better than Schmidt. I said "you don't need the best 3B of all-time hitting seventh, so I went glove."

And a bullpen full of closers makes total sense. I listed a full pitching staff for a full team and everyone else basically listed 18 offensive players and 6-9 pitchers, not 12-13.

I think A LOT of my views stem from playing MLB The Show Diamond Dynasty:
- You're not allowed to put starters in the bullpen.
- Some guys who are great players just don't translate to gameplay style of the user. I can't hit with Mike Schmidt to save my life, but I can blast home runs with Eduardo Escobar. I struggle with Randy Johnson from a control and flat pitches that get crushed by righties standpoint, and that's why I forgot about him for my rotation.

Plus everyone's going to have extremely different views on steroids. I'm not taking Clemens because I don't know if that gives me roided up Cy Young monster Clemens or late tenure with the Red Sox Clemens. (Any version of Barry Bonds is among the best players in history. If I don't get the 70 HR juiced Barry, I get 1984-1993 Barry, who steals 40 bases and won 3 MVPs? Fine by me.)

 

[DaaaaB's]

Nah. Discussing how good guys are wasn't whether they were the best of all time, but if they're best suited for any era. I totally said Ryan wasn't among the top 5 all-time starters, but among the top 5 of his era in multiple eras and that translates to the games we're trying to play better than the old guys, so "I want that on my team."

I never said Arenado was better than Schmidt. I said "you don't need the best 3B of all-time hitting seventh, so I went glove."

And a bullpen full of closers makes total sense. I listed a full pitching staff for a full team and everyone else basically listed 18 offensive players and 6-9 pitchers, not 12-13.

I think A LOT of my views stem from playing MLB The Show Diamond Dynasty:
- You're not allowed to put starters in the bullpen.
- Some guys who are great players just don't translate to gameplay style of the user. I can't hit with Mike Schmidt to save my life, but I can blast home runs with Eduardo Escobar. I struggle with Randy Johnson from a control and flat pitches that get crushed by righties standpoint, and that's why I forgot about him for my rotation.

Plus everyone's going to have extremely different views on steroids. I'm not taking Clemens because I don't know if that gives me roided up Cy Young monster Clemens or late tenure with the Red Sox Clemens. (Any version of Barry Bonds is among the best players in history. If I don't get the 70 HR juiced Barry, I get 1984-1993 Barry, who steals 40 bases and won 3 MVPs? Fine by me.)

Fair enough. I don't agree with most of your logic here but to each their own.

 

[BigBadBruins7708]

Nah. Discussing how good guys are wasn't whether they were the best of all time, but if they're best suited for any era. I totally said Ryan wasn't among the top 5 all-time starters, but among the top 5 of his era in multiple eras and that translates to the games we're trying to play better than the old guys, so "I want that on my team."

I never said Arenado was better than Schmidt. I said "you don't need the best 3B of all-time hitting seventh, so I went glove."

And a bullpen full of closers makes total sense. I listed a full pitching staff for a full team and everyone else basically listed 18 offensive players and 6-9 pitchers, not 12-13.

I think A LOT of my views stem from playing MLB The Show Diamond Dynasty:
- You're not allowed to put starters in the bullpen.
- Some guys who are great players just don't translate to gameplay style of the user. I can't hit with Mike Schmidt to save my life, but I can blast home runs with Eduardo Escobar. I struggle with Randy Johnson from a control and flat pitches that get crushed by righties standpoint, and that's why I forgot about him for my rotation.

Plus everyone's going to have extremely different views on steroids. I'm not taking Clemens because I don't know if that gives me roided up Cy Young monster Clemens or late tenure with the Red Sox Clemens. (Any version of Barry Bonds is among the best players in history. If I don't get the 70 HR juiced Barry, I get 1984-1993 Barry, who steals 40 bases and won 3 MVPs? Fine by me.)

Odd to worry about a couple year outlier in Clemens career (especially in an exercise where the assumption is you're getting their best).

But even removing the steroid seasons, Boston Clemens still gives you a 3x Cy Young winner and MVP.