A couple years ago, I began a project to try and create a statistical-based ranking of Hall of Fame worthy or notable players, and I just kept expanding it to include more and more players. I'm up to around 50 players from every position and more than 100 pitchers.
My top ten list, when separated into position players and pitchers, would look something like this:
Babe Ruth
Barry Bonds
Willie Mays
Ted Williams
Ty Cobb
Rogers Hornsby
Honus Wagner
Josh Gibson
Lou Gehrig
Stan Musial
The next ten would include Jimmie Foxx, Eddie Collins, Nap Lajoie, Joe Morgan, Mike Schmidt, Alex Rodriguez, Rickey Henderson, Mickey Mantle, Tris Speaker, and Hank Aaron. There is not a huge gap between any of these players and the lower half of the players listed above and depending on further refinements I could see any of these players move up (along with players from the next tier like Bench, Pujols, Charleston, Ripken, Mathews, Ott, Frank Robinson, Pop Lloyd, Yastrzemski, DiMaggio, Trout, Clemente, Boggs, and a few others).
Walter Johnson
Roger Clemens
Cy Young
Pete Alexander
Greg Maddux
Randy Johnson
Greg Maddux
Randy Johnson
Lefty Grove
Tom Seaver
Pedro Martinez
Satchel Paige
The next ten would be Christy Mathewson, Kid Nichols, Smokey Joe Williams, Bob Gibson, Bob Feller, Bullet Joe Rogan, Steve Carlton, John Clarkson, Warren Spahn, and Robin Roberts. The gap between Paige and Gibson is about as large as the gap between Gibson and Feller.
Pitcher ratings include hitting and baserunning (this provides significant boosts for Walter Johnson, Mathewson, Spahn, Gibson, Carlton, Rogan, and Williams - it also provides significant boosts for a number of pitchers who wouldn't make the top 20). Pitcher ratings are also normalized to try and account for changing usage patterns for starting pitchers.
Neither of these lists includes credit for postseason performance (I don't know how to weight it yet). It does provide credit for military service and shortened seasons (including an adjustment for the 154-game season or other shorter regular seasons). I do demerit for weakened leagues (the American Association, Union Association, Federal League, and the 1943-1945 AL and NL). Some players receive minor league credit (where they were major league quality players, in my estimation, but were prevented from playing major league baseball because of factors outside their control - the best example is Lefty Grove, trapped in Baltimore because Baltimore's owner refused to sell the rights to his contract after having sold Babe Ruth to the Red Sox the decade before). I do
not award injury credit and I do
not timeline. I will eventually award 2020 credit for similar reasons (Mike Trout
is a great baseball player right now, he's just prevented from playing baseball due to circumstances totally beyond his control).
All ratings are based on Baseball Reference WAR, except for players who were prevented from playing because of segregation (for whom I use the major league equivalency translations performed by the pair at
the Hall of Miller and Eric, whose translations heavily punish strong peaks but which are the best available statistical tools).
These are, of course, statistical rankings and baseball statistics, while generally very accurate and generally capturing the run value of events on the field very well, still have a fair amount of room for discussion and debate, especially over the distribution of credit among pitchers and fielders, the value of catchers at calling games, and so on, and rankings based on statistics come with philosophical and methodological choices that may or may not be universally agreed-upon (for example, my decision to normalize players to a 162-game season or to award credit for seasons spend in uniform, as well as my choice to place a player at a single position but evaluate all of their career value, no matter where it was gained - Ruth's pitching or putting Stan Musial and Pete Rose on the left fielders list, for instance).