The Greatest of All Time
Who is the GOAT (Greatest of All Time)? It’s not just the hitter with the highest batting average – we already know Ty Cobb hit .366 (except we thought it was .367 when I was a kid) with Rogers Hornsby, Shoeless Joe Jackson, and Lefty O’Doul within 10 points. It’s not just the hitter with the most Home Runs – I was fortunate to come to my love of baseball just as Babe Ruth was being 
passed by Hank Aaron and now, of course, it’s Barry Bonds at the top with 762 round-trippers. For a long time, I have had the sneaking suspicion that the best all-around hitter was Ted Williams (.344/521 HRs as a lefty in Fenway and let’s not forget the nearly five years at his peak lost to military service) but if the main thing in baseball is to help your team score runs (can’t win if you don’t!), don’t we need to factor in stolen bases and walks? This elevates Cobb’s position and makes Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle a bit more valuable. Which begs the question: how great was Rickey Henderson? Well, I want to know. And so I bring you…
The All-Time Most Offensive Tournament
First off, this is a massive solo project. I estimate that by the time it is finished, I, or rather my computer, will have played the equivalent of a quarter of a million individual games. I started a version of this project back in the mid-
1990s but, alas, life intervened. The old files are gone, so I have begun again with records current as of the end of the 2015 season. I hope to complete this in less than a year.
What’s the point? Well, don’t you want the data? Don’t you want to KNOW? “Who is the Best of All Time?” is a common argument, a debate that I have had on more than one occasion. I also wanted this project to consider players that had high On Base Percentages as well as those that stole a mess of bases. Babe Ruth hit an awful lot of homers. Ty Cobb had a pretty high average. Ted Williams had both and walked a lot. As did Willie Mays and he did it while stealing bases. How does Barry Bonds fit in? What about Rickey Henderson? And what about the players of today? Where do they rank? I thought this might be a fun way of letting the numbers talk and see if anybody in baseball history can surprise us.
Here is how I’m going to do it: I am using Strat-o-matic Computer Baseball and its Normalized Career Historical Players to create teams made entirely of individual players plus pitchers. They will, in essence, be teams of designated hitters backed by nearly perfect fielders. My thought is that this will minimize the amount of luck that plays into the results. All games will be played in a neutral ballpark. All teams will get a computer generated manager.
The Players
The only other one of these sorts of things I remember was done by Baseball Weekly back in the 1990s. I believe they picked 32 hitters but have been unable to verify this. Surprisingly, Google was no help! But I did find this: Softballcoach on the Stratomatic Baseball Village Forum had a tournament back in 2010. I won’t spoil it for you… follow the link for the results. I started with the top 150 players in each of 10 categories, mostly because I wanted to include every player that hit over 300 lifetime home runs (and 150 was a nice round number). Obviously, there were some players who appeared in more than one spot and that went into the formula I used in seeding the first rounds. In the end, I added a few more “personal favorites” who didn’t make the top 150 in any of the categories in order to fill out the rounds. I don’t necessarily
expect them to go far but, hey, it’s my project and if I want Oscar Gamble in my tournament then I can have Oscar Gamble in my tournament. I ended up with 592 hitters with all the objectively great players and some surprises, as well. Also, there is one accident. All the Hall of Famers as hitters and fielders are here. In retrospect, I really wonder if it would have been so hard to find 8 more hitters to make it an even 600? That is just poor planning.
The pitchers in the first two rounds were made up of the best of the best of each decade based on hits plus walks per nine innings. I tried to balance it out by lefty righty and made sure to have a couple of closers in there as well. The second (consolation) round staff was all the pitchers that didn’t get much mound time in the first round. Boy were the hitters overmatched!
After that, beginning in the third round, I decided to use the Career Wins and Saves leaders, sorted to give a balanced era representation, ensuring that there was a lefty and closer on each staff. I also sorted the pitchers so that the best would be in the earlier rounds. Why? So that as we get toward the finals, the batters might have better statistics.
The Rounds
Each round will be broken up into “Leagues” of 8 teams playing 154 game schedules. Why? Because that’s the way the Good Lord intended baseball to be played. Also, with more games played, the effects of fluky occurrences are minimized. The top 4 finishers go to the next round, ties included. Additionally, any team playing .500 ball goes on as does any team that scores more runs than its opponents. Any team that otherwise would not qualify but finishes the season ahead of any team that does, will move on.
Now, I want to be certain that someone who played in a league where they were clearly out -classed will get a fair shake. With that in mind, there will also be a “Second Chance” for each round. All teams that do not qualify for the next round will play an additional season against other teams that did not qualify for a chance to move forward using the same rules as above. Since it doesn’t actually cost anything, I’d rather have more opportunities for players to move forward than fewer.
For an example of what I am describing, see Season 2, where Babe Ruth won 130 games and John McGraw (!) picked up 105 of his own. Larry Bowa might have had a better chance of making the next round if those two hadn’t skewed the results with their tremendous win totals.
As we near the finals, there will be some changes to both the eliminations and the second chance opportunities.