I think he won't do it until the Astros forfeit the title... LOL. You first, Boston. It's the piety from the media that sets my teeth on edge. I expect fans to be irrational, and ignore the fire in their own house so they can focus on the smoke coming from yours. But it's annoying when people who comment on sports for a living start doing the same things. Oh well: anything for a click. Easiest way to put this behind them is to continue to kick ass at the plate. I hope Dusty keeps it light.
You have to do a full blown analysis that would take months, make assumptions for live ball versus dead ball era, pitching mound, (As in, Era where the Pitchers had the advantage or the Hitters had the advantage), Steroid Era, Ballparks - Bagwell played in both the Steroid and Live Ball Era, versus a guy like Pedro Guerrero who isn't even in the HOF and played in Dodger Stadium (Pitchers park at the time), Dead Ball Era and not the Steroid Era who Bill James also called "the best hitter God has made in a long time." A proper analysis would have to be done in an access database, the HOF is a joke, and the Athletic just puts these stupid lists out to create interest for their subs services - it is obvious that all the sports, NBA, NFL and MLB have made rules and logistics changes to accentuate offensive stats because they believe this brings in more money. All the players (Bagwell included) that play in this era have over-sized stats that should be taken with a grain of salt, or adjusted for era - there is a way to do it - it takes far too much time for a message board - and trust me the Athletic of the HOF haven't done this type of analysis on players or eras. We are talking Quant Level Analysis here.
So, you're not prepared to defend your position with facts, only rhetoric that we're all aware of. By the way, era adjusted stats are a thing, and they actually factor into WAR and bWAR and JAWS. So, the bottom line: you came in here to drop a negative opinion for which you have no support but you're convinced we suffer from "recency bias". Cool.
I also find it amusing that someone did in fact do tons of research and analysis, but you blow it off as a dumb list. Their hard work is only valid if it aligns with your viewpoint, which you admitted is unstudied and uninformed. Awesome. If you don't like that, cool: give me 100 names.
Jeff Bagwell was one of the better players of his era, but so were Pedro Guerrero and Dale Murphy in their era, and both those guys aren't in the HOF. It is really hard to compare players stats across eras, and then make generic lists that basically just look at raw stats with no context or adjustment for rules changes, eras, baseball stadiums, etc. In regard to whether Steroids helped pitchers versus hitters, it is obvious by the stats that hitters benefited more than the pitchers because the offensive hitting stats jumped, given that players could hit routine fly balls that now became home runs. Baseball has a long history with groups of really good players from 8-10 distinct eras (many of them aren't even in the HOF), and comparing these players across baseball eras just based upon un-adjusted or raw statistical analysis makes for easy list compilations, but is rather poor, shoddy analysis. This would be like analyzing inflation without taking in factors like the money supply, purchasing power, and the strength of the currency in real terms - Baseball Nerds think they are real advanced with statistical analysis - and the truth is that they know just enough to be dangerously inept in their analysis, but the bigger problem is that they believe their analysis meets scientific or academic standards, which couldn't be further from reality.
Another long winded excuse that pretends era-adjusted stats don't exist and these things have been studied at length by hundreds of people. It might shock you, but most of us are aware that there are eras in baseball history with variables that greatly affect performance. But thanks for the lecture. Guess you don't have a real defense for your position.
It was linked, earlier. I hope you do; that will actually be an interesting conversation. I love baseball history.
Haven't found the list from the Athletic, but found this list: https://bleacherreport.com/articles/1977372-the-100-greatest-mlb-players-of-all-time#slide0 All these lists are real subjective which is my point.
ESPN has Bagwell rated number 69 on their Hall of 100: http://www.espn.com/mlb/feature/video/_/id/8652210/espn-hall-100-ranking-all-greatest-mlb-players
He is 41 on this list, https://thebaseballscholar.com/2019/06/12/100-greatest-baseball-players-of-all-time/, so three lists with quick searches, not on the list, 69 and 41 - the variability is rather wide here.
41-69 is not a lot of variance when given the number of baseball players all time. All those lists show there aren’t 100 players better than him, like you say.
The one giant flaw in your argument that you seem to be glossing over is there's no way for us to know if Bagwell ever took steroids. Saying that Bagwell benefited from the era is essentially you saying "Bagwell took steroids." We don't know that, and it's unfair to assume that he did without any real evidence other than "he got bigger and hit a lot of home runs." Based on that logic, pretty much no players who peaked from the late 80s to early 2000s should be in the top 100. Are you going to apply that same logic with your own top 100? Are you just going to ignore 10-15 years worth of talent because of an assumption?
Yeah I won't go there...bu You should have seen Ken Caminiti and Jeff Bagwell pumping iron back in the day of the old Gold's Gym - might look at this topic a little differently. The Athletic is the same genre of sports journalism, just as biased they used one set of criteria to vote against Astros players for post season awards, and then turned right around and ignored that same criterion to vote for other players. The Athletic is low rate journalism - not that journalism has any standards these days.
By any metric, Bagwell is a top 100 player of all time. If you want to take out an entire era of players, fine. But you don’t get to pick and choose who gets recognition, specially when Bagwell has never had any confirmation.
