Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Who Was The Greatest "All-Around" Player Ever? Another Quantitative Attempt (Part 3)

Part 2  is below with a link to part 1. I used four stats: one for fielding, one for speed (based on triples), one for hitting for average and one for hitting for power (ISO). The four stats were multiplied by each other and I calculated their geometric mean. Players had to have 5000+ career PAs. They are relative to the league average and there is a park adjustment.

I have already used both a triples stat and then a SB stat to measure speed. Here I combined them. I used the square root of the SB stat (see earlier posts for how that worked). Then that was added to the triples stat and I simply took the average of the two. One reason I took the square root of the SB stat is that it had a very large range and this brings it more in line with the other stats. This is actually similar to what Bill James does with his "speed score." One of his stats in that involves SBs and he takes the square root of it. He also uses triples. But I don't use fielding range factor, partly because it would be hard to get it for each guy but also I am already using fielding here. I don't uses CS or GIDP since we don't have them for all of history. I don't use runs scored since that depends on your teammates.

So here is the top 25.


Here are the numbers for Mays. Recall that they are relative to the leage average:

Fielding: 1.13
Isolated Power: 1.89
Average: 1.14
Speed: 1.49

Mays got a slight bumb from the park adjustment (an increase of 2%). For the above replacement level version here are the leaders (this was done the same way as in the first two posts). Mays has a solid lead. He has been the best or near the top so far in all the ways I have looked at this.

http://cybermetric.blogspot.com/2012/08/who-was-greatest-all-around-player-ever_23.html

http://cybermetric.blogspot.com/2012/08/who-was-greatest-all-around-player-ever.html

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