Best Baseball Players of All-Time
Written August 4, 2009 by Jack Jones
I was taking a look at an article today over at Wired on network science ranking baseball greats and think it might be worth a look. The article talks about a recent effort by arXiv to study every single at-bat from between 1954 and 2008 to compare players who never faced each other and compare hitters who appeared years apart. The core of the study is a stat called Runs Until End, which assigns a value to each at-bat on how many runs a team would score by innings end. The total RUE score for every pitcher/hitter combo is calculated. It can compare any two hitters in the same season by studying the outcomes of at-bats between pitchers both of them faced. Basically it’s based on linking so how did a hitter do against any pitcher he ever faced, and how did those pitchers do against every hitter they ever faced. As long as hitters are connected through a series of links, they can supposedly be accurately compared.
Looking at the results on the page it seems that the formula is biased towards recent stars, especially pitching where nearly all of the starters are from the last 10-15 years. Of course, it’s hard to argue Barry Bonds isn’t the best hitter of the modern era, but Todd Helton at number two over the likes of Mikey Mantle, Manny Ramirez, Alex Rodriguez, and Frank Thomas? Seems a little weak to me.
Here is a direct link to the Mutally-Antagonistic Interactions in Baseball Networks study.
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