Baseball's Best Careers: Team by Team Rankings - Softcover

Jones, Michael S.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0786410876 ISBN 13: 9780786410873

Publisher: McFarland Publishing, 2001

Synopsis

A great career in baseball takes unflagging excellence, year after year, and is a demanding measure of success. This work presents rankings of the best career performances in baseball history, by position, for each team in the American and National leagues. Players are measured both by rate and volume of success. The rankings are also translated into All-Star lineups for each team. Baseball's Best Careers, in a departure from other latter-day stats books, everywhere adheres to common sense. The book, for instance, assigns a player's career performance to a single, primary team. The numbers of Rogers Hornsby, then who batted .380 and hit 39 home runs for the Cubs in 1929, are attributed to the St. Louis Cardinals, for whom Hornsby played most of his games. And so the historic value of the second baseman's career is preserved, and Ryne Sandberg, Johnny Evers, Glenn Beckert, and Billy Herman-the rightful contenders for the Cubs all-time spot at second-are free to fight it out. Several sabremetric measures are employed in compiling the rankings, which have been adjusted for hitting and pitching biases over periods of time. Raw historical statistics are examined, and the author explains why some statistics are used in his work to measure performance, while others are discarded as nonindicators of performance. For each team, statistical ratings and rankings are provided, as are brief player profiles of that club's All-Star team members.

About this title

About the Author

Michael S. Jones is a finance officer living in Park Ridge, Illinois. He is also the author of Baseball Players' Best Seasons by Team (2001, $45).

From Booklist

Baseball fans live and breathe statistics when discussing (and arguing) about favorite players. But how to compare players from different time periods when there are significant differences in the way the game was played? Jones strives to make such comparisons using the base statistical numbers that are available throughout the history of baseball and applying a "sabremetric" formula (sabr refers to the Society for American Baseball Research) also used in John Thorn and Pete Palmer's Total Baseball (Total Sports, 2001) and The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract (Free, 1985).

Best Careers rates and ranks the greatest players by position based on their entire career performance. Statistical tables are arranged by major league teams (even if a player switched teams, overall career performance is listed under his "primary" team) and then by position. Each table ranks players by rate of success (or short-term performances) and by volume of success (or long-term performances). In addition, rankings are compiled for the top 25 team players from 1900 to the present. Following the chapters on major league teams are sections on expansion teams and nineteenth-century players. An appendix shows American League, National League, and overall greatest career rankings for each position.

The book fits well together with Jones' Baseball Players' Best Seasons, and if either is considered, both should be purchased. Suitable for midsize to large libraries. RBB
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: McFarland Publishing
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0786410876
• ISBN 13: 9780786410873
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 378