Quote:
Originally Posted by dkgo
ootp ratings are based on stats not waxing poetically (as much as we have stats from back then). Not saying that they are all perfect but I'm more likely to trust the ootp team's research into real analysis than some 100 year old anecdote people heard in a documentary.
Sisler was a massively negative defender according to baseball reference and fangraphs. Speaker was about average
What sources are you using to show otherwise?
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My sources are/were contemporary accounts by fellow players, newspaper reporters and so on. Iīm not just talking The Glory of Their Times kind of stuff, but things that were written at the time the players were in their prime. The Sporting News for example was a great place to read what people in the know really thought about players, and reporters like Fred Lieb and Ring Lardner were a joy to read.
In the 1980s I was working on my PhD in History and my thesis was that the 1914 World Series was thrown (I still believe it, btw). I spent many hours going through many sports pages on microfiche and wasted a good deal of time reading stuff that wasnīt related to my particular project at all. The time may have been wasted but it was well-spent nonetheless.
With fielding, the problem is simply that the conditions then were so utterly different that it makes it difficult to rate guys who played prior to World War Two. Regarding stl jasonīs excellent post above comparing Speaker and Trout, the glove Speaker used would fit inside Troutīs with room to spare, while Speakerīs excellent range would bring him chances that a mere mortal would never have had, and of course with the inherent chances of making an error, which of course was more common with the gloves in use at the time. Therefore fielding percentage is useless when trying to rate old time players.
And we wonīt even go into the condition of the balls in use up to the 1920s, which definitely made things interesting for all concerned. And then thereīs trying to rate the Negro Leaguers...
Iīm really curious how ootp would rate Hal Chase. During his career he was noted as perhaps the best fielding first baseman up to that time, the GOAT if you will. Unfortunately Mr Chase supplemented his income by throwing games, so along with the usual problem of gloves and ball condition, he also made a ton of errors on purpose. But the only thing we have to go by nowadays is the fielding record, which would make him something under 50 Iīm sure, while closer to the mark, based on contemporary opinions, would be over 100.
I donīt pretend to set myself up as the end-all authority on this stuff, but it is something I grew up with, quite literally as Dizzy Dean was my cousin (and Paul as well, of course
), and I have studied this era extensively. And while weīre at it, another first baseman who gets the shaft is Mickey Vernon.