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My favorite baseball questions are the ones that require both quantitative data and subjective analysis to answer. Who is the greatest baseball player of all time? Well, I could pull up the career WAR leaderboards, say Babe Ruth, and call it a day, but that wouldn’t a satisfying way to reach a conclusion. All of us know that the essence of Ruth — his vast accomplishments and legend — cannot be encapsulated by how many Wins Above Replacement he was worth.
What about Barry Bonds? He ranks second with 164.4 WAR, less than three wins behind Ruth (167.0), while playing against better competition; after all, Bonds wouldn’t have been allowed to play during Ruth’s career. Good point, but there’s the whole steroids thing clouding his legacy. For a while, Mike Trout looked like a worthy answer because of how much better he was than everybody else at a time when sabermetrics were becoming more mainstream. We would use the data to quantify his excellence and then, whenever the numbers alone weren’t convincing, we would say something about the superior talent level in the game today. Now, of course, the overwhelming majority of us would probably answer Shohei Ohtani because of his two-way exploits. We could cite his statistics, but we’d have to include so many qualifications, most of which would relate to the fact that he’s pitching and hitting.
I am not going to reveal my answer in this week’s mailbag because none of you asked for it. Instead, I bring this up because it relates to a different question that a reader named Derek submitted, which we’ll get to in a moment. But before we do, I’d like to remind all of you that while anyone can submit a question, this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com.
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