FiveThirtyEight had a good piece on Friday about Hank Aaron highlighting how consistent the man was. As Neil Paine wrote:
“Aaron’s legacy extends far beyond mere statistics, but his playing career was defined in large part by his metronomic ability to perform at near-MVP levels or better for almost two decades in a row. While there are other athletes who have been as good at age 35 as they were at 25, Aaron was unique in the fact that he never had an ‘off’ season. Year in and year out, Aaron showed up and played at an incredibly high level every day.”
It’s a striking set of statistics, but one that makes sense when you remember that the most memorable thing about Aaron, after all, was his longtime status as baseball’s all-time home run leader. He had to hit a lot of home runs in a lot of different seasons. That results in stats like these.
Baseball doesn’t have a “GOAT” debate the way basketball does. Nothing has a debate about that the way basketball does. But if you had to choose a greatest baseball player of all time, you could, to a point, make a case for Hank Aaron.
Of the seven most valuable players in all-time bWAR (Aaron ranks seventh), only Barry Bonds began and ended his career after Aaron began and ended his, meaning Aaron played in the most modern game among the six for whom performance enhancing drugs aren’t a piece of the conversation. Babe Ruth, Walter Johnson, and Cy Young—the top three—all played a different game than Aaron (on the one hand, it’s impressive that Young stayed healthy enough to make 815 starts, or 37 per season, on average; while on the other, it’s a testament to how different the game of baseball was in his day). Ty Cobb, who ranks sixth, also played a different game. Willie Mays’s span began and ended only a few years earlier than Aaron’s, and the former missed nearly two full seasons serving in the military, making it hard to argue Aaron was better than Mays, which is probably where this breaks down (and why I said “to a point” above), but still—you can get all the way to Willie Mays in an Aaron-was-the-greatest argument without having to abandon reason.
Perhaps you don’t do this, but I sometimes put Aaron into a box as a home run hitter and forget what a great player he was. Of course, a lot of that greatness comes from the home runs—home runs, as Billy Beane will tell you, are very good things for a baseball player to hit. But the singular focus on the home runs sometimes detracts, for me, from recognizing what an historic talent he was, as well as the role he played in integration, entering the league just seven years after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier.
As for the GOAT debate itself (and thank goodness that isn’t a thing in baseball, and my apologies for briefly surfacing it here), it’s hard to not choose Ruth. In his 60-home run season, the third-place finisher in the race only hit 30 dingers. Lou Gehrig was second, at 47 (before you worry that Yankee Stadium was too much of a hitter’s park, rest assured—Ruth only hit 28 of the long balls at home). Babe Ruth was, as WAR says, better than the rest of the league to an extent we’ve never seen since.
Cases, of course, can be made for Mays, and for Bonds and Roger Clemens (who ranks eighth in all-time bWAR) if you play the “context of their time” card and, in the case of Clemens, believe pitchers to have a greater challenge staying healthy. If Ted Williams had gotten those three more seasons at his peak, he’d quite possibly be in Mays territory on the WAR chart. But that’s kind of it. There aren’t other players in the discussion.
Which makes Aaron’s greatness all the more compelling. He wasn’t just the home run king. He was somewhere between the second and tenth best baseball player of all time (I’m leaving some space here for the Negro Leagues). He was one of the two greatest players of his generation, and that generation was a pivotal one in the sport’s history.
The world lost a great man last week, and that comes first. But baseball lost more than just a long-time record holder. It lost one of its greatest talents to ever walk the earth.
