People complain about WAR’s impact on baseball’s MVP debates, and there’s a fairness to the grumble. Within a single season, WAR is so good at defining value that it often ends the debate before it starts, or, worse, it turns the debate into some philosophical ERA vs. FIP smackdown which cedes far too much power to nerds like me.
Where WAR excels is as a resource for debates over all-time greatness. It narrows the scope by enough to make the debate manageable, but thanks to its ability to only adequately adjust for context, it can never reach the finish line on its own.
Here are the top ten players of all time by Baseball Reference’s calculation of WAR:
1. Babe Ruth: 182.6 wins
2. Walter Johnson: 166.9 wins
3. Cy Young: 163.6 wins
4. Barry Bonds: 162.8 wins
5. Willie Mays: 156.2 wins
6. Ty Cobb: 151.5 wins
7. Henry Aaron: 143.1 wins
8. Roger Clemens: 139.2 wins
9. Tris Speaker: 134.9 wins
10. Honus Wagner: 131.0 wins
On this list:
- Johnson and Young accumulated a lot of their WAR through volume. The pair is first and third all-time in innings pitched, even with Young throwing more than one thousand more innings than Johnson. Were they great? Yes. Is volume worthwhile and impressive? Yes. Were they the best to ever play the game? No. And to pull in that ERA vs. FIP wrinkle, Clemens is ahead of both of them by fWAR.
- Bonds and Clemens are widely believed to have used steroids during their playing career. Performance enhancement has been part of the game for a long time. Sports were not Eden before Jose Canseco came along. But it’s fair to believe that neither Bonds nor Clemens would have been quite as productive as they were without the aid of performance-enhancing drugs. You don’t need to be an absolutist to agree that Bonds, great as he was, was a lesser player than Mays.
- Ruth, Johnson, Young, Cobb, Speaker, and Wagner all played during the era of the color barrier. They were playing against an artificially limited talent pool. Again, this is a factor which doesn’t lend well towards absolutism. Mays and Aaron played before baseball had fully tapped into Latin America. Even Shohei Ohtani is still something of a pioneer for players coming over from Asia. These six players were all-time greats, with Ruth in particular so productive that even a ten percent demerit for a lack of competition leaves him atop this list. Still, it must be mentioned. On a debatably significant note, all six of these men also played part of their career during the dead ball era.
- Mays missed nearly two full seasons serving in the military. This is mentioned more alongside Ted Williams than Mays, but it’s a big deal, especially because when Mays returned, he immediately put up a 10.5-WAR season. Missing time due to injuries is one thing. Getting drafted into the armed forces is another.
Who’s the greatest of all time?
It’s easy to award second or third place to Aaron, who debuted three years after Mays. Aaron and Mays were close enough contemporaries that we can give Mays the edge in their matchup. As for Mays vs. Ruth, it really comes down to the era of the game. Ruth was better than his contemporaries to a degree beyond that of Mays. But Mays’s contemporaries were a whole lot better than Ruth’s.
Within debates like these (more commonly Ruth vs. Ohtani, though that’s more a debate for 2034 than 2024), the color barrier’s impact on the talent pool does get its due these days. As it should. What I think doesn’t get enough attention is the impact of the sport’s popularity.
Babe Ruth made good money, especially later in his career. Adjusted for inflation, I believe he made more than Willie Mays did, even with Mays often the highest-paid player of his day. In this regard, though, Ruth was the pioneer. While other greats before him made well more than the average American, Ruth was famously the first player to ever command a higher salary than the president. Baseball’s popularity was still rising when Ruth played. Greater popularity one decade leads to a larger talent pool the next, when youth who pursued the game become adults who compete in it. The effect of the boom of Latin American and Asian talent since the 1990’s is substantial. I don’t think baseball, as a community, has wrapped its head around this. But while Mays and Aaron didn’t play against the largest talent pool the game would ever see, their talent pool was still vastly greater than Ruth’s. Not only were Black Americans finally allowed into the majors, but more white Americans were interested in playing baseball professionally.
Mays was a better athlete than Ruth. This is undeniable. Ruth’s calling card, on the other hand, is the home runs (a very valuable thing) and his years as a pitcher. Like Young and Johnson, Ruth’s pitching value might deserve a discount. As for the home runs? Ruth did play entirely in the day of the 154-game season, and he didn’t begin hitting every game until a few years into his career. But Mays missed nearly two years to serve in the military, which makes it hard to feel much sympathy for Ruth only leading him by 54 career home runs.
Devaluation of Ruth’s accomplishments has gone overboard in the last few years. The guy was outrageously good at baseball. But it doesn’t take a prisoner of the moment to concede that what Willie Mays did was more impressive. Baseball lost its best yesterday. Rest in peace to the greatest of all time.
(We have and will have more Willie Mays content on our homepage today. Something from each of the three of us.)
Miscellany
- Is Sergei Bobrovsky all good? We’ve found some success with our hockey model by making it adjust very quickly to individual results, something which makes me think more of the sport comes back to the timing of a goalie’s streakiness than is commonly acknowledged. This is very much just a theory, but after an electric Game 5, it’s a bullish theory concerning the Oilers.
- The Rickwood Game tomorrow night will feature Major League Baseball’s first all-Black umpire crew, in the latest news on what should be a really special night. I remember being awestruck by the first Field of Dreams game, shocked at how moving it was. This should match that cinematically with one thousand times the meaning. Can’t wait.
- Tennessee and Florida State are underway in the College World Series, with Florida State needing to beat Tennessee twice to reach the Finals (Tennessee only needs to beat FSU once). For Tennessee, it’s a “put up or shut up” moment after a few years around the top of the sport. For Florida State, it’s a chance at redemption after a controversial collapse on Friday night. For the ACC, it’s a last stand. If Tennessee wins, it’ll be an all-SEC final series, with either Texas A&M or Florida emerging from the other bracket.
- Rich Paul says Bronny James has only worked out for two teams “by design,” pointing out that for a player like James, one “in need of development,” the right situation is essential. It sounds obnoxious, but it’s a good point. Drafts are dumb, and for as annoying as the Paul/James apparatus can be, manipulating a dumb system is different from manipulating a system that is just. Also, it is a great move to continue labeling Bronny James as a work in progress. It’s accurate, and as Deion Sanders and Caitlin Clark have both exhibited in these last twelve months, celebrity college athletes do not enjoy the benefit of accurate perceptions.
- USC’s lost two five-star defensive line recruits in the last two days. Both hail from the state of Georgia. There are a lot of threads here—the talent base in California, USC’s defensive trustworthiness, Lincoln Riley’s charisma—but whatever’s driving the situation, it’s bad for the Trojans. It can be overcome, but USC is not in a strong position right now overall.
