What's wrong with Foxx's peak value in relation to Mays?

His peak value is better but not amazingly better and he has a lot more bum seasons (5 basically full seasons under 5 WAR and he retired at 34 [I'm going to choose to ignore the indignity of his 1944 and 1945 campaigns]).

You can't use plain WAR to decide who was a better hitter. That stat takes into account defense, baserunning, and a positional adjustment. We are just voting on who was the best hitter, not who was the best hitter for his position, and not who was the best player.

OPS+
Foxx - 163
Mays - 155

OFFENSIVE WIN%
Foxx - .780
Mays - .748

Willie Mays = God
Jimmie Foxx = Hercules, at best

But yeah the only clear thing I can tell here is that Ruth, Bonds and Williams (in no exact order) are clearly at the top and Speaker, Wagner and Brouthers are a notch below the others. The middle's a muddle.

Which is why I used O War (and what my reference was too). The reason Foxx's OPS outpaces his WAR largely has to do with how unhealthy he was at the end of his career (even though in small sample sizes he still put up decent numbers) and the fact that Mays held on for longer. Foxx barely outdoes Mays in peak value and Mays was more consistent with better longevity.

It's a moot point because neither of them is in the top 5. It's Ruth, Ted, Barry, Lou and Hornsby.

Agreed.

i wish there was a formula that realistically and accurately adjusted the difference between the eras. it's hard for me to believe that ruth could come out in today's game and rake.

Why is that?

He had great hand-eye coordination and unbelievable bat speed.

Why? Not only as Bruce pointed out did he have great hand eye coordination and bat speed but he played with a much larger strikezone, higher mounds, bigger ballparks, and heavier bats. He did play against reduced competition (no blacks and no latinos) but he was so utterly dominant in his era that he would certainly be good in any era. Add to it that he would have had all of the benefits of modern training that modern players would.

Plus in his era there was no other real options for great athletes other than baseball. They were not losing the best athletes to other sports.

AND.....Suppose Babe was around now and using steroids?

williams on steroids would have had OPS 1.50

Would be interesting. Have no idea if this is true or not but I heard someone took the distance of all of his fly balls (roughly measure of course) and calculated that in modern parks based on how deep he hit a lot of flies he's have 1150 home runs (which would be insane if true).

There's a great book about Ruth and Cobb that details day to day games in the late teens and early twenties when they were both stars and playing against each other. Ruth was regularly hitting balls that were near or over 500 feet. Supposedly he hit one fungo that was like 470.

For some reason people think that 90 years ago is some kind of ancient time or something. Human beings have been around for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years already. It's not like they have evolved all that much since Babe's time. And major league baseball had been around already for over 40 years before Babe arrived on the scene. It had had time already to improve to a certain level.

I just think the fact that we don't have clear films of the exploits of the Babe and other players from that era is the reason that some people tend to believe that players from back then were not very good. The fact that technology has improved so much in the past century creates an illusion in people's minds that tells them that athletes have improved at the same rate as technology has since then.

I have guys I know around here who think that Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb and Lou Gehrig would not make a college team now.

This is not football, where a 220 pound lineman would be physically overmatched by today's steroid using linemen.

Babe might have trouble adjusting to split finger pitches and the like, and he might have trouble with all the left handed relief specialists in today's game (he had lots of trouble with Hub Pruett), and the better gloves might help reduce his batting average. I doubt that he'd be able to hit .344 lifetime now, but he'd be hitting titanic home runs as every schmuck out there would try and throw his fastball by him.

I think if you went back to 1921, put him in the DeLorean and brought him to 2011 he could almost certainly do what Prince Fielder does but I don't think he could match up with Albert Pujols. But I don't know, maybe, it's one of many great reasons to invent a time machine. Obviously the "couldn't make a college team people" (I doubt there are many of them) are idiots.