Who is the best all around MLB player of all time

It's his birthday today. He's 80.

yeah thats crazy i rem. hearing that on the mets game last night!

I'll vote for Mays, though arguments can be made and will be. He's the one I liked the most. I saw him as a kid, may he have a good birthday.

Willie was my hero when i was a kid, and i was a big New York Giants fan. However, my vote would be for Shoeless Joe . . .

I was in the park when Willie hit one of his home runs.

I can't pick a favorite, but it's a Yankee.

This a tough one. My thought/vote is that it would go to Babe Ruth. I never saw Babe Ruth live (and he is not of my era), but if you can consider that it's hard to determine outside of a particular era, we can only make some best-guesses.

1. As a pitcher, he was a 20-game-winner as well as World Series winning pitcher.
2. Of his era (and beyond), he held the HR total record for serveral decades, until Hank Aaron broke it in 1974.
3. He was one of the main contributors to making baeball the nation's pastime with drawing massive amounts of people into the park. It sure as hell wasn't Ty Cobb that people went running to go see.

However, if how you define best MLB player as having the most all-around talent (and records to go with it) in all the skills (minus pitching), I'd say Willie Mays is the leading candidate.

Joe DiMaggio is not far behind.

My criteria on "who is the best" is who do I least want to have to play against if my life was on the line, and as good a player as Mays was, I would rather have faced him rather than Babe Ruth.

I schlepped from the Bronx to Queens to see Mays play at Shea Stadium (Giants v.Mets). A true great.

But I gotta go with the Babe.

My father insisted it was Ty Cobb.

yup.
http://able2know.org/topic/136208-1#post-3755199

You can build a pretty good case for Cobb, but I have to go with the Babe due to the combination of hitting, pitching, and defense that no other player can claim. After those two, Mays, Dimaggio, and Mantle have to enter the conversation. I just have to imagine how good the Mick might have been with two good knees.

I saw Mays and Mantle play (in person). Mays was toward the end of his career. He was an awesome all-around player.

The Mick's power was breath-taking. Can't imagine what kind of a player he would have been if his knees had held up. I also wonder whether he might have fared better at the bat (or worse) if he weren't a switch hitter.

And when you consider I was a teenage girl at the stadium on Ladies's Days (50 cents), Mantle was also not bad looking. Can't beat that! I met him once in the flesh. He was nice to me.

I think it was Leo Durocher who said that you can only do five things in baseball: hit for average; hit for power; run; field; and pitch. Nobody has been a star at all five, but Babe Ruth excelled at the three hardest ones, and he wasn't a bad fielder either (he led the AL in range factor at RF twice, and if they had been giving out gold gloves in that era he probably would have won at least one -- in 1928). He could even run a little early in his career -- he had 17 stolen bases in 1921 and 1923. It's hard to dispute that Willie Mays was the best all-around batter of all time, but he never pitched an inning in major league baseball. Ruth, in contrast, could have gone into the Hall of Fame as a pitcher even if he never hit a home run in his life.

My vote goes to Ernie Banks.

#16 from The New York Yankees, Edward 'Whitey' Ford, the best there ever was.

Then there's Honus Wagner, who excelled at four the "five tools": average, power, speed, and fielding. Even Ty Cobb called him the greatest player of his era.

Wagner hit for power? He had 101 HRs over his entire career -- which isn't too bad, I guess, considering that nobody hit home runs in that era. Still, he never led the league in HRs. He did, however, lead the league in triples three times, which I suppose made him a prototypical power hitter for the dead ball era.

On a somewhat related note, I had always wondered whether the "o" in "Honus" was pronounced like the "o" in "hone" or the "o" in "on." And what the hell kind of nickname is "Honus" anyway? Then, one day, the light finally shined. Wagner's first name was John, and people must have always been kidding him about his German ancestry (he was nicknamed "the Flying Dutchman"* -- at a time when Germans were routinely called "Dutch"). Well, one form of "John" in German is "Johannes." Take out the "jo" and you're left with "hannes," which would be pronounced like "Honus" with the "hon" rhyming with "on." QED.


*This brings to mind my greatest individual achievement in College Bowl, where I triumphantly answered the question "What is the name shared by a Wagner opera and a shortstop named Wagner?" A question that combined opera and baseball -- I was destined to answer it.

Yeah, I guess power wasn't quite the same in the dead-ball era; slugging % measures speed as much as power until, what, 1920? Which is the year Ruth hit at least twice as many HRs as anyone had previously. If we measure players' excellence by lining them up against their peers, then, Babe Ruth tops this list in terms of batting.

There's a lot of truth in that. Wagner led the league in slugging percentage six times, but five of those times he led the league in batting average too, so a lot of his power numbers came from hitting a whole bunch of doubles. Not coincidentally, he led the league in doubles seven times -- including the six times he led the league in slugging (in 1906 Wagner led the league in doubles but came in second in slugging behind the immortal Harry Lumley). Maybe if Wagner had started his career in 1920 rather than 1897, he would have been a home run hitter, but I have a feeling his stats would have ended up looking a lot more like Joe Sewell's.