Quote:
Originally Posted by rats60
Well even by WAR, Mantle is 21st. If you remove the one 19th century player, he is 20th. Remove the 3 steroid users 17th. That is not close to being a top 10 player even before addressing the problems with WAR that skew Mantle's numbers higher than they should be. Bill James and Nate Silver have been critical of WAR. I am not drinking the koolaid. In the end WAR is just one (or two) person's opinion of players value. I do not agree it does even an adequate job of representing a players value. It skews some players like Mantle too high. It skews catchers like Johnny Bench way too low. A stat that thinks Phil Niekro and Bert Blyleven were better than Bob Gibson and Pedro Martinez can't be taken seriously.
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You're just looking at the basic cumulative career WAR totals. Mantle, Pedro, and Gibson had much shorter careers then Niekro and Blyleven. That's why the chart above looked at it per games played. It's the sensible measure of who was "better" for players who lasted long enough for HOF consideration.
And as mentioned above somewhere, Mantle led the league in on-base percentage, walks, and especially OPS a bunch of times. So even if you forget throw out the WAR stats, those Bill James type numbers are well in his favor too.
The only objective argument for Mantle not being a top 10 all-timer is if you punish him a lot for not having a really long career. Which is the same thing you don't want to do to Pedro or Bob Gibson (who are in the same boat).