Greatest of all time

[howard38]

Originally Posted by chipperhank44

This was an interesting question for me. As far as batters are concerned, I had a pretty definitive list in my head. That said, I am also from the school of thought that OPS is the greatest indicator of a batter's value. So I looked up the career leaders in OPS and found an interesting top 5. (and yes I realize that defense and steals are not accounted for in OPS, but defense is hard as hell to quantify and I never saw any of these guys with my own eyes so the eyeball test is out the window, I will focus on hitting)

1. Ruth
2. Williams
3. Gehrig
4. Foxx (skipped Bonds)
5. Greenberg


Now I am looking at a top 5 list and saying to myself, really, Greenberg and Foxx in my top 5? So I consider the following question, aren't hits and steals combined just as valuable as a double, if not more so? So I do the following:

Ty Cobb has 3053 total singles in his career and 897 total stolen bases. Why not subtract the total stolen bases from the number of singles and give those hits plus singles the value of a double in the slugging percentage equation. So I do this, and it works out as follows.

Ty Cobb

Total 1B - 2156 (singles minus stolen bases)
Total 2B - 1621 (doubles plus stolen bases)
Total 3B - 295
Total HR - 117
Total AB - 11434

With these numbers, Cobb's career SLG% is elevated from .512 to .590. When combined with his career OBP of .433 you get an OPS (adjusted for steals) of 1.023, which is good enough for 5th place (excluding Bonds) on the all time OPS list.

I know there all holes in this logic, like the fact that every SB is not combined with a hit, many are after walks or HBP, but this was just my attempt to make OPS fair to the base thief. The ability to turn a walk, HBP, or single into a runner in scoring position is invaluable, so I had to account for it somehow. I'm sure if I added Greenberg or Hornsby's steals to their slugging calculation, they might overtake Cobb on the OPS list, but Cobb belongs IMO and this is how I reconciled it.

1. Ruth
2. Williams
3. Gehrig
4. Foxx
5. Cobb


Not sure if this is a novel idea or if someone is going to tell me OPS adjusted for steals is already a thing, but either way, I like it quite a lot.

If you count a single followed by a stolen base as a double then you should also count a single followed by a caught stealing as an out instead of a hit. In Cobb's case that would probably be in the neighborhood of 400 fewer hits.