Baseball's All-Time Best Hitters: How Statistics Can Level the Playing Field

by Michael J. Schell

Tony Gwynn is the greatest hitter in the history of baseball. That's the conclusion of this engaging and provocative analysis of baseball's all-time best hitters. Michael Schell challenges the traditional list of all-time hitters, which places Ty Cobb first, Gwynn 16th, and includes just 8 players whose prime came after 1960. Schell argues that the raw batting averages used as the list's basis should be adjusted to take into account that hitters played in different eras, with different rules, and in different ballparks. He makes those adjustments and produces a new list of the best 100 hitters that will spark debate among baseball fans and statisticians everywhere.


Schell combines the two qualifications essential for a book like this. He is a professional statistician--applying his skills to cancer research--and he has an encyclopedic knowledge of baseball. He has wondered how to rank hitters since he was a boy growing up as a passionate Cincinnati Reds fan. Over the years, he has analyzed the most important factors, including the relative difficulty of hitting in different ballparks, the length of hitters' careers, the talent pool that players are drawn from, and changes in the game that raised or lowered major-league batting averages (the introduction of the designated hitter and changes in the height and location of the pitcher's mound, for example). Schell's study finally levels the playing field, giving new credit to hitters who played in adverse conditions and downgrading others who faced fewer obstacles. His final ranking of players differs dramatically from the traditional list. Gwynn, for example, bumps Cobb to 2nd place, Rod Carew rises from 28th to 3rd, Babe Ruth drops from 9th to 16th, and Willie Mays comes from off the list to rank 13th. Schell's list also gives relatively more credit to modern players, containing 39 whose best days were after 1960.


Using a fun, conversational style, the book presents a feast of stories and statistics about players, ballparks, and teams--all arranged so that calculations can be skipped by general readers but consulted by statisticians eager to follow Schell's methods or introduce their students to such basic concepts as mean, histogram, standard deviation, p-value, and regression. Baseball's All-Time Best Hitters will shake up how baseball fans view the greatest heroes of America's national pastime.

Genres: Sports

320 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1999

Reviews

[Mike · Rating 2 out of 5]

In this book Michael Schell revisits the conventional list of the top 100 hitters of all time in baseball. He notes that comparisons across time and teams can be more difficult than they seem, even if we can make them casually as is often the case. He takes a more scientific approach – adjusting for era, length of career, differences in talent across leagues, and differences in ballparks. It is an intriguing idea. The problem with this book, however, is that Schell cannot decide whether he wants to write a sports book that draws upon statistical analysis or an introductory statistics textbook that features sports examples. Instead, he falls somewhere in the middle, leaving my deeply unsatisfied. I do quantitative data analysis for a living, and I am a baseball fan; further, I agree that much of what we believe we know about baseball is based more on lore and legend than on actual facts and patterns. In other words, Schell’s statistical revisionism seems made for a reader like me. Unfortunately he drops the ball (no pun intended…hey, it could be worse, I could have written that Schell “struck out”). I have no dispute with his statistical methods (but that could be because he is vague on the details, so it’s hard to know exactly how his adjustments work). I cannot even say that I am disappointed with his findings (Ted Williams falls from #5 to #6, so no harm done). The larger problem is that he writes so poorly. He jumps from topic to topic leaving a scattered feel to the text. He uses a lot of unexplained jargon that I bet would leave a mathematical novice unnecessarily bewildered. If you are a statistics kind of person you’ll find Schell too light on methodological detail. If you hate statistics you’ll find it too heavy on statistical concepts (and probably hate this book). Schell leaves all unsatisfied.

[Mark Richardson · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is one of the silliest books I've ever read. It's premise is that good hitters aren't who or what we think they are, but with mathematical tweaking, a list of the truly best hitters will emerge. After he is done with all of his regressions from the mean and standard deviations, etc., etc., Schell comes up with some interesting lists. But if your lists include Kevin Seitzer as one of the top ten hitting third basemen of all-time while making no mention of Mike Schmidt or Ron Santo, your second basemen list includes Glenn Beckert but excludes Ryne Sandberg, Lou Whitaker and Roberto Alomar, and Don Slaught is one of your top ten all-time hitting catchers, you might want to put the book in a drawer instead of sending it to a publisher.