Baseball’s great debates -- and stats to stoke them

Brushbacks and Knockdowns

The Greatest Baseball Debates of Two Centuries

Allen Barra

Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press: 290 pp., $23.95

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There are two ways to look at baseball.

You can go to a game and gaze at the field and the players and slowly, as the game proceeds, get a feel for its particular pace, its special quality that makes it not exactly like any other baseball game ever played. Like people, each ballgame is unique. None will ever be seen again.

That transience, when the play is not very good, makes some baseball games easily forgettable but leaves others, the few very good ones, shimmering in your memory.

Or you can look at baseball as if you were an omnivorous giant computer and all the games in its 150-year history were like grains of wheat just waiting to be grist for your mill, a vast field of numbers to be harvested and punched and spit out to prove -- absolutely, without any doubt -- any opinion about baseball you care to advance. In any argument, statistics will give you your weapons.

The intricacy of baseball lends itself to dispute. Who was the best outfielder ever? The finest pitcher? The champion left-handed hitter?

For some fans, making discriminating judgments and supporting them with numbers is at least half the fun of the game. So it is with Allen Barra, the lively sports columnist for the Wall Street Journal and author of several books, including “Clearing the Bases: The Greatest Baseball Debates of the Last Century” in 2002.

In his latest, “Brushbacks and Knockdowns: The Greatest Baseball Debates of Two Centuries,” he poses provocative questions and goes at them from all sides, setting up an argument, knocking it down, circling back to look from yet another angle.

Barra opens his book with two of the biggest: “Who is the greatest baseball player who ever lived?

“Now -- who is the greatest hitter who ever lived?”

Nearly everybody, he writes, will say that Babe Ruth was the greatest player and Ted Williams the greatest hitter. But is that true? If Williams was the greatest hitter, what does that say about Ruth’s standing in the game? Couldn’t Williams be the greatest player?

These questions start Barra on a 25-page romp through a barrage of statistics about the two men, how and when they played, their competitors, the state of the ballparks they played in, Williams’ absence while serving in World War II, how each fared when playing away from his home park, how their 12 best seasons compared, even a “what if” on if they had been playing at the same time. These are the multitudinous permutations of baseball lore that make it a pastime -- no, an addiction -- for so many fans.

At the end of his exploration of every possible point of comparison between Ruth and Williams, Barra cheerfully concludes: “Do I think Ted Williams was the greatest hitter who ever lived? Yes, I do. Do I think he was the greatest player who ever lived? No, I don’t. Why? I don’t know.

“Perhaps I just can’t reconcile calling a player the greatest ever who didn’t excel in any other area of the game besides hitting, no matter how important hitting is. Perhaps like most baseball fans, I’ve been saying ‘Babe Ruth was the greatest player and Ted Williams the greatest hitter’ over and over in my head for so long that I’ve simply learned to live with the contradiction.”

Using similar blizzards of facts, Barra creates his own All-Star team of the 1950s, which differs sharply from those chosen by 200 baseball writers and editors of the time.

He argues that Chicago Cub third baseman Ron Santo and Chicago White Sox outfielder and third baseman Minnie Minoso are the two best players not in the baseball Hall of Fame.

Barra examines competitive balance in baseball with enough tables of numbers to satisfy even the most statistics-starved fan.

And he looks at the grim consequences that players’ steroid use might have for the whole treasured edifice of baseball stats.

How can you make meaningful comparisons if important numbers were to carry an asterisk implying the possibility of an unnatural assist?

And what happens, Barra asks, if fans “no longer accept the numbers as a true reflection of the players’ on-field performances?” What indeed.