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A Baseball Hall of Fame Dart Game

The Baseball Hall of Fame, Cooperstown, New York.

The Baseball Hall of Fame, Cooperstown, New York.

If they would only let you, and they never will, you could go to the great hall of member plaques in the Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, New York and throw darts at those individual memorials you could not read from across the room. Chances are good that 25 dart strikes later, you would have put together a team roster that could play with or beat any of the top MLB clubs playing today in 2013.

It simply isn’t going to happen, but here’s another possibility.

Thanks to the great and varied ways that Baseball Almanac puts together interesting data, it’s now possible to draft a quick team based on best performer variables by position. I put together the following table this morning that identifies the “best”   regular position, pitching, and managerial candidates by two variables. This decision doesn’t mean that I actually agree with every choice the data provided, but I do think we could play a pretty good game or two with the 17 separate players the data chose for the nine spots.

A Two Variable Look at the Best Players by Nine Positions and a Preferred Manager:

POSITION # IN HOF BEST B.A. B.A. MOST HR HR #
Catcher 13 Mickey Cochrane .320 Johnny Bench 389
1st Base 18 Dan Brouthers .342 Harmon Killebrew 573
2nd Base 19 Rogers Hornsby .358 Rogers Hornsby 301
3rd Base 11 Wade Boggs .328 Mike Schmidt 548
Shortstop 22 Honus Wagner .327 Ernie Banks 512
Left Field 20 Ed Delahanty .346 Ted Williams 521
Center Field 18 Ty Cobb .366 Willie Mays 660
Right Field 23 Babe Ruth .342 Hank Aaron 755
POSITION # IN HOF MOST WINS WINS MOST “K”S “K”S
Pitcher 61 Cy Young 511 Nolan Ryan 5,714
POSITION # IN HOF MOST TIME YEARS MOST WINS WINS
Manager 19 Connie Mack 53 Years Connie Mack 3,731 Wins

As a matter of personal preference, I would take these nine guys from their primes as my preferred all time lineup and batting order:

Willie Mays, CF

Rogers Hornsby, 2B

Babe Ruth, RF

Josh Gibson, C

Lou Gehrig, 1B

Hank Aaron, LF

Honus Wagner, SS

Brooks Robinson, 3B

Satchel Paige, P

I don’t expect all of you to agree with my picks, That right to different opinions is one of the things that has always made talking baseball a lot of fun, but what the heck! I wouldn’t protest too much if I was forced to take Joe Jackson or Ted Williams over Hank Aaron in left – or the great George Sisler over Lou Gehrig at first, or Christy Mathewson or Walter Johnson over Satchel Paige as my starting pitcher.

Heck again! We could go back to throwing darts in the Hall and probably pick a club that was better than most.

Please post your own dart game results, or choices, if you have any.

Have a nice peaceful Sunday, everybody.

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This entry was posted on August 18, 2013 at 2:45 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “A Baseball Hall of Fame Dart Game”

  1. gregclucas's avatar gregclucas Says:
    August 19, 2013 at 1:38 pm | Reply

    Bill, I only have two major disagreements. Due to forces beyond their control neither Josh Gibson nor Satchel Paige can properly be evaluated. They both MAY have been the greatest at their positions, but we will never know. On a team such as yours I could never elevate them to first team status. The competition both faced on a day in day out basis did not compare to MLB even with black stars excluded.

  2. Bill McCurdy's avatar Bill McCurdy Says:
    August 21, 2013 at 6:30 pm | Reply

    Greg – The rationale for your objections to Gibson and Paige is totally unassailable. We cannot objectively compare from the Negro Leagues on the basis of comparable records by volume or constant variable collection. – I chose with these two men to go out on the limb of legend they each had generated about their abilities. When the Hall first started inducting Negro Leaguers, I was very much for it, but I didn’t see any way to fairly compare them to their era peers in MLB, except for those few games they played in mixed race games during the barnstorming season – and that was still too small a sample to make any fair comparisons.

    My picks of them here also was very much an expression of my wish to see how these guys could do as a battery playing for the best. And it was more fun picking Paige and Gibson than it would have been picking Mathewson and Cochrane, the men who would have been my objective choices.

    We’ll just never know for sure beyond this certainty from today’s growing rainbow racial world. – Those primarily black players of today are good enough to play with anybody. – Chances are high that Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson were too – back in the day.

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