[vhawk01]

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A player who hits 250 homeruns in a season but doesn't win a championship can not go back and argue that his 250 homeruns is more likely to have won his team a championship, unless he has a time machine.

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Sure he can. It should be rather obvious that hitting 250 home runs is more likely to win a championship than striking out every time.

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The probability of past events is 1.0. You can't say someone is more likely to have won a championship when he didn't win a championship. The probability of him not having won a championship is 100%. Is this point really over people's heads?

Many people who discuss "greatest" are not trying to predict the future. They are trying to predict the past.

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Exactly. Trying to PREDICT the past. Not merely describe it. Thus, EV. Using the limited data that we have from the past, predict what would happen in, say, 100 iterations of the past. IOW, what is the EV of each decision/player. Exactly the opposite of all the things you just said.

But yes, if all we are doing is describing the past, EV has nothing to do with it. And its also mind-numbingly boring and no one would ever spend time talking about it. HOWEVER, this is usually the refuge that dumb people hide in whenever they realize their arguments dont make sense. "Yeah well WHO'S GOT THE RINGS BAYBEEEEEE" and they pretend like they were having a descriptive, and not predictive, conversation all along.