Variation of decade thread: Make a team from one player per

[Jiggymike]

In light of rocketlaunch ripping me a new one and making some good points, I thought maybe we could have a similar thread to the "dominant player/decade" one with a little variation. Picking the best player from the 0-9 year of a decade is very arbitrary and ends up favoring players with prolonged careers (like one poster said, dominant =/= best but that's how it turned out).

Instead, my idea is that you are building a baseball team using ONE player from each decade from the 1900s-2000s. It can be a player who was awesome for one year if you like, or someone who was great for 5 years, or all 10. Take ALL aspects into account - hitting, fielding, baserunning. For pitchers, you can just make starting pitchers into relievers, although this will possibly give relievers a better chance of being included.

I'm not very good at this and I am not going to bother to look up stats (frankly, I don't care although they are obviously very helpful in order to support your arguments). I'll make a starting list although I'll be wrong or empty on a few.

Batters:
1900 - Honus Wagner SS - Easy
1910 - Ty Cobb OF - Easy but I'm making him a backup in light of the other players
1920 - Babe Ruth DH - Easy
1930 - Lou Gehrig 1B - Easy unless you want to argue Jimmie Foxx
1940 - Ted Williams RF - Easy, right?
1950 - Willie Stargell - IF Not sure on this one
1960 - Willie Mays CF - Easy
1970 - Joe Morgan 2B - Easy (according to other thread, I never knew how good he was)
1980 - Ricky Henderson - OF. Not sure who to put here. I figure with his speed Henderson should be on here.
1990 - Barry Bonds LF - After reading the other thread, Bonds is the easy choice here. Thomas is also good but doesn't have a position.
2000s - A-Rod 3B - Mostly because of his position, close between him and Pujols.

Pitchers
1900 - Cy Young SP - Gotta take the all time wins leader
1910 - Walter Johnson SP
1920s - Don't know
1930 - Lefty Grove RP - Arbitrary
1940 - Don't know
1950 - Don't know
1960 - Koufax RP - When I think of 60s pitching, I think Koufax. Reliever because of his shortened career
1970 - Tom Seaver SP
1980 - Doc Gooden RP - When I think of 80s pitching I think of Gooden. I'm obv. a Mets fan.
1990 - Clemens SP - Inspired the thread. I still hate him
2000 - Mariano Rivera - Closer. Maybe better in the 90s but as of right now this is your guy to get one inning of outs.

[Kneel B4 Zod]

[ QUOTE ]
1950 - Willie Stargell - IF Not sure on this one

[/ QUOTE ]

you're off by a couple decades

[Jack of Arcades]

50s are Stan Musual, RF. This makes the 80s, uh, George Brett, 3B.

Pitchers:

40s are Hal Newhouser
50s are Whitey Ford (Robin Roberts has an argument)
80s are still Dave Steib
90s should be Maddux.
00s should be Pedro

[Suigin406]

man, rivera is a great pitcher, but like jao said, pedro was absolutely dominant and i give the edge to the sp over the rp...

randy johnson too over rivera possibly...

[Jiggymike]

[ QUOTE ]
50s are Stan Musual, RF. This makes the 80s, uh, George Brett, 3B.

Pitchers:

40s are Hal Newhouser
50s are Whitey Ford (Robin Roberts has an argument)
80s are still Dave Steib
90s should be Maddux.
00s should be Pedro

[/ QUOTE ]

So if you could pick one pitcher from the 80s it would be Dave Steib over Roger Clemens, saying that the 90s should still be Maddux? No way that a dream team ever includes Dave Stieb over Clemens, which is the point of this thread.

[Jiggymike]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
1950 - Willie Stargell - IF Not sure on this one

[/ QUOTE ]

you're off by a couple decades

[/ QUOTE ]

Oops, switched him and Mays. Altough Stargell was better in the 70's he still played for like 8 years in the 60s. Made his first All-Star game in 64, from Wiki.

[Wynton]

Jiggymike,

I agree that the other thread, which I started, suffers from focusing on arbtitrary time periods. But I'm not sure that we do much better with your approach, at least for the question I was really trying to get my hands around.

Basically, I've always felt that the most relevant criteria for greatness is how a player outperforms others during his time period. By that standard, I think most people believe that Babe Ruth is the greatest ever.

In any event, what triggered all this was my curiosity about what other players were "dominant" in their time periods. I guess the problem with asking this question is that there is never any logical or coherent way of categorizing or subdividing each era.

Maybe the only way to have done this, for real, would have been to list the most dominant players for every single year, and then take a look back afterwards and see who tops the list most often during each 5 or 10 year period.

[Jiggymike]

[ QUOTE ]
Jiggymike,

I agree that the other thread, which I started, suffers from focusing on arbtitrary time periods. But I'm not sure that we do much better with your approach, at least for the question I was really trying to get my hands around.

Basically, I've always felt that the most relevant criteria for greatness is how a player outperforms others during his time period. By that standard, I think most people believe that Babe Ruth is the greatest ever.

In any event, what triggered all this was my curiosity about what other players were "dominant" in their time periods. I guess the problem with asking this question is that there is never any logical or coherent way of categorizing or subdividing each era.

Maybe the only way to have done this, for real, would have been to list the most dominant players for every single year, and then take a look back afterwards and see who tops the list most often during each 5 or 10 year period.

[/ QUOTE ]

Yeah it's an interesting question. I figured this might get more on to what you were looking for because in that one it was mostly people trying to figure out who was best from 80-89 or whatever but then it might just turn out to be who had the single best year...

In any case I like reading/discussing this stuff but the other thread got pretty sidetracked.

[Wynton]

Maybe a better question, from me, would have been as follows:

What players could be considered "dominant" over a 7-10 year stretch?

[BellagioPlayer]

Dave Steib?

When was he dominating? He had good stats, yes, but was he dominating?