Recent discussions on this board, and my reading of the new Ty Cobb biography last month, got me thinking about what really constitutes being the Best?  Is it doing everything/most things better than everyone else, or is it fundamentally changing the game?  Is Howe the greatest hockey player ever - someone who did everything better than everyone else - or is it Gretzky, who fundamentally changed how offense was played?  In basketball was it Jordan - for whom rules were liberalized to accent his style of play, or was it Chamberlain for whom rules were changed to RESTRICT his style of play because it changed the game?

In our beloved baseball, I don't know that anyone can argue that for his era for a prolonged period of time, nobody else has ever done what Cobb did vis-à-vis his contemporaries.  His batting and base running were light-years ahead of the rest of the league.  Then there's Ruth, and I don't think I need to go on about his batting and how it changed (and arguably saved, but that's another thread) baseball. 

I'm on record, many times on this site, as saying I believe Ruth is far and away the best baseball player ever.  This thread is not a debate about who was/is the best; it's a philosophical discussion of what constitutes being the best, in this case in baseball.  Let the debate begin!

Outstanding question as always pinotfan! I firmly believe we will have a dozen and a half different answers. Somehow I believe it may be tied into the era the person played in and the knowledge of the fans of that era. There are thousands that believe Mike Trout is the "best" in the same sense that Gretzky was so recognized even when older fans laughed at that having seen Howe at his greatness. Thousands believed there was no one better than Joe D during his playing time; firmly believed he reinvented both hitting and fielding. And finally, the other fact that muddies the picture is the fact that we're talking about a "team" sport.

Would Jordan be so thought of without his excellent teammates, coaching staff and front office? We tend to recognize him because of the championships, but those are a product of a "team" not an individual. Could we say the same of Ruth? (hmmmm...perhaps not, he was unique). Could Ruth have brought the St. Louis Browns to a World Series? But then you have to factor in the Browns' owners, front office, management, etc. So many factors! So, it's a terrific question, it will be interesting to see responses. Perhaps we have to reverse the question of a players greatness and simply ask this - if that player did 'not' play would the game of that era be diminished in the eyes of the fans?

HOWE/GRETZKY

WILT/ JORDAN

JIM BROWN/ J. RICE

BABE/ W. MAYS

J. LOUIS/ ALI

ABE/FDR

ELVIS/BEATLES

pinotfan you raise a wonderful issue. 

For example, I consider the two greatest writers (fiction) of all time to be, in order, Aeschylus and Shakespeare. 

Why? Aeschylus wrote something - the Oresteian Trilogy - that encapsulates maybe all of the most important issues that society has to deal with - loyalty, justice, family, social and political organization, what is owed to the god(s) and to fellow citizens etc. In Prometheus Bound, or the extant parts of it, he dealt among other things with why civilization is worthwhile, and did so without being blind to its failings or drawbacks. 

Shakespeare was close to being as broad in what he dealt with, but if Aeschylus, who for us means only a few complete works, is Sandy Koufax, Shakespeare is Walter Johnson - one great work after another, which as a body deal with almost everything. 

 I am a poor critic or analyst of literary style (I know when I like something but that is about the limit of my abilities there) but I think on writing style both of these authors stand very high as well.

I think just as highly of Aristotle in the field of philosophy or social thought, read the "Politics" I tell my students, even where Aristotle is wrong he is asking all the most important questions - what should be important, what makes a political community, what things are necessary but not sufficient conditions for having one, why is this the most important thing in the world and so on.

In music I would be hard-put to even figure out who is in second place behind Beethoven, I am so convinced he is that far ahead of the field, like Secretariat running the Preakness, but I suppose it would be Bach. But Bach is merely great. Beethoven seems to have incorporated everyone and everything (speaking of Western music only of course) that came before him and then doing more with it than the sum of their parts AND adding something else. When the voices start to sing in the 9th Symphony, no matter how many times I hear it, I come away convinced that the world has changed. 

So here, unlike with the examples of authors, the criteria is not "who set the whole thing up for us to discuss ever since?" but rather "who summed the whole thing up and took it miles further?"

Bob Dylan partly fits this last criteria - today it is not just the great songwriting over a period of especially 6-7 years that most amazes me, but that Dylan has an encyclopedic knowledge of American music and all of its various root streams - Gospel, Appalachian music, Delta Blues, Jazz, Country, Western and Cowboy music, and so on. Yet what he did with it made it something else entirely. 

So leaving these threads, I will mention an interesting conversation I  had years ago with an anarchist girlfriend, once a very well-known figure in the punk movement in first LA and then NY. She said "we all had this idea that the revolutionary thing about punk was that anyone could do it. It wasn't restricted only to people with a certain talent and we were breaking down the musician/fan/spectator hierarchies. But the fact is, the Sex Pistols really were a whole lot better than everyone else."

Were the Beatles the best???

OR THE STONES

NEITHER.  THE WHO WERE THE BEST BRITISH INVASION BAND.  NOT QUITE AS FAMOUS, WAY MORE TALENT.

In response to the original question, I think best means best - that is, most talented, having the most notable achievements, maybe impressing the fans the most.  Best is just the superlative form of good.  The best player is the most good.  Simple as that.  I tend to agree with you - the best position player, at least, has to be Ruth.  And it's not just because of his role in popularizing the home run.  Babe Ruth was the best hitter in baseball in 1919, if not 1918, though people may not have realized it until several years later when they started to recognize the value of the long ball.  He remained the best hitter in baseball straight through into the early '30s, at which point he himself was comfortably into his mid-30s.  I don't think anybody, with the possible exception of Bonds, has been the best hitter in the sport for that kind of time frame.  Even if you downgrade his absurd OPS+ numbers from 1920-1921 because of the lack of competition, he's still got some of the best seasons in the history of the sport.  You have to wonder what Ted Williams' career would look like without the war seasons, but outside of that, I don't see any real competition except for Cobb and Bonds.  Downgrade Bonds a little bit for chemical enhancement, and really, nobody quite measures up.

And all of that is ignoring the fact that you could easily count the number of better left-handed pitchers than Ruth in 1916-1917 (his last 2 full seasons on the mound) on one hand.  Heck, he led the AL in ERA in '16.  He went 47-25 over those 2 years and he was 21 and 22 years old.

If you use the word "greatest," instead of "best," then there might be more room for interpretation.  Great can mean very good, but it can also mean important, or significant.  In this case, for baseball, Ruth is still the greatest as well as the best.  But maybe not for the same reasons - maybe more for popularizing the more modern style of offense, rather than just for good he was at it.  Eventually, home runs were going to catch on, and it was never going to take very long once the live balls came into play.  But more people would have listened to Cobb and resisted the change if Ruth hadn't been there to help it along.

Rolling Stone, and everyone else, always lists Jimmie Hendrix as the greatest guitar player of all time.  I believe that.  But I don't believe he was the best.  So which are you really asking about?

While a bit off topic, I feel compelled to share a story I once read about Tyrus R. Cobb. In the mid 1920s, when he was still good but getting a bit long in the tooth, Ty was getting a little fed up with all the accolades heaped on the Babe. Cobb felt like Babe was getting praise for his homers while people were dismissive of his own style.

Cobb told a writer that he was going to put on a power display to show people he could hit dingers if he wanted. So he did. Over two games he belted out 5 homers and proved his point. Guess old Ty still liked the dead ball style game, but had the skill set to belt the ball far if/when he wanted to do so. It left some questions unanswered of course, such as why didn't Cobb keep belting those bombs if he had the capability. Nonetheless, the story stuck in my mind.

May 5-6 1925.  Whether he "called" the shots in the manner in which the story is told is of course hard to ascertain, unless someone can find a contemporaneous account that supports it.

But he did in fact hit 5 HR across 2 games.

No one reasonably thinks Cobb could have kept up any sort of pace like that, but if he did have the ability to hit for more power, and yet somehow chose not to do so, it boggles the mind.  Cobb, whatever one thinks of him, was one of the greatest competitors the game has ever known.  It would be completely out of character for him to knowingly not do the best he could to help his team win.

Thanks contrarian... now I can look up those boxscores in BB reference.com. Agree with your points.

Posted by dahsdebater on 7/16/2015 6:55:00 PM (view original):
NEITHER.  THE WHO WERE THE BEST BRITISH INVASION BAND.  NOT QUITE AS FAMOUS, WAY MORE TALENT.

without a doubt!

Posted by mlent on 7/16/2015 6:29:00 PM (view original):
Were the Beatles the best???

With regards to fame and originality:  Obviously, the Beatles.

With regards to longevity:  Obviously, the Stones, followed by the Who.

With regards to talent and down-right awesomeness:  I gotta go with Led Zeppelin!

dahs makes a good point in that greatest is probably a better term than best (at least for me). IMO greatest would entail how they impacted and changed the game for the better and forever as much as cobb in the deadball and ruth in the twenties had a immense  affect on their game they had contempories of such that could in some ways be comparable ie:joe jackson,eddie collins honus wagner  for cobb  and gehrig,foxx,dimaggio for ruth and others.  i don't think wilt chamberlain will ever have a contempory the way he so dominanted a team game his stats are so way over the top in comparison to any other player in the history of basketball.i mean has any other athlete had rules made to inhibit their quality of play?  for me ruth is the best in baseball jim brown in football but the greatest is chamberlain