Some sad news, one of our members has passed away.

I can't confirm this info but the source where I read this is very reliable.

BBHN underwent successful surgery but formed a blood clot and passed away January 5, 2008 at age 55.

Really, wow that's horrible news, I was wondering why he didn't post on these forums anymore I guess he was feeling to well, and like you said he had to have surgery. This a sad story, my condolences go out to his family and friends.

This is a sad time. The fact that Jim will be missed on these boards is dwarfed by the enormous loss to those that knew him personally. Having said that, in honor of him, I will post what I believe to be one of his better efforts. He truly loved being a part of these baseball chat communities.


Dear Randy,

Here is the post I made last night about Ruth-vs.-Mays. I think it's particularly effective because I've been an enormous Mays fan for 49 years, and believed him to be the all-time greatest player until I was in my late 30's (a fact I failed to disclose).

I grew up in the Bay Area, and first started following baseball the same year Willie Mays came to San Francisco. I knew even at age 5 how blessed I was, because I was getting to experience an incredible baseball career. More than a few times over the ensuing years, I thought to myself, "This must be what it felt like to be a kid in New York in the 1920's."

In my nearly 5 decades of studying baseball history, nothing has happened to change my opinion that I was one incredibly blessed young baseball fan. I think a credible argument can be made that Mantle was better than Mays--based on peak value plus career OBP, GIDP, HR/AB and RC/27--but it's my view Mays was the better of the two. It's also my view Mays was better than Cobb, though Cobb's astonishing career RBI total (1,937, in the Dead Ball Era!) gives him a good case for being considered better than Mays.

However....

As much as I hate to let go of my childhood idols, and thus my fiercely held belief Willie was the greatest player of all time... it's just not so. There is no way Mays' superiority in the outfield and on the bases made up the difference between them at the plate. In my view, it's not even arguable. Here's why:

(1) Ruth leads Mays by a whopping 90 points in career OBP, which, given the number of their respective plate appearances, adds up to a ton of bases;

(2) Ruth leads Mays by a preposterous 133 points in career slugging average--a chasm which cannot begin to be closed by "time-line adjustment," the de-plantationizing of baseball, etc.; and

(3) Ruth had 10,616 career plate appearances and made 5,757 career outs; Mays had 12,493 career plate appearances and made 8,056 outs. This means that if Ruth had kept playing in late 1935 and for the next few years--and if he had gone 0 for 1,877, giving him the same number of career plate appearances as Mays--he would STILL have made only 7,634 outs, which is 422 FEWER outs than Mays made.

No matter how wedded you are to your best player opinion, and nobody is any more wedded to Mays as #1 than I used to be, how can you get around the fact Ruth could go 0 for 1,877 and still be 422 outs behind Mays?

Or, if you prefer, look at it this way:

Ruth could go 0 for 1,877, have the same number of career plate appearances as Mays, and he would still be a whopping 413 career runs created ahead of Mays. That's not a big gap; it's the Grand Freakin' Canyon. There is no way any outfielder can make up for that kind of gap on the bases and in the field. Hitting and creating runs are by far the most important things a position player does, and Ruth did those things so much better than Mays it's ridiculous.

OH, the response will come, "but Mays did what he did in vastly more difficult conditions, facing speedier, desegregated infields and outfields, and generally better pitchers."

Not good enough. Ruth wasted 5.5 prime years hitting dead balls, with a home park whose RF and RCF were outrageously deep. Had he played his entire career under the circumstances which prevailed after 1919, his career slugging average would be well over .700--a figure not reached by any hitter for even one season between 1957 (Ted Williams) and 1994 (Steroid Ball). He also would have scored and driven in impossibly large numbers of runs, unreachable by any player, and would have a better career OBP than Ted Williams, as well as career totals fully as Chamberlain-esque as his single-season totals were in the 1920's.

Yes, Ruth's two monster seasons with over .800 slugging averages occurred in the Polo Grounds, but so did the first 5.5 years of Mays' career (1951-1952, 1954-1957), which is 2.5 years longer than Ruth played in that wonderfully absurd park. No, Ruth didn't face Sandy Koufax, but he faced and fared pretty well against Lefty Grove, who had a far greater career and an arguably greater peak (the first of his two five-year peaks, that is) than Koufax. Mays was 338/441 as a base stealer, which is vastly better than Ruth did, but does anyone seriously want to argue that those bases and comparatively few caught stealings close more than a trivial amount of the gap between the two?

As for Mays-the-fielder, I've always considered him the best I've seen, though stats say Ashburn, Flood, Blair and Andruw Jones (at a minimum) were better, and though a reading of Timothy Gay's outstanding, even-handed Tris Speaker bio will leave you wondering whether that old bigot was better in CF than Willie. Ruth, by contrast, was a very good RF for most of his non-pitching career, but a dreadful one at the end, and ultimately was an above-average RF for his overall career, but nothing like Kaline or Clemente, and certainly nowhere near Mays in career defensive value.

But replace Mays with an ordinary defensive CF for his entire career, and how many more runs do his teams yield? Not nearly as many as a lot of people seem to think, and nowhere remotely proximate to the number of runs the Yankees lose by replacing Ruth with an ordinary offensive player. Not close, no way, never.

There is no reasonable way of looking at their career numbers--either their "average" figures or their totals--and concluding they were close... even with the fielding and baserunning differences thown in. Therefore, any argument in Mays' favor perforce rests on the notion the level of play in Mays' time was not only better than in Ruth's time, but exponentially better.

But here's an interesting fact: Mays was closer in age to Ruth (36 years) than he is to Ken Griffey, Jr. (38 years). So, if players got vastly "bigger, faster and stronger" between Ruth's time and Mays' time--and I mean without steroids, greenies and other b.s.--how is it that they didn't NATURALLY do the same between Mays' time and Junior's time? Yet I never hear anyone say that modern players are legitimately better by a huge margin than in the time of Mays, Mantle and Aaron.

The answer, I believe, is that the average player in Mays' time was better than the average player in Ruth's time, and not as good as the average non-cheating player today, but not by nearly the margin many would have us believe. Certainly not by enough to nullify the Grand Canyon which separates #3 from #24 offensively.

It's a conclusion I was loath to embrace, given my childhood and teen love affair with Mays-the-player, but it's an inescapable conclusion nonetheless:

Babe Ruth was a greater player than Willie Mays.

BBHN

I didn't even know the guy, but this brought me down bad. Sorry life ended so early, man.

I remember talking to him the day he turned 54. We talked about how Babe had died at 53 and sorta joked about Jim outliving Ruth. For him, he was kinda proud. It seemed to put into perspective just how young that is. There's nothing any of us can do except miss him. Perhaps the next time you see a Rifleman episode, which was one of his favorites, or you hear a Beatles tune, you'll think of him, if even for a second. I know I will.

My Prayers go out to his family and friends.