baseball

I will go ahead and dive into my arguments, but I will break this down into sections to make this easier. 1) Defense. I would strongly disagree that defense is of little importance. We are, after all, arguing based on a DEFENSIVE position, not simply who was the best batter. Though I am also entirely confused about this, since Mickey has a better defensive rating than any big name CF batter. His career .984, edges over Mays' .981 and Joe's .978. I would think such a thing would have been a strong point for my opponent (or I might be leading you into a trap). But, since my opponent wishes to ignore defense, I shall bring in someone to replace Joe that I originally threw out because he was a hitter only and just stood out in CF until his time. .. Cy freaking Cobb [1][2]. 2) Era 2. a) Joe I will grace Joe with one parting bit of defense before Ty replaces his booty. My opponent claims that Joe played in a batter's era, while Mickey was in a pitcher's era. This is not entirely true [3]. As we can see, the real "batter's" era was the 20's and early 30's, when national averages were floating in the .280's and even some .290's. Joe started in 1936, when the average was .284, and it began going down at his rookie year until he retired in 1951 (the same year that Mickey and Mays started). For much of his career, 1941 - 1951, it bounced in the .250's and .260's, while when Mickey was playing it was bouncing in the .250's until the end of his career in the mid 60's (Mickey played from 51' - 68') when it dropped to the .240's. So the league difference was really only about 15 points between eras, yet Joe batted almost 30 points higher. That is far more than the difference of the league averages, so it is illogical to claim that the era's are what make for that difference. 2. b) Ty Freaking Cobb (pretty sure that is his actual middle name [2]). Now, you heard me say that the batter's era was the 20's (that is for batting average, for HRs, we'll likely get into next round). But Ty started playing in 1905 when the average was only .248 and it didn't break the .240's until 1911 and didn't break out of the .260's until 1920. Ty Cobb's first 6 years we harder for batters than almost all of Mickey's career (apart for the end of it, but definitely for his prime). Yet Ty broke the .300 mark 5 of those 6 years and broke .350 in 3 of those 6 (Mickey only broke .350 twice in his entire career). Ty went on to break .350 eleven times in a row (from 1909 - 1919). What we see, is that Ty played much of his career (16 years of it) before the big hitter era and still utterly crushed Mickey in all respects to batting. 3) Mickey vs Mays Both Mickey and Mays started in 1951 (Mays got RotY, cough cough). To accurately compare the to each other (since they played in the same era) we should only look when they both played. So any HRs, RBIs, etc that Mays had after Mickey retired are ignored. We should only look at 51' through 68' (we can still look at 52' and 53', when Mays served his country and Mickey did not, because Mickey will need all the help he can get). (please note, that all these numbers go back to sources presented in R1) This will be number intensive, so I will try to make it look like a list and it will be in the format of. .. [category], Mays' stat, Mickey's stat Hits, 2782, 2415 HRs, 587, 536 RBIs, 1654, 1509 2Bs, 446, 344 3Bs, 129, 72 BA, .305, .298 SLG, .575, .557 SOs, 1147, 1710 As we can see in the time frame that both players played, Mays was better in EVERY stats that matters. Of course, Mays played longer and his age would skew his career averages, but when the two were together, Mays was clearly the better player. And of course, if we look at just batting, Ty Cobb was better than both of them. I will leave this at this for now. Thank you, [1] . http://www.baseball-reference.com... [2] . http://i1.wp.com... [3] . http://www.baseball-almanac.com...