Willie Mays Was Way Better Than Alex Rodriguez

Not sure that Mays needed confirmation from the pocket-protector crowd but OK, the results of the pick-a-metric comparison confirm what my old-fashioned eyeball test tells me, it's Mays in a landslide.

from fivethirtyeight.com
Willie Mays Was Way Better Than Alex Rodriguez:

Certainly, we’ve reflected positively upon Rodriguez’s immense talent — steroids notwithstanding — in the past. But we also thought it would be a useful public service to once again point out that passing a legend on a prestigious statistical list doesn’t necessarily mean you’re the better player. In the case of the Say Hey Kid versus A-Rod, it’s Mays in a landslide.

An easy way to measure Mays’ dominance over A-Rod is to look at the all-time wins above replacement (WAR) leaderboard¹. By total WAR, Mays ranks as the fifth most-productive player in major-league history, trailing only Babe Ruth, Barry Bonds and pitchers Cy Young and Walter Johnson. Mays also ranks as the third-best non-pitcher ever, according to JAWS, which attempts to balance a player’s aggregate WAR compilation against the brilliance of his peak. Among position players in the history of baseball, only Ruth had a better prime — as measured by WAR in a player’s best seven seasons — than Mays did when he was at the top of his game.

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