The 25 best ballplayers not in the Baseball Hall of Fame

The 25 best ballplayers not in the Baseball Hall of Fame

The article gets confused about its premise. Does it mean the 25 BEST or the 25 MOST DESERVING of enshrinement. Clearly Shoeless Joe Jackson should not be 25th on the list in either case. If we are simply talking about BEST, he was a far greater player than Pete Rose, for example, who is eighth.

FAR greater.

Jackson's lifetime adjusted OPS is 170, which means that his average year was better than Pete Rose's best year. In fact, Jackson's worst year (143 OPS+) is almost as good as Rose's best (158 OPS+). There are only 6 players in history with a higher lifetime OPS+: Ruth, Gehrig, Bonds, Williams, Hornsby, Mantle. That's the A list. Make it A+. Jackson's famed contemporary, Ty Cobb, is not on that list, nor is The Man Musial, nor Double X, nor Say Hey, nor Hammerin' Hank. Nobody else.

Rose's career WAR was 79 in 15890 plate appearances; Jackson's was 62 in 5700 plate appearances, which works out to more than 170 in a career as long as Rose's. And Jackson's stats may actually have gotten better if he had not been banned, because he accumulated his stats in the deadball era, but was tossed from the game just as the lively ball era was beginning. (He batted .382 with 121 RBI in his only season in the 1920s.)

I would say that Jackson is the second-best non-pitcher not in Cooperstown. (Barry Bonds, hate him or not, is #1.)

But then there's the other question. What if we rank them by how much they deserve to be in? I would vote for Shoeless Joe just as soon as they let in Casey Wise, Tony Suck, Dick Smith and every other marginal guy who ever patrolled the nation's ballparks ineptly, but honestly.

So I'd rank Jackson close to either first or last, depending on the criterion employed, but not 25th in any case.