Barry Bonds, Todd Helton, and Mickey Mantle are the top three batters in baseball … well, according to a new study that used network science to rank players by analyzing the outcome of every at-bat from 1954 to 2008. The study, which a Wired article called “the baseball version of ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,’” had the advantage of comparing players from different eras, which means we can see how Albert Pujols might have fared against Sandy Koufax. Some factors, of course, get lost in time translation — steroids, e.g. [%comments]
Multidecadal Fantasy Baseball
TAGS: Baseball, data analysis
and 
. You can also watch it on 
I love when academics (especailly economists) decide that they don’t need to see if people outside of academia have found out the answer to a question before they decide they have a better answer to the question.
As other posters have said, this study is just silly.
Amen to Fielding. Between BaseballProspectus.com, Fangraphs.com, PitchF/X, and Hittracker, there is a lot more brilliant work going down than using network theory to rank ballplayers. This is a surface level article out of the Freakonomics guys.
It does not take late-career decline into effect as much as it should, so all current players, and anyone who retired early, are given HUGE advantage. For that I agree with the majority of the posters who don’t like it; however, Todd Helton is probably the most underrated player of all time. His batting average numbers aren’t bolstered as much by the thin air as you make it out. Nobody else on the Rockies has a huge standout, and the bit of difference there is with most players is due to home runs flying out more often. This is not how Helton compiles his amazing numbers.
Second best of all time? Definitely not. Top ten best hitters of the past 20 years? Possibly.
This sort of thing has is already done by http://www.fangraphs.com/
If you look at the paper cited in the Wired piece, its point is to demonstrate the effects of networks and study the properties of baseball networks in particular, not to provide a definitive ranking of players. Why expect something that isn’t even the goal of the authors? It is picking apart straw men to criticize people for not succeeding to do something that wasn’t even their goal.
Many of the limitations of the paper’s indicated rank-ordering that are mentioned in the above posts are acknowledged in the paper because of course one must consider such things if that is one’s purpose. Also included is where Albert Pujols is ranked (which is indeed higher than Helton; he’s not in the ranking published in Wired because only players with 10+ years of service were included in the table in question). Additionally, none of the authors are economists—nor are the authors “the Freakonomics guys”, so why blame people just for posting something they feel their audience would find interesting? Judging from the response, it seems they made a good call in this respect.