What is Greatness, or What is Peak?

This is a non-sabermetric question; greatness, unlike “value” or its slightly more vague cousin “ability”, cannot be tied up in a neat numerical package. After all, the word itself implies some sort of transcendent quality that leads to bromides such as “I know it when I see it.”

The only reason I bring this up is that “great” and its synonyms are often used in Hall of Fame discussions, or the ever-present “100 Greatest Players of All-Time”. Even though it is difficult to define greatness, everyone has some internal definition that guides their thoughts when answering these questions.

So suppose you have your personal definition of greatness, and it involves “peak value” or some such thing. How would you go about convincing me that I should care about peak value as it relates to who should be in the HOF or whether Sandy Koufax was “greater” then Don Sutton? Truth be told, I have never seen a satisfying explanation. I suppose this could be because I am not in that camp, and my definition of terms is different then yours, and this different viewpoint is an insurmountable obstacle in me accepting your argument.

This may well be true; however, I will now try to justify my position, which is that the concept of peak value is unimportant for anything other then the question of who had the highest peak value. In other words, I don’t think that looking at a player’s five best seasons or best three consecutive seasons or eight best seasons or what have you is very useful in answering the HOF or greatness questions. There is nothing wrong with asking “Who was the most valuable player over a five-year period?”, but I simply do not see the relevance of this to the greater questions.

My position starts with the premise that what is truly important in the baseball world is helping your team win games. We could now digress and argue about whether this means the actual wins you contributed, including the situation in which your performance occurred (WPA); or whether this means the actual wins you would have contributed had your performance been distributed across possible situations in an average distribution (TPR); or whether this means the actual wins you would have contributed if you had played in ballparks that were neutral in every way, and again your performance had been distributed across possible situations in an average distribution (XW); or any other number of possible ways you could quantify “value”, “performance”, or “ability”.

But I’m not going there, not now, because one can agree with the principle that contributing to team wins is the important thing without agreeing exactly on how to quantify the contribution.

From my perspective (and again that’s all I can offer here, and I’m not passing this off as a black and white issue), the only way I can see giving extra credit for peak performance is if it results in tangible team success, more so then scattered performance would.

This standard immediately in my mind throws out any construction of “best 3 years” or “best 5 consecutive years”. There’s no logical reason why some arbitrary standard like that would be directly related to the extra team success resulting from clustered performance. It *may* be correlated with it, but it certainly in and of itself does not represent it.

Therefore, it all comes down to the extra team success. What value is it to a team to have ten wins in one year rather then five wins in two different seasons? There are two possible answers that I can see. One is that since the number of roster slots on a team is constrained, a player who contributes +1 WAR may have positive value, but if you have a whole team of guys like that, you’re only going to win 82 games. In other words, there is a “roster slot filling cost” that delinearizes the relationship between two players’ WAR. This I can accept, but I don’t think it would make a big difference.

The other, and much more common and potentially bigger impact answer, is that concentrated performance helps the team to win more pennants. Bill James and others, particularly Michael Wolverton and Dan Levitt, have modeled this and found that it is true. One 10 WAR season will have a bigger “pennants added” value then two 5 WAR seasons. However, the difference is not great. Under a career “pennants added” approach, Sandy Koufax is still unable to crack a list of the forty most valuable pitchers of all-time. Also, these approaches are fairly hard to do properly, as you need to make a number of assumptions about the distribution of team winning percentage, what exactly the “pennant” threshold is, how the player’s impact on the team should be valued, etc. Of course, one could argue that this means that the existing approaches are inadequate and that this is why the results have not saved Koufax. I do not think this is the case, I am only weakly trying to justify why I have not gone all out in trying to model it myself. The most user-friendly approach I believe would be to compare the rigorous Pennant Added figures to more conventional ones, and either find a baseline that approximates the impact, or maybe a formula that uses an exponent to increase the value of big seasons, etc.

From my perspective, “peak” is a fuzzy word, since so many people have their own definition for it. Now “peak” is fine for answering the question of “who was the best over a five-year span”, which, while I don’t feel is particularly relevant to the HOF, I have conceded is a legitimate question to ask, if only for the heck of it. I think that “clustered” or “concentrated” performance is a better way to describe the potential impact of high “peak” performance as it pertains to a discussion of the player’s career as a whole.

But what nobody has ever been able to explain, at least persuasively enough to change my outlook, is why I should, say, evaluate Hall of Famers based on “peak” value. It seems to come down to a belief that the Hall of Fame is about “greatness”, and that Sandy Koufax was great and maybe Don Sutton was and maybe he wasn’t. Koufax just should be in the Hall of Fame because that’s how they feel.

Well, if that’s how you feel then knock yourself out. But it ain’t me, babe. I hereby issue a friendly challenge for any peak supporter who happens to be reading this to write a comment explaining why I or anyone else out there should evaluate Hall of Fame candidates in terms of peak value rather then in terms of career value, with considerations for the extra value of “concentrated” performance. I just explained why I don't buy into the peak value mindset, so I would love to know why I'm all wet, if you feel that way. And I certainly wouldn't mind giving your view exposure. If you want to write an article lenght response, I'll even post it here, assuming you have no better place to post, which is doubtful because in five minutes you could set up your own blog which would probably beat posting here.