538280: Present your case for Charleston

[Honus Wagner Rules]

538280,

You rank Oscar Charleston as the #1 player of all time. Here is your chance to present your case for him. Please show us why you consider Charleston the greatest player of all time. I would you to do the following as part of you arguing your case:


1) Please show sabermetric evidence for Charleston greatness.

2) You place a great deal of emphasis on "value". How is Charleston's "value" higher than Ruth, Mays, Wagner, Cobb, Williams, Bonds, and Mantle's "value"?

You claim this:

I rate Oscar #1 not because Buck O'Neil says so, or because Jocko Conlan says so, or because anyone else says so. I rate Oscar #1 because based on the info I have been able to gather, Oscar had the most complete skill set of any player the game has ever seen. hear opinions, and based on those opinions I try to come up with a stat line, how the player would translate to the majors. That is how I rate Negro Leaguers. I see Charleston having everything Mays had, but better contact hitting skill.

What info have you gathered? What kind of info is it? How do you come up with a stat line from opinions?

I look forward to you "Case for Oscar Charleston"

[History Of Baseball Fan]

theres no point.

the guy thinks that Mike Schmidt is better than Ty Cobb for crying out loud.

[Blackout]

well considering he has Ty Cobb at #10 on his best players ever, i wont expect it to make much sense

over the last couple of months it seems everyones jumped on the Charleston bandwaggon for some odd reason. I personally dont think he was even the best hitter in the negro leagues, I'd place Gibson ahead of him myself.

where were the Oscar worshippers a year ago?

[runningshoes]

Yeah, I see what you mean, Honus...too bad.

[Honus Wagner Rules]

OK, this thread is NOT about bashing 538280. I honestly want to hear his argument for Charleston. I'm looking forward to reading his response.

[Honus Wagner Rules]

well considering he has Ty Cobb at #10 on his best players ever, i wont expect it to make much sense

over the last couple of months it seems everyones jumped on the Charleston bandwaggon for some odd reason. I personally dont think he was even the best hitter in the negro leagues, I'd place Gibson ahead of him myself.

where were the Oscar worshippers a year ago?

I hate to admit this but I never even heard of Charleston until I came to BBF. I've read a lot of as a kid about the Negro Leaguers and I've read about Paige, Gibson, Lloyd, Bell, Foster, Stuttles, Smooky Joe Williams, etc.

[History Of Baseball Fan]

well considering he has Ty Cobb at #10 on his best players ever, i wont expect it to make much sense

haha, you stole the words right out of my mouth !!

[Captain Cold Nose]

haha, you stole the words right out of my mouth !!

He has posted his views as well as his lists and has offered at least some justification for the most part. Since he at least has come to the table, what about you?

Since you're so fast to criticize, let's see something from you.

[538280]

I do exactly what I said-I read expert opinion on Charleston-and based on that opinion I try to form a stat line in the major leagues. My projected stat line for Charleston is that he could probably hit for about a .350 career average in his own time, and be a great power hitter that hit 40 HRs a year. To go along with that, the opinions on him as a fielder are not hard to find-he was considered to be one of the best fielders in history. He also was one of the greatest basestealers in Negro League History. I see no reason why his baserunning isn't on par with Cobb or Mays.

I've said it before, the difference between Charleston and Cobb are three things-fielding, power hitting, contact hitting. I feel Cobb is probably the second best contact hitter ever (behind only Tony Gwynn). Oscar was a tremendous contact hitter-no doubt, but not better than Cobb. I feel, however, that Oscar was a better power hitter than Cobb. Charleston is about the same power hitter as Mays to me. That is, better than Cobb. Cobb was also a very good slugger, but I really don't think he was an all time elite power hitter. A 140 Rel. SLG% is good, but not tremendous for a deadball era player. The biggest difference between Charleston and Cobb is fielding. I know, I don't value fielding as much as most. But, still, the difference between Charleston/Cobb in the field is large. Cobb is a decent fielder, Oscar is an all time great fielder. The difference there is very significant.

So, to sum it all up, I consider Charleston to be a very slightly better hitter and a significantly better fielder. Charleston is down on contact hitting, but he is also up on power. I consider slugging to be a much more important part of offense than contact. Some of you may disagree with me there, I understand. If you do disagree with me there, then it is completely fair to go with Cobb as a hitter. But, you can't deny the fielding. You can deny that it doesn't make up for the hitting, but I don't agree.

As I've said before, with Mays it's mostly contact hitting. Mays was a good contact hitter, but hardly an all time great there. Charleston has just as good power, is just as good in the field, is just as good in the basepaths, but I feel he is better with contact hitting. Mays compiled a .305 career average in his time. I feel Charleston could have hit about .320 in that time.

I would like to address one more thing.-When I made my comments on eyewitness opinions, I was responding to a post which tried to convince us that Cobb was the greatest because he won a series of polls on the greatest player ever. What I meant when I said, "that means absolutely nothing to me" is that I don't see the logic in rating Cobb #1 because people from way back when thought that. Just like I said, I don't rate Charleston #1 because all these people say so, I rate him #1 because of the info I have learned. I trust eyewitness opinion most of the time when people talk about a specific skill. They say "Charleston had great power", or "Charleston was awesome in the field". I trust them when they say that, but as far as their opinions as to the greatest player ever, I don't view them as anything more than the lists we make here.

[digglahhh]

I hate to admit this but I never even heard of Charleston until I came to BBF. I've read a lot of as a kid about the Negro Leaguers and I've read about Paige, Gibson, Lloyd, Bell, Foster, Stuttles, Smooky Joe Williams, etc.

(Gulp), Ditto.

[digglahhh]

theres no point.

the guy thinks that Mike Schmidt is better than Ty Cobb for crying out loud.

Ths type of debate springs about when two people who rate players differently.

Some people weigh position heavily, others do not, they just put guys in order of their best overall talent or accomplishment. Joe Morgan, IMO, is nowhere near one of the best 20 players to ever play the game, but he is a second baseman. Probably second or third best to ever play the position, add that to the fact that he is so far ahead of players behind him and you'' find many, myself included who'll slip him in the top 20 or so.

Somebody like, say Ken Griffey Jr, would be top 15 of all-time if he produced like that from 2B, but he played CF, a position played by so many greats that he dips to around the late 30's to 40's on most people's lists.

Something can be said for the idea that the best 3B of all time should be ranked ahead of the 3rd best 1B or 2nd best CF. I don't know how many would agree with it, or even if I would, but there is a somewhat logical premise behind it.

I don't know how many of you play fantasy baseball, but this is like the strategic fork of drafting scarce positions high or merely drafting the best overall player available.

[Blackout]

so what about Charleston playing against much inferior competition to Cobb?

[Wee Willie]

Here is a post from earlier (5-31-05) this year by "The Splendid Splinter", talking about first-hand accounts of Charleston as told by his grandfather.

A first hand account is evidence if it is documented soon after the event witnessed took place. If someone saw Charleston play in 1935 and then tried to discribe what he/she saw in 2005, from memory, that's not real good evidence. Human memory is EXTREMELY unreliable. A few years ago a man in America was accused of being a nazi soldier at a death camp. They had several eye-wintesses try to identify him. How in the world are people in their 80s-90s going to identify a man in his 80s-90s as a man they saw 60+ years ago when the man was in his 20s?

My great grandpa has seen Charleston 16 times out of the 71 Negro League games that I counted in his journal. Most (48) of them were written down within a few weeks of the actual games. The rest of them came later in life, some like a year after and some as far as like 30 years after(i rarely pay attention to those games but I do keep it in mind because my great grandpa has wrote them and they are along the line as the other games. Like none of them are about some crazy stories, for example, like Gibson hitting something like a 700 ft. HR. My great grandpa has seen one monster shot from Gibson, and he claimed it had the potential to be over 600 ft. and realistically about 550-560 ft. at the time he saw the HR.

June 18th, 1932
"My friends (Freddy and Homer) and I went to measure his (Gibson's) shot after the game, remembering where the ball landed in a certain area, it was measured 564 ft. but we gave ourselves 5 ft. each way potentially because we couldn't see exactly where it landed so it could've been as low as 559 ft. and as high as 569 ft." He said Gibson's max distance would've probably been about 610 maybe 620 ft., but he would be very surprised if he hit one that far. He didn't believe most of those stories himself.

But he has seen Charleston enough times for me, that I believe him and all the stories were pretty much similar every time.

August 14th, 1922
" Oscar was playing CF for the ABC's. He plays really shallow in CF, like Speaker, but plays about 15 ft. behind where Speaker would be. It is a beautiful sight to watch him playing at CF in the sea of green. So fluid and graceful. Made one catch that only a handful of CFs would make. He lunged foward with his mitt as the ball was coming over his head, dove for it, and caught it. (I'm guessing that's something like Mays famous catch but dove for it because he wasn't there quick enough.)"


just a comparsion my great grandpa made about Oscar with some of the great players in history...

March 29th, 1983 (so like 40-50 years after the last time he seen Oscar play)

"Oscar Charleston was the greatest CF I have ever seen. Of course, if you count Cobb as CF, then Oscar would be 2nd, but I think of Ty as a RF or LF more than a CF. His defense was good, not something like Speaker/ Mays/ Ashburn levels, but probably a notch below. Those three were just amazing, something out of this world. Oscar is definitely in my top 10 best defensive CF, not top 5, but in the top 10. Probably would be better to compare him to like Mantle or someone of that level. Speaker, in my mind, might be the only CF that could be a better hitter than Oscar, but I rank Oscar first only because he had more power than Speaker, but not as much as like Mays or Mantle- Dimaggio would be the best comparsion for power. Hitting for average, only Dimaggio or Speaker could challenge him for that title. Probably average higher than Dimaggio and probably right around where Speaker is. As for stolen bases and baserunning, Oscar was in a class of his own. No one could challenge him there, not even Speaker. He wasn't super fast and probably was just fast, but he was one of the smartest runners in the game though. He knew when to run and jump to a great lead."


"As he got older and started to gain weight, his defense at CF quickly declined. It went from very good to average in matter of 2 or 3 years, then he had to switch over to 1B, which was in his early 30's so he didn't play CF as long as everyone else, but when he did play there in his prime, he was more than capable of playing CF. The only way I would move Oscar to LF or RF is if I had these guys as my CF first... Speaker, Mays, Mantle, Dimaggio, Ashburn, and Torrienti, anybody else I would rather have Oscar at CF"

So basically, you have a man (Splinter's great-grandfather) who saw Oscar play a lot and wrote down a fair amount of first-hand accounts soon after watching him. And, in rating him, he put Charleston behind Cobb but ahead of Mays. So that basically means he believed Cobb to be the best hitter of the 3, and Mays to be the best defensive outfielder of the 3.

[Wee Willie]

Here are some stats on Charleston 538280 gave earlier this year:

I was able to find some stats for Charleston, from a book called A Team for the Ages by Robert W. Cohen. It's not one of my favortie books, but it does have some Negro League stats in it. So here they are:

AB Hits Runs 2b 3b HR RBI BA SB OBP SLG
2992 1069 x 184 63 151 x .357 153 x .612

Runs, RBI, and OBP apparently couldn't be found. Cohen says in his book that these are stats that "we are absolutely sure about". I'm not sure what seasons those stats come from (his prime, the start of his career, the end, or a combination). Obviously, Charleston had many more at-bats than that. Here is his career, based on those stats, projected out to a 9000-at bat career.

AB Hits Runs 2b 3b HR RBI BA SB OBP SLG
9000 3216 x 553 190 454 x .357 460 x .612

Based on these numbers, it looks like Charleston was a very complete player who could do a lot of things well.

I'm not sure what the time span (in years) these stats cover, but if they are only covering Negro League games, here's what they suggest to me:

-- Charleston more than likely (but I'm not 100% certain) was a better hitter for average than Mays.
-- Charleston did NOT quite have Mays' power. 151 homers in 2992 at-bats equates to about 27 homers every 550 at-bats (roughly a major league season). Mays averaged 34 per 550, in nearly 11,000 major-league AB's.
-- Considering that the quality of competition Charleston faced was probably considerably lower than what Mays faced, both the batting and slugging avgs. listed above would be somewhat lower had he played in the majors. 538280 suggests a career average of .350 with around .600 slugging. I'm thinking more along the lines of .320-.325 BA with .540-.550 SA had he played his full career in the majors.

[538280]

so what about Charleston playing against much inferior competition to Cobb?

In making my projected stat line, I do incorporate league quality.