Vol. 135: Who’s the greatest?

Modern science answers your questions

During a halftime interview on Penn’s student radio station in 1980, the old Philadelphia Eagles stalwart Chuck Bednarik— one of the leading football players of all time, not to mention the last of pro football’s “60-minute men”— was asked to choose the greatest game of his college career at Penn.

Without hesitation, Bednarik picked the 1948 Penn-Army game, a thrilling affair played in his senior year before 78,205 fans at Frankin Field. That day, an underdog Penn squad held the lead three times against the nation’s third-ranked team. Penn was still in front, 20 to 19, in the final minute when West Point’s Arnold Galiffa threw a touchdown pass to Jack Trent, and Army escaped with a 26-20 victory.

The interviewer, a Penn student, expressed surprise: How could a winner like Bednarik choose a defeat as his greatest college game?

You could almost hear Bednarik shrug over the airwaves. “Well,” he explained, “two years later, Jack Trent was killed in Korea. When I heard that, I realized it was foolish to get too concerned over whether we won or lost a football game.”

Babe Ruth or Barry Bonds?

That was 45 years ago. Last week, the New York Times announced— on its front page, yet— that a team of eminent statisticians had spent almost a decade devising a definitive ranking of baseball’s best players, past and present, regardless of era or team. This immense undertaking sought to determine how every player’s achievements stacked up when accounting for changes in demography, war, racism, health care, and the rise of both basketball and football.

Their conclusion: The greatest baseball player of all time was neither Babe Ruth nor Ty Cobb, but Barry Bonds, followed by Roger Clemens.

Never mind that both Bonds and Clemens were accused of using steroids during the 1990s. According to Daniel J. Eck of the University of Illinois/Urbana-Champaign, who led the study, the new model judged Bonds and Clemens in the context of their own times, when so many other Major League players were also using performance-enhancing drugs.

“Baseball,” Dr. Eck further explained, “is this system that’s really rare and desirable for scientists, because it’s a closed system operating under essentially the same rules, with very careful data collection.”

State of the art

This new statistical model, chimed in Dr. Michael J. Schell, an oncologist and biostatistician at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Florida, is “arguably the state of the art, at this point, for player evaluation over time. They’ve moved the ball forward.”

Which raises just two questions in my mind:

First, so what?

And second, don’t these statisticians and oncologists have anything better to do with their time— like, maybe, finding a cure for cancer?

Yes, yes, I know— everybody needs a hobby. And some great economists— Paul Oyer of Stanford, John Fizel of Penn State, Andrew Zimbalist of Smith College, J.C. Bradbury of Kennesaw State— got started by tracking baseball statistics a=when they were kids.

‘A wonderful laboratory’

Sam Peltzman, the noted University of Chicago champion of free markets— whose office, last time I visited, was festooned with souvenirs of the Brooklyn Dodgers’ first World Series victory, in 1955— put it this way to me:

“Baseball is a wonderful laboratory for economists, because there’s such an obvious and dramatic interdependence of the companies— that is, the teams. Economists love to experiment with baseball questions. For example, which would attract more fans— a bad team in an exciting pennant race, or a good team in a runaway? It’s good practice, and it’s no nuttier than a lot of other things economist do.”

OK, I get it: The lessons we learn from a ball field can be applied in larger life. But those lessons aren’t ends in themselves. Sooner or later, you must leave the ballfield. Chuck Bednarik, of all people, had a better idea of what really matters than these statistics-obsessed Ph.D.’s trying to compare Barry Bonds of 2005 to Babe Ruth of 1925.

The greatest president?

I suppose they could do a similar comparative study for U.S. presidents. Washington and Jefferson may have qualified for Mount Rushmore, but they presided over a country of barely 5 million people— fewer folks than live in greater Philadelphia today. So, their job was a snap compared to Donald Trump, who has his hands full keeping tabs on 341 million without any assistance from slaves.

On the other hand, Washington and Jefferson had to manage without the aid of telephones, railroads, automobiles, planes, TV, computers, the Internet, smartphones, or Elon Musk. They had to make momentous historic decisions without air conditioning or antibiotics or even indoor plumbing. So, it evens out, doncha see?

The Dick Allen debate

And please don’t get me started about whether Dick Allen does or does not belong in baseball’s Hall of Fame. On the one hand, Allen was a great hitter who had to wear a batting helmet in the field to protect himself from fruit, ice, refuse, and even flashlight batteries thrown at him by racist Philadelphia fans. On the other hand, he annoyed white baseball writers by stubbornly refusing to change his skin color and objecting when they called him “Richie.”

And now, five years after his death, the same fallible humans have consigned Allen to an amusement park they call their Hall of Fame. Here Allen is housed for eternity with a gaggle of allegedly great and demonstrably not-so-great baseball players (Tinker to Evers to Chance?), some of whom were racists to their dying day. Me, I would have said, “Thanks, but no thanks.”

Why George Munger quit

Chuck Bednarik’s coach at Penn, George Munger, spent 16 years on the job– a record for Penn coaches at that time. On his watch, Penn football teams in the 1940s led the nation in home attendance year after year, routinely drawing crowds of 70,000 and more to Franklin Field at a time when the Eagles rarely attracted more than 12,000. When Munger quit the job in 1953, he was only 44 and presumably ready to move up to the big time. Instead, he accepted a low-profile job as Penn’s director of intramural athletics, where he remained contentedly until he retired in 1974, while also spending 24 apparently happy summers as director of Camp Tecumseh in New Hampshire.

Why did Munger walk away from a celebrated coaching career at such a young age? That question mystified his players and fans for decades. Only in retrospect is the reason clear: Munger understood, as his disciple Bednarik understood, that the game of football is not an end itself, but a steppingstone to a meaningful life.

Let me close with a quote I may have shared with you before. It’s from the late Princeton basketball coach Pete Carril, who won 514 games over 29 seasons. When asked to comment on the occasion of his 250^th victory in 1981, Carril replied:

“I don't give a hoot about the first one, nor the 100th, nor will I care about the last one. They are so meaningless anyway. A victory is to be enjoyed for a while and then forgotten, and a defeat should be reflected upon for a while and then forgotten as well.”

Meanwhile, last Thursday, the Associated Press celebrated the 100^th anniversary of its college All-America teams by choosing— what else?— the top 100 college football players of the past century. Chuck Bednarik, of course, was among those chosen. I think I know what Bednarik— not to mention his coach, not to mention Pete Carril— would say about that.

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s new memoir, The Education of a Journalist: My Seventy Years on the Frontiers of Free Speech. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com