Is it the top 1 percent? The top 1.5 percent?

There’s a pretty huge difference between those two things, and a lot of guys fall in there, like many of the ones I’ve mentioned. (Upon further review, I easily could have added Carlos Delgado to this list, by the way.)

I guess I just lean toward fewer guys in the Hall, because I think the more guys you put in who merely “meet the statistical standard,” the more it waters down the group for the true greats (Mays, Cobb, Aaron, Ruth, etc.)

HOF voters, like umpires, get to decide how much of the borderline we’re going to include. We all have a right to interpret that fuzzy gray area as we wish. All anyone can ask is that we be consistent, and I try to do that.

Which might just mean that everybody was juicing, but probably means that juicing didn’t have nearly the effect people assume it did (if it had any effect at all), and that other things were at play. But regardless, it’s entirely beside the point. We have things like OPS+ to get past issues like this. The average player saw the same boost Edgar did, and Edgar was still THAT much better than average, which makes him a really elite hitter, even if he played alongside a few extra other really elite hitters than we’d expect. I think the most important thing Dave Cameron said in that post was this:

“let’s not let the fact that he played at a time when the sport was rich with elite offensive performers overshadow the fact that Martinez’s performances are historically special.

Baseball is cyclical. Sometimes, the sport sees a lot of great players at one position all come up at the same time. 10 years ago, we had an abundance of shortstops who could really hit. Right now, we have a pretty special crop of young pitching. We should not refuse to acknowledge the individual greatness of one of these players simply because their careers dovetailed with the timing of other great players.”

Each of those guys had a really, really special seven years. I think Edgar was *clearly* better than each, for various reasons (mostly the ones Dave mentioned — if you move away from looking at consecutive seasons and just count up truly dominant offensive seasons, Edgar simply had more of them), and I also think you assume away too much with the next paragraph — none of Bagwell, Vlad or Thome, great as they were, had a seven-year peak that was quite as dominant, offensively, as Edgar’s. But regardless: they all really were great, historically very rare hitters during those peaks. To discount their accomplishments because, out of hundreds of hitters in the league at any given time, there happened to be a couple more of them than we might have expected to see at other points in history, seems silly. Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle happened to play at more or less the same time, but that Mickey wasn’t as good as Willie doesn’t diminish his all-time standing vis-a-vis OTHER CFs. The point we judge from needs to be how they compare to their peers as a whole — the whole league — not how they compare to whoever else happens to be in the top handful of players in the game at that particular moment in time.