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I'll try to keep it short. I'm hoping to publish it as a book to be called "Paradox at the Plate: Searching for Baseball Greatness at the Intersection of the Improbable."
- Two imperatives for hitters: avoid outs, generate offense
- Two imperatives for pitchers: get outs, prevent offense
- Four skills for hitters: Launch, Spray, Walk, Anti-K (oversimplified, but allows measuring through all of history)
- Four skills for pitchers: K, Anti-Launch, Anti-Spray, Anti-Walk (same)
- The four skills are (mostly) independent (which can be verified), and some (as in Launch and Anti-K) are, in fact, self-contradictory
- Therefore, we can conclude that it is highly improbable for individual players to be highly proficient in all four skills at once
- We can create a Venn Diagram of Greatness to analyze which players have succeeded in making it all the way to the "improbability bullseye" where all four skills intersect
- 11 hitters make it into the center of the Venn Diagram of Greatness prior to the '90s -- all are Bona Fide Immortals
- Hitters with Dead Ball Skills (Ty Cobb, Wade Boggs, Rod Carew, Ichiro) don't make it due to lack of Launch, and achieving Launch while maintaining the other skills is the key to Improbability Greatness
- During the Circumstantial Evidence Era (1993-2005), suddenly Jason Giambi and Gary Sheffield and a multitude of others are doing what only Ruth, Gehrig, Williams, et al. could do in prior eras, and what George Brett, Eddie Murray, Jim Rice, etc. never did
- After the Circumstantial Evidence Era, only Pujols joins and becomes the 12th Bona Fide Immortal
- The "weaponized K" doesn't really emerge for pitchers until the '50s, but the ability to employ the "weaponized K" while maintaining the other three skills doesn't appear until Sandy Koufax -- The Babe Ruth of Pitching
- Only 5 pitchers make it all the way to the center of the Venn Diagram of Greatness so far
- The 2010s appear to be perhaps the greatest pitching era of all time, with several guys on the verge of emerging as Bona Fide Immortals
- I'm now working on applying the Venn Diagram of Greatness to teams