Baseball Generations: A New Look at the Hall of Fame and Rating the Greatest Players of All Time

In baseball today, Wins Above Replacement, or WAR, is the go-to tool for measuring player value. But WAR is limited in how it compares different eras, how it handles certain fielding positions, and by the fact that it's a pure compiler stat.

Career Value Index (CVI), the new analytic tool developed by David Gordon in his book Baseball Generations, expands on and enhances WAR in a new and compelling way that puts players from Old Hoss Radbourn to Pedro Martinez, Bill Dickey to Johnny Bench, Nap Lajoie to Joe Morgan, and Ty Cobb to Mike Trout on the same statistical plane.

Baseball Generations blends cutting-edge number crunching with a witty narrative style reminiscent of Bill James to take readers through every era of major league baseball's 150+ year history-from the founding generation to the analytics generation and everything in between. The result is detailed yet breezy history of the game accompanied by a new ranking of the best to ever play the game.

Like every good review of baseball's all-time greats, the Hall of Fame is central to the discussion.

Gordon recaps the history of the BBWAA and Veteran's Committee selections, and in the framework of the current Hall of Fame, uses CVI to identify the upper-tier stars, the solid members, the borderline cases, down to the flat-out undeserving-along with the best players on the outside looking in.

No matter how many Hall of Fame analyses you've read or arguments you've heard or had, some of the conclusions in Baseball Generations will surprise you. But even if you disagree with Gordon's rankings, the power of CVI and the thorough, context-driven analysis will make them impossible to ignore.

Author: David J. Gordon
Publisher: Summer Game Books
Published: 10/04/2021
Pages: 402
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.52lbs
Size: 9.25h x 7.50w x 0.82d
ISBN: 9781955398060

About the Author
Gordon, David J.: - Dr. David Gordon is a retired cardiovascular epidemiologist who, for almost 40 years, specialized in the conduct and analysis of cardiovascular clinical trials. He was born and grew up in Chicago, where he fell in love with baseball, the Cubs, and Ernie Banks, before coming to Washington to work for the National Institutes of Health (NIH).After his retirement from NIH in 2016, David pivoted back to his longtime love of baseball, bringing his statistical expertise and passion for history to such baseball topics as the rise and fall of the Deadball Era, racial parity in the Hall of Fame, the impact of free agency on competitive balance, the impact of PED on career longevity, and a tool for analyzing players by peak value. SABR's Baseball Research Journal has published articles on three of these topics, with the other two articles under consideration.Dr. Gordon lives with his wife outside of Washington, DC. They have two grown children.