Mantle,Williams or Di Maggio?

[thedude]

It is easily Ted Williams. By second greatest hitter behind Ruth. Not a great left fielder, but his bat more than made up for that.

[Carnac]

Teddy Ballgame

The Mick

Joltin Joe

[AquaMan2342]

Surprised anybody said anything besides Williams. Granted a lot of Yankee homers here, but it's not really too close IMO.

[Tavish]

Surprised anybody said anything besides Williams. Granted a lot of Yankee homers here, but it's not really too close IMO.

At their best, Mantle was just about as good at the plate as Williams. And he could steal you 20 bases at a 80%+ clip and was a good defensive center fielder. Not very hard for me at all to put Mantle way ahead of Williams.

[Underwood7476]

I think Mantle had by far the most potential of all three, due to injury obviously we will never know and just a "what if", however I think that Williams is the best of all three stats wise, then again he doesn't have any rings

[thedude]

{quote="Tavish"}

Surprised anybody said anything besides Williams. Granted a lot of Yankee homers here, but it's not really too close IMO.

At their best, Mantle was just about as good at the plate as Williams. And he could steal you 20 bases at a 80%+ clip and was a good defensive center fielder. Not very hard for me at all to put Mantle way ahead of Williams.[/quote]

But Mantle wasn't as good as Williams with the bat.

Williams's ability to get on base far exceeded Mantle's ability (compare the number of times Williams won the OBP title to the number of times Mantle won that title).

Also compare their ability to hit for average. Williams was a better hitter for average than Mantle. I don't think this can really be argued, so I will not place the numbers in this post.

Williams had at least as much power at Mantle.

I also disagree that the other aspects of their respective games place the Mick ahead of Teddy Ballgame.

The advanced defensive metrics say that Mantle was a good defensive center fielder on a couple of occasions, but for his career he was actually a bad defensive player. While these metrics are not 100% reliable, especially for older players, they should be considered more reliable than the biased reports by New York Yankee beat writers. These same metrics show that while Teddy was a terrible LFer his last few years, he was an above average LFer for most of his career.

Mantle should get credit for playing in a tougher defensive position.

Mickey was a better base runner, no doubt about that.

In summary Williams was better than Mantle.