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 the different fielding positions, and by the fact that it’s a pure compiler stat.
Career Value Index (CVI), the new analytic 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 narrative style reminiscent of Bill James totake 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 a deeply researched yet breezy history of the game, accompanied by a ranking of the best baseball players ever, both by era and all time.

Like every good review of baseball’s greatest, the Hall of Fame is central to the discussion. Gordon recaps the history of the BBWAA’s 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 arguments and analyses you’ve read, the assessments in Baseball Generations will both surprise you and provide food for thought. But if you are serious about sabermetrics, even if you disagree with some of the book’s conclusions, the power of the CVI analytic tool and the author’s thorough, context-driven assessments make them impossible to ignore.