Talk:Lists of Major League Baseball players

List of all baseball players
If anyone reads this, I've been meaning to add a list of all baseball players, but I would need to make a new page for each letter, and would make things rather nebulous. Maybe there could be another page for notable players.NOT A LIST.س Au rang 02:37, 19 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Only wikipedia pages
At one time, this page listed only players who had wikipedia pages. That kept the list small. I don't know why that format was changed. Kingturtle 08:30, 19 Oct 2003 (UTC)

potential size for this article
Considering there have been 10,000s of major league baseball players, this article could get considerably huge. To prevent that, I propose only listing Hall of Famers and players that have wikipedia articles. What do you think? Kingturtle 19:29, 7 Nov 2003 (UTC)
 * No, I propose this list to should include all players and statistics to make it more of a reliable source when new articles are created. - Presidentman 12:33, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

Conflict in career stats
I've been noticing a fairly consistent conflict in the career statistics posted by Baseball Reference and those posted by the Baseball Hall of Fame, especially with players from the pre-20th century era (since there was poorer record-keeping then and has been a lot of tinkering over time). I doubt there's room for compromise, so I guess I'm asking people who they think is the more reliable source, or at least the one we should be quoting. -- Matty j 04:08, Mar 21, 2004 (UTC)

I know the HoF uses the officially recognized stats from MLB (their source being Elias Sports Bureau, currently MLB's official record-keepers); I couldn't find on B-R exactly which source they use, but it clearly isn't Elias. One of the most prominent cases where there's a difference in opinion is that of Cap Anson - Elias/MLB/HoF credits him with 3081 hits (I think The Sporting News uses this as well); B-R lists him with 2995 (not counting the 400+ hits he had in the Nat'l Ass'n 1871-75, which MLB and most others don't recognize as a major league); CNN/SI and Baseball-Almanac both list him with 3055, which comes from Stats Inc.; and there are other sources which credit him with an even 3000 (the late and lamented Baseball Encyclopedia's figure). I know ESPN, in its official publications, doesn't use the Elias/MLB stats - but I'm not sure who they do use at the moment; their annual almanacs, if I'm not mistaken, list Anson with 3000 - I think that for historical purposes they've general used the figures from the final edition of the Encyclopedia. I know Bill James (and some others) served on an advisory board for the Encyclopedia - at least in its last edition or two - which dealt with some controversies anout historical records; there was a big deal about this several years ago when MLB switched their official recognition to Total Baseball. ESPN's Rob Neyer - who is something of their in-house expert on historical baseball - used to intern under James, and they co-wrote some books together. It's all veeeery complicated.... MisfitToys


 * Actually, it is quite simple. Elias is the official number. All other numbers are unofficial. Baseball-reference, CNN, ESPN are not official. STATS Inc is not official. Elias is the only official number. Kingturtle 19:11, 9 Apr 2004 (UTC) P.S. I used to work for Elias :)


 * Well, he only asked which figures were more reliable, not which were officially recognized. The question of historical reliability is a bigger debate, and the fact that CNN, ESPN, and other agencies of more modest qualifications choose not to recognize Elias' figures deserves some mention. MisfitToys


 * The Elias numbers are the official stats, therefore are the most reliable. Which numbers does Major League Baseball use? The Elias numbers. Elias has been under contract for over 50 years to provide this service. The reason so many companies choose not to use the Elias numbers is because Elias charges too much money for the privilege of using their name. It is actually cheaper to hire your own people than to deal with Elias. Elias is run by a cheap, paranoid fogey who tells all his employees to go to dental school. I kid you not. Kingturtle 22:21, 16 Apr 2004 (UTC)


 * Fair enough comments regarding the reasoning, but just because the Elias stats are the officially recognized ones doesn't automatically make them the most reliable. (There are enough different sources doing massive research in this area to create the possibility that the most reliable source could be someone else.) MLB has various "officially recognized" corporate partners, but this doesn't automatically make their products the best ones. Besides, I'm not sure various news outlets would need to pay Elias for the privilege of using the same historical figures Elias cites; if MLB's relationship with Elias only goes back 50 years, then any baseball stats from before that point might very well be fair game for anyone else. MisfitToys


 * Yes, you are correct. Elias is official, but not necessarily accurate. But the Official accounts are what matter when discussing records. If you are at the olympics with a great stopwatch and get more accurate results than the Olympics, it doesn't matter. What goes into the record books is the official Olympic result.

Allow me to interrupt. Baseball has repeatedly contracted with publishers, or entrepreneurs who contract also with publishers, to produce official print encyclopedias that include historical playing records ("all-time statistics" from 1871 or 1876). When one official encyclopedia is in print, much of its content is official. --And anything MLB publishes is official. Does anyone know that mlb.com uses historical statistics from an Elias database?

Elias provides statistical services including receipt and compilation of official scores. It seems to me that is the heart of statistical service for sports leagues, which is in turn the heart of Elias' business (the official part). --P64 08:38, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
 * . . . Elias is too cheap to hire historians. They published the Baseball Abstract a few years to compete with Bill James, but again, Seymour Sewoff would rather not spend money. He's not in the business because he loves statistics, he is in the business to earn money without spending money. Elias's product is the worst one, but it is the official one. Elias cannot copyright history (i.e. statistics), but they have a contract to publish what is official. And if they are wrong, they don't really care. Kingturtle 20:47, 17 Apr 2004 (UTC)


 * Being official *certainly* doesn't make Elias more reliable. They're notorious for not correcting the mistakes that more thorough research tend to reveal. MLB would rather maintain the fiction of old records than have them updated. Baseball Reference, btw, got their original numbers from Total Baseball. They've since been amended and updated as new information came in. Varitek 09:23, 17 Apr 2004 (UTC)

albert belle
could someone please create Albert Belle? thanks Kingturtle 02:39, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)

article name
I changed the name of this article for List of major league baseball players to List of Major League Baseball players because Major League Baseball is an official entity, and should be capitalized. Kingturtle 20:03, 30 Dec 2004 (UTC)

big picture
As mentioned, this article could easily include tens of thousands of names. I don't have a problem with that. It would be divided by letter and would provide a free (GFDL) list of every player who donned a major league uniform. I think such a list is a valuable reference. As I understand it, a List article is the place to create a comprehensive, ideally annotated, list of every item/individual in a category where the list has a value in and of itself. A Category article is a place to gather links to all of the individual WP articles that pertain to that category. A list, if it is assumed that all the items will eventually merit individual pages, will have a lot of red on it. If not, it will have a lot of black with some blue here and there. The category page will be all blue. A List that limits itself to blue links is just a poor relation to a category page. (Categories, lists, and series boxes) Dystopos 03:24, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)


 * Yeah, what does this page do that the Category article dosen't (other than serve as a waste of time)? Cacophony 17:14, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
 * It provides an alphabetical list of all Major League Baseball players. If we relied solely on the category system in this instance, the players would be filtered down into sub-categories, and a person requiring an alphabetical list would be forced to integrate by hand all players from the team or position sub-categories. There is certainly interest in an alphabetical list of players; such lists have been published commercially and sold for years. -Hit bull, win steak(Moo!) 04:49, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

Can't say I like it
I can't say I like the new style for this page, having it broken up into a bunch of pages. I think this will make it harder to navigate. Alex 20:14, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
 * I'm actually pleasantly surprised by the change. It doesn't take as long to load, and the alpabetical header seems relatively intuitive for the purpose of navigation. -Hit bull, win steak(Moo!) 01:18, 29 January 2007 (UTC)


 * I actually agree. At first the changes looked a little extreme, but I'm finding them to be very beneficial. Alex 02:04, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

Why only players with a biographical article?
Why does this list only contain players with a biographical article? This is created a lot of 'extra' 'unneeded' work by adding players as the articles are created. I propose that the list contain every player, and not simply the players that have an article. —Borgardetalk 12:51, 29 July 2008 (UTC)


 * For example here I picked a random last name, and every player who has player with "Abbott" as their last name had an article, but they were not all on the list. I think this is created unneeded work. Even if we do have some red links for a while. —Borgardetalk 13:02, 29 July 2008 (UTC)