The vast majority of disagreements that you will find in the comments of the top-100 lists on this site have to do with how athletes from competitively weak generations are rated. Not only do these comments not surprise me, they are the reason this site exists. We are so programmed to pine for the good ole days when everyone and everything was “better” that any suggestion otherwise is met with resistance ranging from incredulity to straight-up vitriol. I’m not interested in rehashing why our idolization of the weakest eras is misplaced–I have written thousands of words on the site exploring this notion–but I will highlight the consequences of such idolization. For all of its benefits (and consequences), artificial intelligence is merely a reflection of us. ChatGPT and the like take a deep look into our souls and spit out our reflection–the good, the bad, and the ugly. Recently, ChatGPT was asked to list the greatest baseball players of all time, and the results were, well, totally absurd. There were zero players in the top 10 who started their careers after 1959, and just one in the top 15. This is, of course, a statistically ridiculous representation of the greatest baseball players who ever lived. Even the vintage league players who reenact baseball the way it was played in the early 19th century would side-eye the claim that the last 65 years haven’t produced a single baseball player worthy of the top ten.
This sort of disconnect from reality isn’t new. The Sporting News made the same miscalculation in 1998 when its entire top-25 list included zero baseball players who debuted after 1967. Bias toward the past is present in every sport, and it’s really hard to change. Fans take personal offense when an athlete they (or their parents) idolized isn’t rated in “the usual” spot. However, for the ordering of the greatest athletes of all-time to be a worthwhile endeavor, these top-100 lists must have integrity, which means they need to not only represent players by performance, but also represent eras proportionately by league size and competition level.
ChatGPTs Top-15 Baseball Players of All-Time
By and large, most sports saw their weakest eras occur when their top leagues were either completely or largely segregated. Due in part to the Civil Rights Movement, the last three decades of the 20th century saw an uptick in competition level, but still proved largely inaccessible to the global population. Sports started to see a significant shift in global talent pools at the turn of the 21st century, which has led to the most competitive eras across the board during the 2000s. You will notice that every list on this site has the same basic framework, featuring competition level and league size as the guiding principles. If we don’t do this, these lists lose integrity in a hurry. ChatGPT’s opinion of the greatest baseball players of all time is all the proof we need.