Left Out in the Cold - Who will NOT make your list?

[Matt D]

Is it easier to compare Aja Kong and Vader or Jim Breaks and Vader?

[W2BTD]

i think that's the point, joe: you are rather unusual in your lack of interest in relative skill. comparing just raw athleticism is boring to a lot of us, and this entire project is one of relative skill for many. i go back to the point of comparing shootstyle to deathmatch wrestling - how can you fairly do that with any metric besides relative skill?

 

Again, it isn't about raw athleticism. It's about how raw athleticism relates to ability and the application of that ability.

 

And to be fair, i've stated numerous times on this board that I find it very difficult, and even somewhat impractical, to attempt to compare wrestlers from completely different styles. So if nothing else, i'm being consistent. The example I always use, is how on Earth can you compare Bill Dundee to Masato Yoshino, when they may as well be working on different planets in terms of what they're trying to accomplish with their work? So much just comes down to style bias, and it's a big reason that I may end up ultimately not compiling a list.

[BillThompson]

I don't agree with your take Joe, but it has been consistent.

[Matt D]

We're all amazingly consistent, aren't we?

[fxnj]

The "relative skill" argument strikes me as shit because, unlike sports where you have different weight classes muddying things, the metric of personal enjoyment that we rate matches off is a universal measurement. Sports are a horrible comparison in this case because, even if you have a difficult thinking of wrestling as an art form, I don't see how you can deny that our focus on critiquing the artistic qualities of matches is far more in line with how someone would talk about an art form than a sport. Arguing that women are inherently at some huge disadvantage to men in wrestling talent would be less like saying the same for sports talent as it would be in saying the same for writing or acting talent.

[funkdoc]

yea fxnj, i agree with you on that bit. i just see any comparisons between styles as matters of relative skill, and joshi happens to have its own distinct style.

 

also, even in sports, joe's way of looking at things is rather unusual among the more analytical types. i just thought of this example:

 

 

bill james is one of the most vocal people out there in the belief that the quality of play in major-league baseball has steadily improved over time. yet, when he ranked his top 100 all-time baseball players, his top 3 were babe ruth + honus wagner + willie mays. how would you reconcile this?

 

simple - he focused on how dominant players were within their own era, with a bit of adjustment for the fact that it's harder to dominate nowadays than it was in the 1910s. even in a sport as seemingly simple as baseball, you can never get a true apples-to-apples comparison between different time periods. i don't see the point in tailoring your requirements to that goal in much of anything, tbh...

[W2BTD]

I agree completely with James in terms of ranking players within their own era. Personally I don't think that directly correlates to comparing a deathmatch wrestler to a Toryumon wrestler to a joshi to a Memphis brawler to a shoot style wrestler, because this is where personal preferences will inevitably come into play. If somebody thinks the Toryumon style is shit but loves southern brawlers, it doesn't matter how good a wrestler is compared to their peers in that style, that person is very likely going to prefer the mediocre southern brawler to the elite Toryumon wrestler.

 

The thing is, I didn't drag sports comps into this. Other people did, even though I ran with it and things ended up being derailed a bit. They only work to a certain extent.

 

This has gotten way too convoluted. I think men are significantly better wrestlers than women. I'm not comfortable ranking them together for that reason. If that's closed minded or something, so be it. That's how I feel.

[Phil Schneider]

Why can't everyone see that Joe is only concerned with ethics in gaming journalism?

[stomperspc]

I agree completely with James in terms of ranking players within their own era. Personally I don't think that directly correlates to comparing a deathmatch wrestler to a Toryumon wrestler to a joshi to a Memphis brawler to a shoot style wrestler, because this is where personal preferences will inevitably come into play. If somebody thinks the Toryumon style is shit but loves southern brawlers, it doesn't matter how good a wrestler is compared to their peers in that style, that person is very likely going to prefer the mediocre southern brawler to the elite Toryumon wrestler.

FWIW, I think it is an oversimplification bordering on inaccurate to say that Bill James believes baseball players should only be evaluated against other players in their era. He created the Win Shares metric specifically as a tool to evaluate players across eras, leagues, positions, ect. It is less about avoiding ranking guys across eras and more about finding ways to put all the players on an equal playing field so that they can be compared fairly across eras. In any era, a player's job was to create/contribute to runs/wins. The methods of achieving that have fluctuated over time but the end goal has always been the same. The idea for James and others is to to eliminate the noise (ie. how the player went about contributing to a win) and focus in in which players created the most wins.

 

Bringing this back to wrestling, the problem is that what constitutes a good match in wrestling is subjective and unclear. In baseball, a run is a run and a win is a win objectively. A good match is not. We can still compare guys across styles but we will be comparing them to a subjective/personal standard rather than an objective one.

 

I can compare Dundee and Yoshino because I know what I look for in a good wrestler/match and can conclude that Dundee succeeds to that end for me far more than Yoshino.

[RyanClingman]

Antonio Inoki won't be making my list, even if his matches act as the greatest of sleeping pills.