Top 10 Baseball Hitters of All Time

There are basically two types of batters in professional baseball. On one hand, you have the sluggers; the home-run hitters that thrill the crowd by tearing the cover off the ball. Then on the other hand, you have the hitters: the guys who constantly make contact and seem to get on base almost every time they get up to the plate. This article is about a list of the top 10 hitters based on the total number of hits they amassed in their careers. I decided to take things a step further and reorganized the list based in order of who was the best contact hitter, not who had the most hits.

My reasoning for setting up the list this way was simple. In order to judge the best hitter, it needs to be based on quality not quantity. According to the record books, these are the top ten hitters listed by name, rank, and total career hits --- Pete Rose (1) 4,256, Ty Cobb (2) 4,189, Henry Aaron (3) 3,771, Stan Musial (4) 3,630, Tris Speaker (5) 3,514, Carl Yastrzemski (6) 3,419, Honus Wagner (7) 3,415, Paul Molitor (8) 3,319, Eddie Collins (9) 3,315, and Willie Mays (10) 3,283. These are remarkable numbers when you initially look at the list.

I used a system that I designed for the purposes of this article in order to rate these 10 hitters based on the quality factor. There were nine key statistics that I used in order to accomplish what I set out to do in this article --- games played, at bats, hits, batting average, average hits per season, average at bats per hit, average hits per game, number of seasons with 200 or more hits, and number of seasons with over 100 or more hits.

Hits per season, at bats per hit, and hits per game required simple division in order to calculate the answer. Number of seasons with 200 or more hits and 100 or more hits required simple addition in order to calculate the answer. The other four stats were self-explanatory. Each of the player's statistics has been ranked 1 through 10 with 1 being the highest. I simply added up each category rank and divided the total by nine (the number of categories) in order to calculate the true ranking index.