Comparing Miguel Cabrera to Ty Cobb

An interesting debate sprung up on the official Detroit Tigers.com message board asking if Miguel Cabrera has earned the title of "Best Tiger Ever" (I assume he meant of the positional players).  That honor has traditionally been held by Ty Cobb.  He's the Tigers all-time leader in batting average, runs and RBI while in the top 5 in OBP and SLG.  Advanced stats like him too as he's the Tigers top leader in wRC+, OPS+, fWAR, and rWAR.  Looks like both traditionalists and Sabermatricians can agree on Ty Cobb being the best Tigers player ever.

However, is Cabrera on his way to surpassing Cobb?  There are several counter-arguments to the above stats.  First of all, Cobb is done as a player; his stats are final.  Cabrera is right in the middle of his career; who knows what he'll do in the future?  Also, both have played in completely separate eras.  While the advanced stats above kind of neutralizes this, I think we can take it a step further.  

For this comparison, I'm going to take both players 5 best consecutive seasons, which just happens to be exactly 100 years apart (1909-1913 for Cobb and 2009-2013 for Cabrera).  Now this is kind of unfair to Cabrera because he's right in the middle of his 2013 season, so obviously his numbers are going to change after the season. Although Cabrera does have more PA, 3047 to Cobb's 3005, so I think it'll work alright.

First the traditional stats:

Player	Years	PA	Runs	HR	RBI	AVG	OBP	SLG	OPS
Ty Cobb	1909-1913	3005	559	36	475	0.396	0.455	0.564	1.018
Miguel Cabrera	2009-2013	3047	482	165	544	0.334	0.418	0.594	1.012

Now the advanced stats:

Player	Years	PA	wOBA	wRC+	OPS+	fWAR/150	rWAR/150
Ty Cobb	1909-1913	3005	0.481	191	198	10.1	10.1
Miguel Cabrera	2009-2013	3047	0.425	167	169	6.3	6.5

For the next set of stats, I'm using the same methodology as OPS+.  OPS+ is calculated as follows:

OPS+ = (OBP/lgOBP + SLG/lgSLG - 1) * 100

OPS+ adjusts for both the park and league and is put on an easy scale of 100 being average.  So if a player has an OPS+ of 110, he was 10% better than league average and someone with an OPS+ of 90 was 10% below average.

The hard part is figuring out the park factors.  Luckily, Baseball-reference already does this, not only for OBP and SLG, but also for AVG too.  League stats are easily accessible too.   So essentially  we can figure out AVG+, OBP+, SLG+, OPS+ and ISO+.  I also want to calculate BB+ and K+ using walk rates and strikeout rates, but since neither of those are balls in play, I don't think the park effects are necessary.

Player	Years	PA	AVG+	OBP+	SLG+	OPS+	ISO+	BB+	K+
Ty Cobb	1909-1913	3005	148	136	162	198	114	108	63
Miguel Cabrera	2009-2013	3047	127	127	142	169	115	148	77

So now we have stats of both Cobb and Cabrera with about equal playing time, right in the prime of their careers, taking into account park effects and adjusted to the league.  A player wants to have a low strikeout rate, so having a K+ of less than 100 is a good thing.

Aside from the walk rate, it looks pretty clear that Cabrera hasn't reached Ty Cobb's level yet.  However, he still has many years of playing time to try to catch him.  Cabrera currently has an OPS+ of 188 for 2013 - the highest of any year of his career.  If he can sustain that for several more years, it could get close.