He felt that baseball gave a player more opportunities to perform: "In cricket you may have the bad luck to get out early; which often means a blank afternoon. It is not so with baseball; you are in the game all the time." Joe Clark, the author of "History of Australian Baseball", said "Ponsford is considered by many to be the best baseballer of his time in Australia." The official program for the 1952 Claxton Shield—held in Perth—made a similar claim. In first-class cricket, Ponsford scored 13,819 runs at an average of 65.18, as of 2009 the fifth highest complete career average of any player, worldwide. Ponsford was not satisfied with merely making centuries; he strove to score 200 and more. Arriving in big cricket a few years before Bradman, for a time Ponsford was considered the heaviest scorer in cricket history. Jack Fingleton claimed that "The true perspective of Ponsford's deeds had barely dawned on the game when Bradman ruthlessly thrust him from public thought ..." Apart from Brian Lara, Ponsford is the only man to twice score 400 runs in a first-class innings and along with Bradman and Wally Hammond, he remains one of only three men to have scored four triple-centuries. His 437 against Queensland is, as at 2009, still the fifth highest score in first-class cricket. Ponsford was known for batting in partnerships, sharing in five that amassed over 375 runs each. Ponsford and his long-time partner, Woodfull, were known as "the two Bills", "Willy Wo and Willy Po" and "Mutt and Jeff" amongst other names. Together, the pair made 23 century partnerships; 12 of these exceeded 150 runs. Ponsford's other prolific partnership was with Bradman. In two Tests in 1934, the pair set records that still stand today: Cricket writer Ray Robinson said of the pair batting together, "[Ponsford] was the only one who could play in Bradman's company and make it a duet." For services to cricket, Ponsford was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 1982 New Year Honours announced on 31 December 1981. Ponsford was one of the ten inaugural inductees when the Australian Cricket Hall of Fame was launched in 1996. In 2000, Ponsford and Arthur Morris were chosen to open the batting for the Australian Cricket Board's Team of the Century, a theoretical selection of the best team of Australian cricketers of the 20th century.