Joe Posnanski's Top 100 Players in Baseball

what catchers made it? he's no less than the 5th best catcher in baseball right now isn't he?

Jair Jurrjens should be on this list even if he didn't have the best name in the game.

no mccann until fucken 81??? eatadiccup posnanski

i normally love poz but this is DOGSHIT i hope he is brutally murdered

it kinda feels like he just went to his yahoo league, sorted players by their ranking, and copy/pasted it into a SI column

uh this has nothing to do about this article, just a general question and i assume some ppl will open this thread:

how do you have a lower obp than BA, as yuniesky bentancourt has had in his time with the royals?

sacrifices lower your OBP but not your BA

thank u shasta

Finished with the first 10 on his 100-Greatest-Ever list:

100. Curt Schilling
99. Cool Papa Bell
98. Ron Santo
97. Lou Whitaker
96. Ichiro Suzuki
95. Mariano Rivera
94. Paul Waner
93. Craig Biggio
92. Old Hoss Radbourn
91. Robin Roberts

Prediction, based on stray comments he's made here and there: Mays, not Ruth, will be #1.

I know all the arguments against Ryan (#87), they've been widely discussed. But wow at this:

Since Deadball ended — it was a different game in Deadball — who has thrown the most no-hitters?
A: Nolan Ryan. Of course. He threw the seven no-hitters, most ever even if you include Deadball.

OK. Next. Since Deadball, who threw the most one-hitters?
A: Nolan Ryan. He’s tied with Bob Feller with 12 one-hitters.

Since Deadball, who threw the most two-hitters?
A: Nolan Ryan. He threw 18 of them.

Since Deadball, who threw the most three-hitters?
A: Nolan Ryan. He threw 31.

Think about this for a moment. Nolan Ryan threw 69 complete games where he allowed three or fewer hits. That’s more than Roger Clemens...and Pedro Martinez...and Randy Johnson. COMBINED. It’s more than Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale combined, even if you throw Greg Maddux on top.

I have a hunch that it's a lot less impressive that it seems ... i.e. how many walks and runs did he give up in those games? He threw "only" 61 shutouts, so in most of those three hitter or less games he probably gave up runs and maybe didn't win the game.

thats covered pretty well in the remainder of the article

OK, I hadn't read it yet.

Couldn't resist checking, so I went through his game logs. Not nearly as onerous as it might seem. The games in question were easy to spot, so it only took about 45 minutes.

I only came up with 66, so I must have missed three. I kept track of IP, H, ER, and decisions, not walks and strikeouts. I wanted to do it quickly. Some of the walk totals were indeed crazy--8 or 9 sometimes--and the strikeouts were indeed awesome. We already knew that, though--I wanted to see if the walks led to runs, and if the runs led to losses. For the 66 games I found:

IP: 590.2
H: 138
ER: 36
ERA: 0.55
W-L: 62-4

It's hard to know whether those games are less impressive than they seem, because there's nothing to compare them to--no one else threw that many low-hit games. If Greg Maddux had thrown those games, obviously they would have been light-years tidier in terms of walks. He probably would have given up fewer runs, too, although maybe he would have given up more home runs than Ryan (who didn't give up many). Sixty-six games of Pedro doing that would have been more impressive, I'm sure. But that's all hypothetical--they didn't do it. If Johnson or Koufax were in the 40s or thereabouts, maybe that'd form some basis of comparison.

Nice work ... I looked at a few years of game logs ('77 + '78 and '89 and '90) and it was about what I expected -- the first group had games of the 2 H 6 BB 8 K 0 ER variety, and the second group was more like a Justin Verlander special, 2 H 2 BB 12 K (except for the pitch totals ... just ridiculous ... several 140+ pitch games in '89, including a 164 pitch, 8 IP 13 K game). Pos claims that Ryan just wanted to dominate hitters and couldn't care less about the walks, but something obviously changed between the late 70's and late 80's. How much of it was the hitters and how much of it was Ryan learning how to control his pitches?

I think it was the latter. What's kind of amazing is that it coincided with a drop in his strikeout rate (actually that's not amazing) but no real drop in effectiveness (kinda interesting) but then rose like crazy again in the latter part of his career (okay that's bonkers). Also the comparison between Fangraphs and B-R WAR is really striking for Ryan. Like if you just focus on peripherals he looks amazing (esp. at the end) but in terms of actual outcome he's basically more than a win worse for every year played.

w/out looking, he figured out how not to walk ppl when he was about 35, right?

31 (1978) is the last year the walk rate is just bonkers (over 5). It trends down after that (some spikes though). It never goes below 3 a game though (mostly between 3.5 and 4.5).

Ryan's total # of career pitches must be insane

Randy Johnson just got better and better controlling the strike zone:

1988-92: 5.7 BB/9 (range: 2.4-7.9)
1993-98: 3.3 (2.7-3.8)
1999-03: 2.5 (2.1-2.8)
2004-09: 2.1 (1.6-2.9)

His K/9 never dropped below 10.0 from '91-02, peaking in Arizona.

Johnson was definitely amazing. Way better pitcher than Ryan even was.

randy would've had ten consecutive 300k seasons without the strike and injuries.

and w/ryan, his three best WHIP seasons came during his first three seasons in texas (his age 42-44 seasons!)

i mean really if he'd learned to pitch earlier in his career he could have been one of the top five pitchers ever.

It wasn't just Ryan though, the changes in BB/9 and K/BB rates were a general trend in both leagues. A 2.5 K/BB used to be excellent, and plenty if good pitchers got away with walking 3-4/9IP. Some of the changes had to be driven by the hitters. Lineups used to be more unbalanced, so pitchers could get away with walks more easily because there were three or four banjo hitters in every lineup. That changed during the 80's and was definitely over with by the 90's, and pitchers had to adjust.

lol - banjo hitters?!

Used to be a common term, not sure of the origin. Maybe if you couldn't hit, you tended to swing the bat like Pete Seeger.

http://www.fangraphs.com/leaders.aspx?pos=all&stats=pit&lg=all&qual=0&type=1&season=2011&month=0&season1=1901&ind=0&team=0%2css&rost=0&players=0&sort=0%2cd

League-wise there's not an enormous difference in BB/9 or K/BB rates between Ryan's first year and his last, AFAICT.
The big drop in BB/9 comes in the mid-50s.

TT is assigned to read the Dickson Baseball Dictionary over Christmas

Starting in 1973 (when the late 60's/early 70's pitchers' era ended, runs/game spiked and continued rising steadily throughout the 80's), pitching went from roughly 5 K/9, 3.3 BB/9, and 1.5 K/BB (holding steady for most of the 70's), to 5.6 K/9, 3.2 BB/9, 1.75 K/BB in 1989 (with many year to year fluctuations). I guess it's more correct to say that K's and K/BB went up steadily but not BB/9, which is really just an increase in K's.

Obviously the changes aren't as drastic as Ryan's numbers, but he's an extreme case. Still, the same trends occurred with other great pitchers of the time. Steve Carlton became a better control pitcher in the 80's (until he got too old), Jim Palmer won Cy Young awards with K/BB ratios that were far worse than the best pitchers of the late 80's, etc.

Just wanted to make note of 1970, which was one of the weird offensive blips you occasionally get (1987 being another). Much more drastic in the NL, but the AL spiked too. It's a year that's always fascinated me because it was the year I became a fan.

1969 AL: 4.09 RPG, 1649 HR, .246/.321/.369
1969 NL: 4.05 RPG, 1470 HR, .250/.319/.369

1970 AL: 4.17 RPG, 1746 HR, .250/.322/.379
1970 NL: 4.52 RPG, 1683 HR, .258/.329/.392

1971 AL: 3.87 RPG, 1484 HR, .247/.317/.364
1971 NL: 3.91 RPG, 1379 HR, .252/.316/.366

There were a bunch of huge offensive years in '70, some of them real flukes:

Yaz -- .329/.452/.592, 44 HR
Billy Williams -- .322/.391/.586, 42 HR
Tony Perez -- .317/.401/.589, 40 HR

Aaron, Bench, McCovey, Rico Carty, Dick Allen, long list--but also Jim Hickman, Bernie Carbo, Dick Dietz, Wes Parker, players who didn't do much hitting for the rest of their careers. None of which takes away from your point--pitching again dominated in '71 and '72, and it was '73 when things started to shift. Not sure what happened in '70. Same teams (almost--Seattle moved to Milwaukee in '70); new Astro-turf parks were opening around then, so maybe that figured in.

i'm loving this series so much

Great entry on Shoeless Joe.

Discussion on Willie McCovey post about whether MOST feared hitter tag has a big racial component with a lot of people naming a bunch of amazing African-American hitters and then struggling to remember if white players from the same era were also called feared (part of me looks at someone calling Dick Allen, Willie McCovey the most feared hitters and thinks duh those dudes were crazy great hitters). I think any racial significance/connotation has largely melted away now (certainly in recent years McGwire, Giambi, Piazza were all called feared hitters, not to mention Brett and Boggs from when I was a kid) but what do you think? Was it a thing?

http://shirtssince09.spreadshirt.com/the-preeminent-slugger-of-our-time-A7091470

most feared pitchers always have to have a 'stache is all I know

That McCovey discussion is really interesting. For me, I think the idea of being a feared hitter might be tied in with left-handedness. In the '80s, the two guys who scared me most against the Jays were Brett and Mattingly; didn't get to actually see as much baseball in the '70s, but the guy that came to mind was Parker. They're all left-handed, as was McCovey. I don't know that it makes rational sense, but there's something about the way a left-handed hitter is coiled up the plate that presses a button with me.

Allen though was a right-y (as were McGwire and Piazza and Thomas and Pujols). I don't know it's interesting. I can buy that in the sixties-seventies there might have been a racial component to the tag, but at same time were Mantle, Mathews, Yaz and Schmidt for example really not referred to as "feared"? Seems hard to believe somehow...

Even just a cursory google search of Eddie Mathews and feared comes up with 204K hits (50K more than McCovey and 20K more than Allen) so now I'm thinking this whole thing is bullshit.

My left-handed thing was purely subjective--it's just an image I've internalized of left-handers like Brett and Mattingly coming out of a coiled-up stance and crushing line-drives all over the place.

If you used IBB, you could probably study this. The thing that would be difficult, though, is controlling for who comes up after these hitters, which obviously figures in to the decision to issue an IBB.

You should post the results of your Google search on Posnanski's site, Alex, in response to the guy who put the theory out there.

continuing to love this countdown. i was already familiar with arky vaughan, but it was nice to read about his apparent defensive skillz.

you know what would make the countdown even better? just one photograph to go along with each entry.

(Provided Don Mossi or Willie McGee don't show up.)

http://maxcdn.fooyoh.com/files/attach/images/1068/926/212/005/etpicture_33.jpg

lol

I wouldn't be surprised if there was a racial component but the 60's and 70's were the peak for African-American involvement in baseball (I think a quarter or a third of the players were non-white) and nearly all the very best position players were African-American. There weren't enough superstar white power hitters around to even make a comparison. When the best hitters were white, they were also feared, e.g. searching "mickey mantle feared hitter" turns up a billion hits. However, I'd have to go through those and see if he was "feared" when he played or if he was described that way when his career was over.

what about "loathed"...
i want to know what ethnicity made up the most "loathed" people in baseball.
i'll bet it was the fucking dutch.

He's really emphasizing peak value and "potential" in this series ... Duke Snider was great but could have been even better, Monte Irvin was great but imagine how he would have played if he'd been in MLB from the very start, and so on.

Thinking Juan Guzman might show up then: "If only he could have clocked down to 45 seconds between pitches."

Yeah he's clearly very focused on peak for some of these picks. Based on that it's hard to argue against Snider whose for a time was pretty awesome (just unfortunately less awesome than the two CFers in the same city at the same time).

In keeping with all that, Sadaharu Oh at #69--and the expected sniping in the comments section. Myself, no idea. If he'd played a little closer to Hideo/Ichiro's time in Japan--there's a 10-year gap there--I'd feel more confident in assessing him.

Maybe Clemente or Jeter or A-Rod for the other spot.

Ha! "Egregious"--if it's post-war, I'm thinking Jackie Robinson just might be Top 10 (could conceivably be #1, even).

Bob Gibson has at least three big fame markers: 1.12, his post-season heroics, and his reputation (exaggerated, I've read) for being willing to throw at his own grandmother.

Yogi Berra could crack the Top 10 too.

Headline on today's blog post: "Nothing Beats a Great Pennant Race. Here's Why."

Is nothing safe from this kind of thing? Better than "Nothing Beats a Great Pennant Race--and here's why that's bad for Harris," but not by much.

so wait, is that not ok?

Posted some "fine start"-related stuff in the HOF thread the other day. Tom Tango's hopped on--couple of follow-up notes.

1) Now has a better name: "Nolans." (Game Score of 58 or better; Clemens actually had a few more than Ryan for his career.)

2) The opposite--not-so-fine starts--also has a name now: "Moyers." (Game Score of 40 or less.)

3) Tango, because he’s Tango, figured out Wins Above Average based on Nolans and Moyers, and here are the 10 best seasons since 1969:

Pedro Martinez, 2000, 8.3 WAA
Dwight Gooden, 1985, 7.6 WAA
Roger Clemens, 1997, 7.6 WAA
Randy Johnson, 1999, 7.5 WAA
Pedro Martinez, 1999, 7.5 WAA
Pedro Martinez, 1997, 7.2 WAA
Mike Scott, 1986, 7.2 WAA
Greg Maddux, 1995, 6.9 WAA
Steve Carlton, 1972, 6.8 WAA
Randy Johnson, 2001, 6.8 WAA

Neat seeing Mike Scott there--he was indeed awesome in '86.

mike scott had a weird career -- an even more extreme jake arrieta

Read up a little bit, trying to understand what happened to him in '86--thought maybe that was the year he developed his spitter. His Wikipedia page twice makes reference to rumors of scuffed/doctored baseballs.

Ugh: spitter = splitter.

Joe writes about the Red Sox (long) and Kershaw today. I think this takes you to where you can subscribe for free:

https://www.joeposnanski.com/subscribe?ref=NtRLktbp1q&_bhlid=bf7a73b936aab597b0df9777ef50b28c5a049d32

You can read it here - https://www.joeposnanski.com/p/the-red-sox-did-what-6110

Nothing very enlightening imo. Joe speculates that the FO intended Devers to get disgruntled in order to give them an excuse to get out of his contract.. seems a little 5D chess to me

May or may not work: Zack Wheeler as a possible HOF'er.

https://www.joeposnanski.com/subscribe?ref=NtRLktbp1q

You can read it here - https://www.joeposnanski.com/p/the-red-sox-did-what-6110🕸

Nothing very enlightening imo. Joe speculates that the FO intended Devers to get disgruntled in order to give them an excuse to get out of his contract.. seems a little 5D chess to me

Nah I think he’s dead accurate here

In my mind, they KNEW that Devers would be furious about being moved to DH. They knew EXACTLY what promises had been made by the organization. They were more than happy to let him hang himself in the court of public opinion by saying so. I think they wanted all along to get rid of Devers and dump that salary … and if they got a couple of prospects they could hype in the process, all the better

He was getting straight up hate from all sides during spring training until he eventually came out and said he’d DH and he even said the fear of being thought badly of was an influence on his behaviour. Meanwhile every dog in Boston was barking with the fury of the so called fans and what they were lining up to say about him.

At least SF isn't nearly as racist as Boston. I feel like Red Sox players of color have additional hurdles to clear outside of the usual fanbases.

Correct

On the Zack Wheeler question, I think he’d have to do a bit more to get in there. I don’t see him at this point as being someone who’s accomplished more than Dave Stieb in terms of career achievement, he’s no Corey Kluber in terms of peak (not far off but Kluber had five legit seasons), he just seems like the hall of very good. He could age really well and put up three or four more seasons like this and then it could happen, if he’s like Verlander then maybe it’s pretty likely. But right now, if after this season he was not a HOF level guy, I just don’t see it.

he claims he's gonna retire after 2027, which would hamper him. if he keeps this level up, he'd finish with 50+ fwar, which is just below the hall threshold for healthy players

Can you imagine the Giants 2014 SP rotation if they hadn't traded Wheeler away?

Madison Bumgarner
Jake Peavy
Tim Hudson
Matt Cain
Zach Wheeler
Ryan Vogelson
Tim Lincecum

Wheeler's a super longshot for sure. But I like that he threw the idea out there. The HOF is about career and peak. For the longest time--except for Koufax, Dizzy Dean, and a few other cases (and certainly players held back because of segregation)--career was much more important. The relative importance of each is clearly in transition now, moving towards peak. So I just took the column as, Wheeler's taken care of the peak part, now he has to pitch well till he's 40 and get to the bare minimum that would take care of the career part.

Preemptive and (obviously) speculative, but Posnanski thinks if it were 1977, Raleigh would edge out Judge for MVP:

2) I’ve been thinking about how the American League MVP voting would go if this was, say, 1977. It seems to me that MVP voting in those days came down to (A) How well the team did, (B) Batting average, (C) RBI, and (D) Did that player win the MVP last year because the voters didn’t like repeat winners, and maybe (E) Catchers getting a slight bit of extra credit for being catchers.

3) With that in mind, you look at Judge v. Raleigh — (A) the Yankees and Mariners have roughly the same record and are both currently in the wildcard race, (B) Judge’s .355 batting average would be a huge factor, Raleigh is hitting just .259. (C) Raleigh’s lead in homers and RBI would certainly be taken into account. (D) Judge DID win the MVP last year and also two years before that, and (E) I think Raleigh would get some credit for being a catcher, especially because he won the Gold Glove last year but I don’t know if the voters would have given him the full “Thurman Munson Leader” bonus.

4) And in the end? Whew, it’s SUCH a tough call. On the one hand, Judge’s batting average seems to me the decisive factor. The voters rarely gave the MVP to a batter who hit less than .300 (or thereabouts) and NEVER gave the MVP to someone hitting .259. On the other hand, they did give the MVP to Johnny Bench in 1972 when he hit a mere .270, and I really think the voters would have gone to extremes not to give yet another MVP award to Judge.

5) In the end, I’m going to guess: Assuming that Raleigh is leading the league in homers and RBI at the end of the year AND the Mariners make the postseason, the 1977 voters would have given him the MVP award.

What about the 1974 voters? What about the 1975 voters? What about the 1976 voters? What about the 1978 voters? What about the 1979 voters? What about the 1980 voters? What about the 1981 voters? What about the 1982 voters? What about the 1983 voters? What about the 1984 voters? What about the 1959 voters? What about the 1961 voters? What about the 1905 voters? What about the 1923 voters? What about the 2020 voters? What about the voters beaming in their opinions from 2172?

On the one hand, Judge’s batting average seems to me the decisive factor.

tell me you wear readers without telling me you wear readers.

WmC -- I assume by 1977, he picked a year that stood in for a 15- or 20-year window.