Joe Posnanski's Top 100 Players in Baseball

7. Dick Allen

I must have assumed he'd already been listed.

That leaves Bonds, Clemens, O'Neil, and Whitaker for sure, I think; Rolen probably (doesn't make sense to me that he'd be this high, but it makes even less sense that he wouldn't be in the Top 100); plus one more.

O’Neill I wasn’t expecting.

Paul O'Neill at #3 will not make me happy.

(If you go back a few posts, I misspelled his name too!)

I don’t see it at all. He’s nowhere near those other guys.

Buck O'Neil in; Paul O'Neill, no.

(Unless you mean Buck O'Neil shouldn't go in as a player. I don't know enough about his playing career, but I'm basing that on this move in the direction of character, combined with Posnanski's friendship with him.)

6. Lou Whitaker

5. Scott Rolen

4. Roger Clemens

I bet he puts Buck O'Neil at #1 and not Bonds. Still not sure who the third will be.

3. Barry Bonds

I started skimming the Bonds comments, and the thing I've been puzzling over was made clear: Minnie Miñoso will be #2.

2. Buck O'Neil

Minoso at #1? I'm surprised. Posnanski is also obsessed with Duane Kuiper, maybe it'll be him.

1. Du...Minnie Minoso

Also, there’s this: A SABR researcher named Scott Simkus added things up, and he found that when you add together Miñoso’s Major League hits, minor league hits, Cuban League hits, Mexican League hits and Negro Leagues hits, you come the staggering number of 4,073, seventh all-time. Here’s that list of players with more than 4,000 total professional hits:

1. Pete Rose, 4,769
2. Ty Cobb, 4,379
3. Ichiro Suzuki, 4,367
4. Henry Aaron, 4,245
5. Jigger Statz, 4,093
6. Julio Franco, 4,074
7. Minnie Miñoso, 4,073
8. Derek Jeter, 4,059
9. Stan Musial, 4,023

The fifth most hits ever is by a guy named Statz.

i will admit to being ignorant of all things Buck O'Neil. what's the case for him?

former NL player of middling quality but P much invented the NL HOF in Kansas City, was an advocate on behalf of all the NL greats and forgotten greats, beloved Baseball spirit, first black coach in MLB for CHI C

should be in as a builder at the very least

like, if Yawkey is in the HOF buck o'neil should be above him for so many reasons

a guy named Statz

5-foot-7, 150-pound pacific coast league legend

I think a lot of people got to know Buck O'Neil through the Ken Burns film; he's in it a lot, and he's great.

I looked up Statz this morning--four consecutive years of 240+ hits in L.A. of the PCL.

it's amazing how many games the PCL scheduled in those days -- statz played 199 games in 1926!

guess you can do that when the games don't take three hours

I think a lot of people got to know Buck O'Neil through the Ken Burns film; he's in it a lot, and he's great.

― clemenza, Tuesday, January 26, 2021 11:21 AM (seven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

He's great in Jazz too, especially if you are familiar with Baseball. The way he talks about Henry Aaron and similar to the way he talks about Billie Holiday.

Had no idea. I have Jazz and have been meaning to start it for years.

i can't look at buck o'neil without slowing zooming and panning

"We are living in a moment where Chris Sale — one of the most accomplished pitchers of our time — goes 2 2/3 innings, allows five hits and one run, and he’s getting congratulated in the dugout like he just flew the first trans-Atlantic flight."

(I just noticed Karl's post directly above--perfect!)

In the interest of fairness, Posnanski's column is actually in praise of pitchers today, contrasting the lineup Rodriguez faced last night with a Twins lineup Koufax faced in 1965 when he pitched a two-hit WS shutout--substantially more daunting to be a starting pitcher today.

I had no idea his Top 100 book is 880 pages...I think the longest single volume I've ever read was Tom Jones in university (as opposed to, say, Stephen Ambrose's multi-volume Nixon biography). I will get this at some point when it's (much, hopefully) less than the $50 Amazon is charging right now.

Finally started in on the book; waited all year hoping for a price drop, never happened. (The paperback's slated for early next year.)

Not sharable, but an excerpt about last night's game (which I had to miss):

And that’s true, as far as it goes, but what they don’t acknowledge is that it isn’t a fair fight. If you have two great boxers in the ring, say Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, you get the Thrilla in Manilla. But what if in the third round, a manager comes in, takes the gloves from Joe Frazier, and hands them to George Foreman. And in the fourth, the manager calls for Joe Louis. And in the seventh, he calls for Rocky Marciano. And in the eighth, he calls for Mike Tyson, who gets in some trouble, so the manager stops the fight in the middle of the round and immediately brings in Evander Holyfield.

I mean, what chance does even Muhammad Ali have in a scenario like that?

...

I worry that sometimes these sorts of essays come across as me screaming at clouds and wishing to turn back the clock...but that’s not how I mean them. I’m thoroughly aware that you CANNOT turn back the clock. And I love baseball as much today as I ever have.

No, I write them more to point out what’s happening in the game because it can be super easy to miss. There are no announcements.

Did that guy know that baseball and boxing are quite different sports cos I’m worried he doesn’t.

He probably doesn't know that, no.

Sorry for the sarcasm...mounting frustration.

what on earth is he talking about there?

He's talking about how overmatched hitters are today in the middle-late innings, and making a fanciful analogy to boxing to get the point across. I'm pretty sure it's not meant to be taken literally--Posnanski's a great writer before he's anything else, I'd say. And he's observing, not complaining--I made sure to include those last two paragraphs, which appear later in the article, to head off any carping about him clinging to a game that doesn't exist anymore.

("There are no announcements": it helps to read the whole thing, obviously. It begins by contrasting football, where--according to Posnanski; I don't watch football, so I don't know--the league is very aware of what fans want, and tinker with the game to please fans, as opposed to baseball, where things just happen before fans are even aware that it's happening.)

i mean, watching the blue jays, "overmatched" isn't the word i would use for it.
does give off the impression he feels like something is concerningly wrong here tho

I'll quote the end, which reads like John Lennon's "Nobody Told Me":

No, I write them more to point out what’s happening in the game because it can be super easy to miss. There are no announcements.

Nobody told us, “From here on in, starters will pretty much never go seven innings in the World Series.”

Nobody told us, “From here on in, you will see 16 or 17 strikeouts per game rather than the 10 or 11 or 12 that you might have grown used to.”

Nobody told us, “From here on in, teams will carry 13 or 14 or 18 or 200 pitchers, and just about all of them will be unhittable in small bursts.”

No, this stuff just happened gradually and without a vote. The great pitchers of the past — the Mathewsons and Fellers and Gibsons and Koufaxes and Carltons and Fords of history — would probably not think all that much of Framber’s 6 1/3-inning, 4-hit, 3-walk, one-run start in a crucial World Series game.

But these days, that’s about the best a pitcher can do.

I guess that either resonates with you or it doesn't.

(I do think it's a mistake for him to assume that the way things are right now is the way things will be 10 or 15 years from now. Things always change--we could have an even more extreme version of today, or that trend could gradually reverse course. I doubt we'll be at the same place.)

That ignores when managers bring in washed-up Buster Douglas (aka Craig Kimbrel, or postseason Aroldis)

Finished The Baseball 100 today. Might be the longest book I've ever read, not sure. Proust awaits.

I wouldn't say it's replaced Ball Four or The Historical Abstract (or maybe James's HOF book) at the top of my list, it's pretty great. Enough so that I think someone who doesn't know baseball that well could get a lot out of the stories and out of the writing.

I've got a friend who's always telling me he loves the aesthetics of baseball--Clemente's his favourite player, and he collects stuff from the '50s and '60s, from when he was a kid--and that he has no interest in stats. I argue that that's a false distinction: there is an aesthetic beauty to, say, looking at the first 10 years of Frank Thomas or Albert Pujols' career boxes, something I've gravitated to since I bought my first MacMillan Encyclopedia in the mid-'70s. (I like great catches and long home runs, too.) And that's what Posnanski does exceptionally well: balances the stories and the stats. You can tell he's fascinated by metronomic consistency too. Only occasionally do I think he overdoes the aesthetics (e.g., the beginning of the Mays entry--#1, so cut him some slack), which leads to the kind of Natural/Field of Dreams sentimentality I'm not big on.

He doesn't cut slack for any of the villains in the book--Rose, Schilling, Cobb, Speaker, PED guys--and they are in there. He's not an apologist, and sometimes he goes after their apologists. But, as I posted on the Jerry Lee Lewis thread, he tries to present the whole person; as he quotes Buck O'Neil (which he does often in the book), "People ain't one thing."

at the top of my list, but it's pretty great.

I got an e-mail this morning saying I can give three free subscriptions to JoeBlogs away...I've got two friends I want to give two of them to; if you want the other, send me board e-mail with your regular e-mail address.

frogsb was quick on the draw.

hell yeah

One month only, frogbs, but still free.

Another three gift subscriptions to give away. They're only for a month, but you could get a lot read in that time (plus he's doing HOF columns right now). Let me know if you want one.

You can get The Baseball 100 (paperback) for under $15.

https://bookoutlet.ca/products/9781982180591B/the-baseball-100

I like when writers revisit their pre-season predictions. Posnanski made 23; he reviews and grades them today. A mix of good ones and bad ones, and some--Shohei wins the Cy, "Aaron Judge tops 50 home runs again, maybe 60"--were actually good but derailed by injuries. (So he grades himself C for both.) My favourite:

Prediction 20: The Reds will call up Elly De La Cruz, and he will do jaw-dropping things.
Accuracy grade: A+++

It might not have been the hardest prediction to make, but I couldn’t haven’t gotten it more right.

Why We Love Baseball comes out Tuesday; Jan at the local bookstore gave me my copy today, saying something about not having signed an affidavit about letting it go, evidently something bookseller's have to do.

Will dive into it soon, but I've got to say: Posnanski has hit some kind of unbearable low the past few weeks when it comes to self-promotion. Every other column is filled with stuff about his book tour, signings, promotions, etc. This is on a blog you pay for. You still get more writing than most any other blog besides that--he churns it out, and it's always interesting--and that's a fair trade-off. But it is annoying having to wade through that stuff. This shareable column from the other day is typical:

https://open.substack.com/pub/joeposnanski/p/introducing-the-willie-stargell-award?r=1jtu0&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email