Joe Posnanski's Top 100 Players in Baseball

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

The Sid Bream dash is #44 in Why We Love Baseball.

#38, the Pine Tar meltdown. Three amazing things I don't think I ever knew. The league reversed the ruling the next day--Brett's HR counted, and the game had to be resumed for the last four outs. The Yankees appealed, and it went to court.

1) Lawyer for the Yankees: Roy Cohn!
2) When the game resumed, Martin was still angry, so he played Guidry in CF and Mattingly at 2B--the first left-handed second basemen in 26 years.
3) Martin also tried to protest the resumption once it was underway, saying that, in the earlier game, Brett failed to touch first or second. When the umpires disallowed that, Martin cleverly asked them how they could ever know if they weren't there? (New umpiring crew.) So one of the umpires takes out a signed affidavit from the original crew stating that Brett had indeed touched all the bases.

Inside the top 20...I'd forgotten all about Curtis Pride--great story (if you don't know about him, gyac, you'll love it). Managed to hang around for 11 seasons, and actually did have one really good one of around 100 games with the Tigers in '96.

The first half of this, about the Dodgers, isn't all that interesting. The second half, about problems at Substack is. A friend of mine edits a Substack blog for somebody else, so just sent this to him and said I thought the writer whose blog he edits will have to deal with the same issue.

https://open.substack.com/pub/joeposnanski/p/free-friday-are-the-dodgers-cracking?r=1jtu0&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

Joe started counting down his 50 Most Famous Players of the Past 50 Years today--reader votes, and I think he has a system. Anyway, love #50: the Bird.

Any guesses as to who'll be #1? 50 years takes you back to '74, so Aaron is still around but not Mays. I don't think he'll go with Aaron, though, who's obviously a '50s/'60s guy.

Reggie? Jeter? Junior? Ohtani? Ryan?

Seaver? Yaz?

sort of feel like it’s bonds

I'd say Seaver was in the running for #1 at one point, but I'm not sure if that would have been before or after the '74 cutoff. I don't know if Yaz was ever quite Seaver/Mays/Reggie-level famous ('67 maybe?).

I wouldn't at all be surprised if he settles on Ohtani. I suspect he'll avoid Bonds, since some degree of his fame is now the wrong kind. (Ditto Rose.)

Oh sorry I totally skipped over the Famous. In that case, yeah, Bonds surely

Most famous? Could be Ichiro, Jeter, Reggie. Definitely not Bonds. But there's an argument to be made for Pete Rose. He dominated headlines for years in the 80's between setting the hits record and the gambling controversy.

I don't know if its true that the Rose scandal really affected Bart Giamatti's health, but the fact that the story is out there shows how it was viewed as an existential crisis for the game. It may have been the last time when a player was bigger than the game itself? Rob Manfred wouldn't allow a silly scandal to derail his $10B/yr machine.

Pete Rose case is especially interesting given how entangled the sport is with gambling now.

Bonds should be top 5 imo. He was MVP seven times across three decades! They literally had him drop off the ballot and he’s one of the first names that come up in terms of players that were kept from the hall of fame despite their numbers (Rose in this category too!) There’s prolonged interest in him - he still holds a number of records and HBO is producing a new documentary about him next year. And his name came up multiple times when Aaron Judge was chasing the AL record. And ofc the “issues” around him defined a whole era of the game. Plus he was kind of forced to retire early despite putting up great numbers in 2007 because SF wouldn’t take him back due to wanting to draw a line under their association with him - and then they ended up retiring his number like a decade later anyway.

Jeter is famous enough for me to have known his name growing up on account of all the celebrities he dated.

I guess it’s subjective as to the criteria.

who can tell me what all these players have in common:
Wade Boggs
Don Mattingly
Jose Canseco
Randy Johnson
Roger Clemens
Darryl Strawberry
Mike Scioscia
Ozzie Smith
Ken Griffey Jr
Whitey Ford
Steve Sax
Mark McGwire

All guested in the Simpsons?

Corect!
Wade Boggs also appeared on Cheers and was also the inspiration for an episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, centring around his greatest accomplishment; which therefore makes him the most famous ball player ever.

Jeter was in Seinfeld. Bonds has a Kanye song named after him.

Simpsons/Seinfeld factor should definitely count (SNL? Jeter, I think).

I should at least copy his criteria:

1) This is my list, based on my super-secret formula. I know there were some of you who asked me to put the formula here, but I’m not going to do that because it’s an absurd formula filled with countless illogical twists and some very bad math. I don’t care, because it spits out a list that I like very much. I’d rather you argue with me about the people than the formula.

2) People who were retired by 1974 are not eligible. Basically, there are two all-time greats—Henry Aaron and Frank Robinson--who were not retired by 1974 and, in fact, achieved incredible things in the last 50 years. So they are on the list. But Willie Mays, who retired in 1973, is not. I had to have a cutoff because I really wanted this list to cover more modern baseball, and this made the most sense to me. There is no doubt that Jackie Robinson, Babe Ruth, Sandy Koufax, Mickey Mantle and other retired giants were more famous over the last 50 years than plenty of people of others on the list. Their fame isn’t in question.

3) The qualification for being considered was simple: You had to be on the cover of Sports Illustrated since 1970. Because several non-players were on the cover--owners, announcers, umpires, etc.—they are eligible to be in the top 50 and, as you will see soon enough, at least one made it.

4) There were almost 300,000 votes in the Fame Game that I created last week, which is incredible. Those votes were technically not a component of my super-secret fame formula, but I will tell you where you ranked each person.

So if you're bad at math, you have a head start in predicting #1.

The most detailed thing I've ever read on Rose vs. Giamatti was in whichever of James's Baseball Books followed the ruling. Must have been 12-15 pages long. Typically, he reached an idosyncratic, seemingly perverse conclusion: that Giamatti was killed by the internal stress of knowing he had dealt with Rose duplicitously. I know, in light of Rose's behaviour since the ruling, how hard it is to get your head around that--worth seeking out.

I think Bonds is one of many answers that might be right, but I don't think Posnanski would ever put him #1. He's always been very fair with Bonds with regards to his greatness as a player--had him #3 in The Baseball 100--but I think subjectivity will enter there and he'll have someone most every baseball fan likes.

(Bonds was also mentioned in Salt-N-Pepa's "Whatta Man"...assume "smooth like Barry" referred to Bonds in 1993--could've been Barry Sanders.)

Barry White surely

Barry
Bo
Yeah jeets
Ohtani
Mark

In no order

Talk about subjectivity--for 30 years I've heard that as Barry Bonds, but right, it's gotta be Barry White.

Bo Jackson will be high.

"Fame" has a bit of a peak fame vs. career fame component. First sentence in yesterday's Fidrych entry: "The Bird’s fame was so intense and so short-lived that it’s difficult to fully recapture it."