Joe Posnanski's Top 100 Players in Baseball

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.

His numbers were certainly awesome:

http://www.baseball-reference.com/japan/player.cgi?id=oh----000sad

Roy Campanella post seems to have brought out the trolls but I'm not clear what's controversial about him (admittedly you do have to kinda assume that that from 20-25 he was also the best catcher in the world, but given the fact that most independent observers THOUGHT exactly that not sure what issue there is either). In fact all it's doing for me is indicating how fucking weird C WAR is.

Yeah, I don't know why some of the commenters (a couple especially) don't take this in the spirit in which it's written, which is more like a combination of the 100 Best Players and the 100 Best Stories. Having said that, it was interesting to find out that Campanella's home/road splits were so drastic; Snider had a moderate split, Robinson didn't have much of a split at all.

The entire list is full of assumptions about how good some of the Negro League players really were (including the ones that later played in MLB), I figured his readers would have accepted that by now. When he puts Josh Gibson in the top 20 the trolls will have a field day.

Right but these are not huge assumptions since a lot of these dudes were pretty great when they did get to mlb and best African-American players of next gen were clearly equal or better than white contemporaries. Oh is as clemenza points out biggest leap since there is no baseline.

No question they were great but trying to assign them a ranking in a top 100 is very speculative, or like clemenza said, a combination of greatness and storyline. Like for Monte Irvin, Pos assumes that he would have had at least another 7-8 seasons that were at least as good as the few he had in MLB, and ranks him more or less according to that assumption. And he was more or less done as a star player by 35, which might or might not mean anything (plenty of HOFers declined quickly in their 30's). There's just no way to know, but at the same time you can't leave these guys out of a discussion about the best players of all time. Basically I don't envy anyone who tries to rank that generation of African-American players.

Right but by the same token you have to do adjustments of all the pre-integration MLB ballplayers as well. The whole exercise is very speculative and single out Negro Leagues ballplayers seems a bit odd.

I too btw find Campanella's H/R splits fascinating.

Bizarre--literally two minutes after posting that, the new one showed up.

#45: Kirk Gibson

Gibson’s fame was certainly mixed. He never played in an All-Star Game. He played 140 games in a season only three times. He hit 255 home runs and stole 284 bases—when he retired he was one of only nine players to have 250 homers and 250 steals—and yet there was always this sense that his career was a disappointment, that it had fallen short of what might have been. But I tend to believe careers are often what they’re supposed to be, and I’m not sure that a mercurial player like Kirk Gibson—who played with such wild abandon—can stay healthy or be metronome consistent. He was a bright-lights performer. He was a ferocious competitor. He was a football player. Had he stayed in football, who knows, his bust might be in Canton right now. But baseball wouldn’t have been the same.

I don't know if it was the only time he was on the cover of SI, but the issue accompanying the piece is early:

https://i.postimg.cc/zDK1P1mT/kirk.jpg

how do you do that, win an MVP, and *never* make the all star team?!

I don't know if he's the only guy ever to accomplish that, but definitely strange. I thought he would have been part of the '84 game, but he did get off to a so-so start: .273/.349/.483, 12 HR, 46 RBI. (The Tigers were 57-27 at the break.)

(Chet Lemon made it; .307/.377/.540, 12 HR, 51 RBI. Close, but clearly better.)

Gibby w/o a moustache is so weird

Typical Posnanski: he starts the most-famous countdown, gets six entries posted, then begins a pre-season countdown of the teams, #30-1 (for me, not nearly as interesting; there are a zillion pre-season rankings). So he seems to have put most-famous aside for at least three weeks. He did that a few times with the Top 100--took him three or four years to complete.

Resumption. #45, Manny:

He was supernatural with two outs and runners in scoring position. The highest OPS ever in such situations with at least 1,000 plate appearances:

1. Babe Ruth, 1.203
2. Ted Williams, 1.128
3. Lou Gehrig, 1.065
4. Jimmie Foxx, 1.056
5. Manny Ramirez, 1.050

And when asked how he did it, MannyBManny said: “I don’t know. I just hit.”

He did just hit. The rest of the game held little interest for him. But in that way, he wasn’t really much different from another Red Sox leftfielder named Ted Williams. He was flakier than Ted and less profane than Ted and just plain odder than Ted. It’s unlikely that Ted Williams would have delayed a game looking for his diamond earring in the infield dirt or smiled after getting picked off in the World Series or left the outfield in the middle of the game to go the bathroom or run back to first base after stealing second or dived to cut off Johnny Damon’s throw for no apparent reason or kept a water bottle in his pocket...

Millar: (Julian Tavarez and Manny) had this drink. It was like whiskey and it was this Latin cocktail they’d shake up in this old bottle, like a big old Perrier bottle. They put all this stuff in it: a shot of whiskey, honey, lemon. Well, Manny had the idea of throwing in Viagara pills and didn’t tell anybody. We were all taking shots of this stuff and it was like: “Let’s go play!”

Arroyo: Manny loved a laugh.

Leskanic: You know how they have the Silver Slugger award? I told him that this year they were going to give out a Silver Glove award. So we all spray-painted his glove silver and hung it in his locker. He said: “Lesky, I told you I was going to win the Silver Glove award!”

McCarty: For all the s— he took about his defense, he really worked at it.

Garciaparra: Manny put in the work.

Leskanic: We would go out and have some drinks together. All his drinks had Red Bull. I’d say: “Manny, every time I see you, you’ve got a Red Bull in your hand. Why do you drink so much Red Bull?” And he would say in his dreams he could take longer batting practice because of the energy.

Millar: Only Manny.

Arroyo: Manny was so cheap, when we would check out of a hotel, all his incidentals he would freaking send to Edgar Rentería’s bill every time. You’d see Edgar arguing with the hotel manager that he didn’t have all this food.

Leskanic: That’s true! Terry Adams was checking out, and I was right behind him. Terry was like: “I didn’t get four massages. I wasn’t even here for four days, how the hell would I get four massages?” Manny put it on his bill!

Foulke: Manny would do the same thing to Julian (Tavarez). Julian knew him really well. He’d go into his wallet and get money out.

Leskanic: Schilling made these “why not us” T-shirts. Manny took them all, put them all in his locker, 25 shirts, and he wore a different one home every night.

Arroyo: Manny would open up his man purse and he’d have $10,000 in there.

Leskanic: I just loved the guy.

Most of today's entry was about how little MVP support he garnered during an astounding seven-year run.

I often think of Manny as my favourite player

Why do you drink so much Red Bull?” And he would say in his dreams he could take longer batting practice because of the energy.

In his dreams

he is batting practice viking

manny ramirez (best player)

Down to #6 on the pre-season rundown that put the famous-player countdown on hold (I get the feeling he was rushing to get rundown finished before Opening Day and missed). In his Astros entry for today, there's this little bit--I've had this same theory for a while and have posted about it somewhere on ILX:

OK, I’ve been wanting to unveil this thought I have about 1970s sitcoms, and maybe I can pull it off here. Maybe not. But I’ll try. So you probably know that 1970s sitcoms were, pretty much without exception, filmed in front of a live studio audience. Well, one of the features of this is that after a show had been on the air for a while, the studio audience would cheer the mere appearance of Fonzie or Latka or Laverne.

But what struck me, even as a kid, is that the longer the show would go on, the more characters the studio audience would cheer for simply showing up. I mean, it was one thing when the audience cheered for the Fonz. It was quite another when they cheered for Ralph Malph. That, to me, that was living proof that a show was going on too long--the fans started applauding simply because they recognized someone from the old show. Hey, look, it’s Chachi!

this is a classic clemenza post, ty <3

but has joe posnanski ever been in a live studio audience? i mean, they literally prompt you to applaud! also does he really think 70s sitcom producers adhered strictly to audience reactions rather than using canned laughs when it suited their purposes?

Happy Days was the worst offender by far.

The first two seasons of Happy Days (1974–75) were filmed using a single-camera setup and laugh track. One episode of season two ("Fonzie Gets Married") was filmed in front of a studio audience with three cameras as a test run. From the third season on (1975–84), the show was a three-camera production in front of a live audience (with a cast member, usually Tom Bosley, announcing in voice-over, "Happy Days is filmed before a live audience" at the start of most episodes), giving these later seasons a markedly different style. A laugh track was still used during post-production to smooth over live reactions.

A laugh-track, yeah, but I don't know whether the entrance applause for characters was coaxed or not. It's almost a moot point as to how embarrassing it was to hear that watching at home.