Joe Posnanski's Top 100 Players in Baseball

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."

Non exhaustive list of baseball player mentions in songs

https://genius.com/Rap-genius-athlete-references-in-rap-music-lyrics

First one I thought of was Sadahura Oh...Ryan Howard was on an episode of The Office, but pretty sure he's not making the list. (He was being schmoozed by a fledgling sports agency out of Philly.)

i got mad hits like i was Rod Carew

first to my mind: got mad hits like i was rod carew!

xpost dammit!

OH jr griffey over barry maybe for top 5

Ken Griffey should be top 5. He had the Nikes and he had his own game. He had an iconic look and ofc he was very good. And he’s still involved in the game regularly.

Also, this video made me laugh. He had that personality as a player too, like when Buck Showalter said he was “disrespecting” the game by wearing his hat backwards and he was like BUCK HASN’T GOT A 24 YEAR OLD GOOD ENOUGH TO CARRY MY JOCKSTRAP.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CvIXk_2JAct/

How ya sound be? You're better off a quitter
I'm on the mound G, and it's a no-hitter
And my DJ the catcher, he's my man
Anyway he's the one who devised the plan
He throws the signs I hook up the beats with clout
I throw the rhymes to the mic and I strike em out
So it really doesn't matter on how you intrigue
You can't fuck with those in the major leagues

Unless I'm forgetting something obvious, don't think anybody in the last 50 years resonated in a pop song like DiMaggio did in "Mrs. Robinson."

don't forget about Fernandomania, Big Papi, Doc Gooden

are curt schilling and john rocker gonna make the list?

what about deion sanders?

Rickey will be on the list pretty high, I'm sure.

also Kirk Gibson of course. Sammy Sosa, too.

Pretty sure the one non-player he'll have on the list (see criterion #3 above) is Steinbrenner.

Steinbrenner was also the subject of jokes in the Simpsons and Seinfeld

national fame vs regional fame is kind of a key distinction here, probably. to me, ozzie smith is an incredibly famous baseball player. everyone around here knows ozzie smith. albert pujols. mark mcgwire in the late 90s was very famous (on a national level there, for a while, too).

i just polled a non-sports fan who grew up in kansas city. they answered "albert pujols. mike moustakis. oh, and a-rod". they recognized barry bonds name, and when i asked what they knew about him, they said "he cheated. and he took his socks off"

I think McGwire, Pujols, and Ozzie will all be on the list. Agree with your basic point. In Toronto, Moseby, Stieb, and Kelly Gruber are still famous.

I think Ozzie will make it on the strength of "Go crazy, folks!," The Simpsons, his cartwheel, and his nickname (above and beyond his playing credentials).

i wonder if george brett would make the list? pine tar + "the george brett story" on youtube

If you didn't follow baseball in the '70s, this will befuddle you (and if you did, you might hate it), but--just posted--#49: Steve Garvey. (Haven't read the entry yet.)

Brett, I'd say 100%--pine tar, chase for .400, epic post-seasons, hemorrhoids, The Simpsons, on and on.

Didn't realize he was running for the Senate in 2024. You know for which side...

https://stevegarvey.com/

I assumed he was a Republican without knowing anything about him cos most are, website confirmed that, but he could be a fairly standard democrat with those views, and the website is deceptive!

I think he's very much a Romney type of Republican, not so much a Trump guy, but in 2024, who knows. One thing I remember is him citing (during his playing days) Gerald Ford as his political hero for stepping in and (paraphrasing from memory) calming the country after Watergate. Later on that day, he went out and fathered three children.