Saturday 6/22/24
Four of the five starting pitchers for the 1980 Oakland Athletics threw a fourteen inning complete game that year. Not a typo: fourteen innings. Four different starting pitchers.
I don't really like doing the whole "best living baseball player" thing, which has come up now that Willie Mays has died. It feels kind of ghoulish to me. It seems like you should say someone from well back, not someone active now or recently retired. When I first encountered this question the other day, my answer was Carl Yastrzemski, who is not the actual best living ballplayer, but might be the answer most in the spirit of the question. Does that make sense?
This is my list at the moment of ten best baseball players ever. My list changes often. The top half, less so. This is just position players, not pitchers, obviously. Moving one to ten:
Babe Ruth
Ty Cobb
Ted Williams
Hank Aaron
Willie Mays
Rogers Hornsby
Lou Gehrig
Mickey Mantle
Honus Wagner
Stan Musial
Close: Rickey Henderson, Mike Schmidt, Johnny Bench
These are older players. Why? Do I think older players were automatically better? I don't. I think some of them were better at finding ways to separate themselves from everyone else, though. Part of the reason is because they had more inventive approaches. More individualistic approaches.
You could argue that Cobb and Ruth should be switched. I'd listen to that, if you really knew your stuff.
I can be skeptical sometimes about Honus Wagner.
Barry Bonds isn't here. I don't buy into him as much as many others do. Steroids, okay. But I also think the league bought into a narrative that you had to walk this guy 200 times a year and I don't believe you did. I penalize Bonds more for steroids than I do Roger Clemens, because Bonds became something so much different than he was before, and Clemens did not. Clemens may have gotten sustain. But Clemens in 1998 wasn't better than Clemens in 1990.
Jimmie Foxx is not in the top ten because he finished too early. Lost it too fast. If Alex Rodriguez had not used steroids and put up the same exact numbers, I still wouldn't have him in the top ten. Why? His OPS+ was 140. Not high enough. Surprisingly low, I'd say. Put him in another era and those numbers would have come down. He would have been like a 33 homer, 111 RBI guy in the early 1960s. And a pill.
Greatest ballplayer who is not thought of as an inner circle great but actually kind of was: Hank Greenberg.
I saw where someone's top ten list included Josh Gibson, Oscar Charleston, and Satchel Paige (they were including pitchers), and someone else made a crack about the "DEI'ing of baseball," which bothered me a lot. Those three players could definitely be a part of the top ten. I published an op-ed suggesting that Paige may be the best pitcher of all-time.
The problem--and what causes hesitation for me--is we don't know enough about these players. I would wager that I know as much about all three as anyone does right now, and I don't know enough to feel confident in a determination one way or the other.
Mike Schmidt came up one stolen base shy of a 30-30 season. Isn't that surprising? You don't think of Schmidt as a 30-30 guy.
I'm not suggesting it's likely, but it's possible that we could have a batting champion this year with a batting average below .300. And if not this year, then in the next few seasons the way the game is played now.
In the category of this isn't easy to do: Shohei Ohtani might end up leading the NL in WAR this year as a DH. I'd imagine a DH has never led the league in WAR.
It makes me uncomfortable oftentimes when I see the managers of last year's World Series teams as the managers for each league at the All-Star game. Often their team is not in it and it just seems sad to me. Darrell Johnson managing the AL in 1976, Davey Johnson managing the NL in 1987.
Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron and Dave Kingman are tied for eighth all-time in grand slams. Kingman!
Because the concept of a starting pitcher is bastardized at best and obsolete at worst in today's game, and because players from every era at every position make the Hall of Fame, there are going to be a lot of pitchers with career stats inferior to earlier pitchers making the Hall of Fame while those other pitchers will remain on the outside. This is going to look very stupid.
Also: Catchers. How are catchers going to make the Hall of Fame in the future? Will guys get in with these negligible career totals? 1528 career hits, a .267 batting average, 239 home runs, and 783 RBI? Or much less than that, actually, but with some "hardware"--four Silver Sluggers--and seven All-Star selections because there was no one else, really.
There are all of these guys from baseball history that when you look at their careers you do a double take over what they accomplished while seemingly not accomplishing a huge amount, which is unfair to them. You're still surprised, though.
Consider, for instance, Ron Fairly. He never hit more than 17 home runs in a season, never drove in more than 74, never hit .300. But he ended up with 205 home runs, 1044 RBI, and an OPS+ of 117. He won three World Series, playing from 1958 to 1978. Think about that. He was on the Dodgers of Gil Hodges, Duke Snider, Carl Furillo, Pee Wee Reese, Don Drysdale, and Sandy Koufax before he got good in 1958, and then he's playing on the Angles with Don Baylor, Bobby Grich, and Carney Lansford in 1978 when the Yankees caught the Red Sox and Bucky Dent popped one over the Monster.
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