Who is the most underrated player in baseball history?

Saturday 8/30/25

There isn't an actual single accurate answer to the question of who is baseball's most underrated player, and even if there is, the answer in 2025 can be different from what that correct answer was in 2020 and will be in 2030.

Certain names, though, will occur to someone who knows their stuff baseball history-wise; the players that, for one reason or another, haven't been given their proper due. Sometimes these players are titans of the game, and you might say, "Wait, if a player if known as an all-time great, how can they be underrated?"

Happens more than one might think. Take Stan Musial, for instance. Most people would rate him outside of the sport's top ten, and that's if we're just talking position players, but I think almost all baseball historians have slept on Musial's greatness. He's in that top ten for me. We're talking a player who was better than Mickey Mantle, and considerably better than Joe DiMaggio. Musial is closer to Ted Williams than he is to the likes of the Mick.

We know the biggest names--Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Ty Cobb, Ted Williams, Lou Gehrig, Honus Wagner--but Musial ought to be right there with them. You could argue he was better than Gehrig, which seems, at first, like a controversial statement--for Gehrig could basically do no wrong as a hitter--but you get into the nitty-gritty of the numbers and it's like, "Hmmm...yeah."

Musial was better than Jimmie Foxx, but I feel like Foxx remains the "louder," if you will, historical figure, whereas Musial and his legacy is quieter. Look at Musial's 1948. I'm not saying you'd be right--because I don't think you would be--but you could argue that it's the best season a hitter has ever had.

He practically led the league in everything (runs, hits, doubles, triples, RBI, batting average--a whopping .376--on base percentage, slugging percentage, OPS, OPS+, total bases, while finishing third in homers, seventh in walks, striking out only thirty-four times and amassing 11.3 WAR). But we don't talk about that Musial campaign like we do Babe Ruth's 1923 (or pick any of a number of other years), Rogers Hornsby's 1925, Mantle's 1956, Williams' 1941, Gehrig's 1927, Carl Yastrzemski's 1967. But we should.

At the same time, it's not a secret that Stan was the Man, and maybe that disqualifies him from being the answer to the question I posed above, depending upon how you come down on such things. The spirit of this inquiry does suggest that whomever we go with should be a fallen-between-the-cracks type of player, which is understandable.

That can mean someone who wasn't a Hall of Famer, or close, even, but just very good. Valuable. And, of course, overlooked.

Say...Jim Sundberg.

Ace defensive catcher. Vital part of a winning team. Backbone of elite teams. Three All-Star selections, six Gold Gloves. Played during the golden age of catchers--Johnny Bench, Carlton Fisk, Thurman Munson, Bill Freehan, Ted Simmons, Darrell Porter, Gene Tenace, Many Sanguillen, Bob Boone, Lance Parrish, Gary Carter--and thus bound to be overlooked because he wasn't a big bat type of guy (I'm not suggesting Boone was; but he had that family name and seemed to be in the thick of things with the high-profile Phillies).

You'll see the occasional person cite Sundberg as a player who ought to be in the Hall of Fame, which I think is a bit much--he had less than 1500 hits, hardly any power, and a .248 career batting average--but I dig the sentiment, which is: This guy was a lot better than pretty much everyone now knows.

What about a clear-cut Hall of Famer who, at the same time, isn't an inner-circle Hall of Famer? Like Al Kaline. How often does Kaline's name came up among baseball historians? It's not a ton. Kaline's issue is that there's this sense of him underachieving. Which is kind of silly.

In his second year, he finished second in AL MVP voting, then third in his third year. These were his age nineteen and twenty seasons, so you expected that Kaline would rack up the MVP awards going forward, but he never won one (though he could and maybe should have in 1963). His numbers didn't get better. He was steady--steadily very good, which isn't the same as "great for this five year period."

That will get you in the Hall of Fame if you're that way for long enough, and Kaline definitely was. No one questions his inclusion in the Hall, but he's not talked about much either, including by people who talk about these things. Underrated, sure, but not someone who you should really lead with in a discussion like this one.

Here's a good one: Mike Piazza. He's not talked about more glowingly for two factors: 1. There's this prevailing belief that his defense was atrocious, which isn't really true--it was more that he didn't have much of an arm and 2. Steroids.

Everyone from that era is met with some doubt, I'd say, whether they're innocent or not. The numbers are so extreme that on a whole it's hard to take them seriously. And I understand--you can say that about the early 1930s, but at least for that period we know players weren't getting the anabolic help that many in the late 1990s and on into the 2000s were.

But if Piazza put up the numbers he did in the 1970s? Even now, most people will name Johnny Bench as the best offensive catcher ever, and while that doesn't seem wrong to me, his numbers, paradoxically, aren't close to Piazza's. It's odd that this conclusion can still feel reasonable, but that's part of the fallout of baseball's steroid era, and I'm someone who's unconvinced that it's over.

Derek Jeter has become underrated. You'd think, given how people talk about him, that he was this poor defender who got lucky in ending up on a team like the Yankees during that time period, when in reality Jeter was an all-time great hitter and the biggest single reason why those Yankees teams were great.

Wade Boggs was underrated when he played, but analytics has done him a solid turn in recent years. Who knows Johnny Mize, meanwhile? Ted Williams rated him one of the ten best hitters of all-time. He's certainly in the top twenty, and maybe the top fifteen. Do you know anything about him?

I'll tell you a good one: "Indian Bob" Johnson, who should easily be in the Hall of Fame and may never be. Johnson got a late start. His rookie year was his age twenty-seven season in 1933. He had a career 139 OPS+. Put up eight 100 RBI seasons. .296 career average. Eleven seasons in the top ten in home runs. Has a strong argument for best player not in the Hall of Fame.

But my personal answer would be Dodgers shortstop Pee Wee Reese. I think this guy was amazing and I don't believe more than a few people, if that many, have a clue about that now. First of all, he averaged 5.1 WAR/162 games in his career. If you're averaging 5 WAR per season, you're doing some big things, and if you're a shortstop doing that, you're special.

For some reason, there are a lot of second baseman that you wouldn't think would average 5 WAR or more per 162 who do/did. Something about that position, almost like playing second base allows you to exploit some loophole in the WAR formula. I mean, I love Dustin Pedroia, but 5.6 WAR/162? That's way misleading. WAR over-rewards second baseman and rips off catchers, as a general rule.

But back to Reese: His mid-century era was a marvelous time in baseball when shortstops and catchers had more value than their offensive numbers might have suggested. The game was pure, organic, and these were the players that made you win, could make you great.

Reese was a greatness maker. Yes, he had lots of help on those Dodgers teams, but for all of that star power--Duke Snider, Jackie Robinson, Carl Furillo, Roy Campenella, Gil Hodges--Reese was the most important player, the one who made everything come together. The glue, the general, the best example, he who should be followed, the model, the most versatile. The best "getter" of wins.

Reese was a fantastic defensive shortstop, and his offensive numbers were "bigger" than they suggest at face value. He'd give you 70 RBI a season, and the likes of Vern Stephens aside, that's not what you got from a shortstop at the time. Reese was a leader. As reliable as they come. He stole bases, had a little pop, walked a lot. Helped his teammate, the heroic Jackie Robinson, before anyone else.

Actually, Reese may be the quintessential shortstop in the game's history. Not the best. You have these giant guys at short who hit fifty homers and play good defense. But I mean shortstop as the way God drew them up in the original baseball plan. What a shortstop has been, more than anything else, or what those with a love of the position might aspire to be, over the game's 150 plus years.

Discussion about the great shortstops in history means Alex Rodriguez, Honus Wagner, Cal Ripken, Jeter to a degree (though not without caveats and criticisms these days), even Ozzie Smith, but almost never Pee Wee Reese, who should be in the thick of that conversation. I'll tell you something else about Reese: He's a top 100 player of all-time. And there are some major figures outside of that top ten who are easy Hall of Famers, can even be first ballot Hall of Famers.

Reese had to be inducted by the Veterans' Committee in 1984, after having failed to be elected by the writers between the years 1964 and 1978, when he fell off the ballot, having never got more than 47% of the vote. Pee Wee Reese was incredible, though. He could be the most important player on a dynastic team. A team that went the World Series virtually every year for a long run. That how good he was, which no one seems to have any clue about, and why he's my choice for the most underrated player in baseball history to date.