Joe Posnanski's Top 100 Players in Baseball

I know this article has been written a million times before, but it's a lot more fun when Joe P writes it:

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2009/writers/joe_posnanski/07/21/top.100/index.html

Thoughts? Arguments? Concurrence?

oh man i <3 this guy

i guess the obv quibble would be a-rod - the guy is getting old and is likely deteriorating, and his home run numbers are pretty obv juiced by playing in new yankee stadium - and if this was a "who would you draft" thing i dont know if i would want a guy who is hitting .250 as opposed to like... justin upton even

I thought it was pretty audacious to put the grinkster in the #4 spot, even if his performance has maybe warranted it.

greinke, lincecum & haren are almost interchangeable as the #1 pitcher imo

All the American League 1B at 14-17 seem silly to me.

xp Agree, but I'd still take Lincecum marginally over the other two to pitch a single game cuz of the strikeouts.

ya - greinke's slot was the first headscratcher to jump out at me.

Ibanez at 26 is just a joke.

23. Derek Jeter, SS, Yankees

Would take McCann, or Escobar, or Gallardo, or Phillips, or just about anyone behind Inge, prior to Inge.

McCann at 81 is fucking nuts. He's top 25 probalby.

A-Rod at 6 or whatever and Chipper at 87 is mindblowingly weird.

ibanez kinda makes sense if you follow his criteria of who is the best right now at this very moment

i guess the obv quibble would be a-rod - the guy is getting old and is likely deteriorating, and his home run numbers are pretty obv juiced by playing in new yankee stadium - and if this was a "who would you draft" thing i dont know if i would want a guy who is hitting .250 as opposed to like... justin upton even

― igloo-fifty-four-quart-sports-ice-chest.jpg (J0rdan S.), Wednesday, July 22, 2009 4:39 PM (58 minutes ago)

really dude?
arod - .252/.401/.546
"justin upton" (i know u were just trolling but) - .291/.361/.525

and those arod numbers are including that awful start

i'm like the only dude that doesn't like joe pos :(

upton was probably a bad example because he doesn't walk much, but let's go with... idk matt kemp

a-rod - .252/.401/.546
kemp - 323/.390/.507

or
mccan - .305/.379/.508

or
votto - .345/.430/.592

take any of those four guys and switch them w/ a-rod (who has inflated home run numbers due to new yankee and has a million more rbi chances being on a team like the yankees than say the reds or dbacks) and they are having comparable if not better years

"ibanez kinda makes sense if you follow his criteria of who is the best right now at this very moment"

I guess, but there has to be some forecasting to it too. I mean who'll be the rest for the rest of the season ya know?

I don't really like him either, CAD.

Uh aren't Votto's #s inflated by playing in Bandbox Park?

And it's not like A-Rod's going to stop playing in New Yankee Stadium so really who cares about that.

Agree that McCann and Kemp are seriously underrated though.

upton was probably a bad example because he doesn't walk much, but let's go with... idk matt kemp

a-rod - .252/.401/.546
kemp - 323/.390/.507

or
mccan - .305/.379/.508

or
votto - .345/.430/.592

take any of those four guys and switch them w/ a-rod (who has inflated home run numbers due to new yankee and has a million more rbi chances being on a team like the yankees than say the reds or dbacks) and they are having comparable if not better years

― igloo-fifty-four-quart-sports-ice-chest.jpg (J0rdan S.), Wednesday, July 22, 2009 5:59 PM (15 minutes ago)

okkkkk but 1) who cares about rbis and 2) arod had a horrible start, he's still a better player than those dudes

read some of the comments section re this list and ppl rightfully kind of livid over him missing out on markakis AND adam jones and even brian roberts

nflandrum
Arlington , VA
Brian Roberts leads the AL in doubles not Pedroia, is tied in runs scored with Pedroia, has more RBIs, total bases, and steals and plays on a worse team. He has also grounded into 10 fewer double plays. Glad to see major market teams getting the standard bias. This list is rediculous.

hmmmm.......

tragic that roberts' peak has been wasted on the o's imo

soo many people in the comment are mega butthurt over cole hamels not making the list - the guy has a 5.82 era and a .337 baa ON THE ROAD

lots of lols from "HOW CAN THE MVP FROM WHEN IT MATTERS THE MOST NOT MAKE THIS LIST!"

lots of stl fans getting butthurt over no yadi - dude is an amazing defender but...

what catchers made it? he's no less than the 5th best catcher in baseball right now isn't he?

Jair Jurrjens should be on this list even if he didn't have the best name in the game.

no mccann until fucken 81??? eatadiccup posnanski

i normally love poz but this is DOGSHIT i hope he is brutally murdered

it kinda feels like he just went to his yahoo league, sorted players by their ranking, and copy/pasted it into a SI column

uh this has nothing to do about this article, just a general question and i assume some ppl will open this thread:

how do you have a lower obp than BA, as yuniesky bentancourt has had in his time with the royals?

sacrifices lower your OBP but not your BA

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.

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.

It lives (77 days dormant, according to Posnanski): #43 on the fame countdown, Clayton Kershaw. (I messed up somewhere above.)

On hold again for something called "Revising Greatness":

We’re counting down the Hall of Fame plaques, 270 to 1, based on how well they tell the story of the player and how many emotions they summon from baseball fans, both young and old. When a plaque is marked “ASNC,” that stands for “All Stats, No Cattle,” meaning the plaque has too many boring statistics and not nearly enough about what actually made the player special.

Honestly, it's the most pointless thing he's ever done.

Wow--he resumed the Fame Countdown today and did what he probably should have done from the beginning: much shorter entries, so he reeled off 13 today. (I was born to complain; maybe a little too short--about 60-70 words per player.)

#42, 41, 40 -- I swear he messed up and forgot these numbers (unless I missed a post, which I don't think I did).

#39 - Yaz
#38 - Gary Carter (in terms of fame, not value, strongly disagree with this; Carter spent his greatest years anonymous in Montreal)
#37 - Maddux (in ILM parlance, too low! Maddux is legendary, and even has something named after him)
#36 - Morgan
#35 - Fernando (when a first name is enough, you're famous)
#34 - Gooden
#33 - Vin Scully
#32 - Trout
#31 - Canseco
#30 - Pedro
#29 - Judge (hard to gauge someone in his prime...)
#28 - Sosa
#27 - Rivera

It's been so long since this thing started, I forget him timeline...I think it was postwar players? (Or maybe even '62 expansion forward.)

Pedro too low. Order off the top of my head for that era

Pedro 1A
Randy 1B
Clemens (i think. His Ny years were kinda wack and Im a steroid agnostic ymmv) 3
Maddux 4 (emotional 1C. His 3rd act was admittedly kind of a drag)

Ranking those four is really tough. My sense is that Maddux is the most famous because of the "chicks dig..." commercial and because of "he threw a Maddux," but Pedro has the Zimmer fight, Johnson has the two ASG slips with Kruk and Walker, and Clemens has a mountain of infamy. (Trying to gauge their fame independent of pitching value.)

slips = clips

Randy made the bird explode

Randy is very tall too

The bird, yes--he and Dave Winfield both score high on the dead-bird component of fame.

One thing I'd factor in is "How long is your Wikipedia entry?" A quick look tells me that Clemens wins that one going away.

Does Michael Jordan count as a baseball player?

I doubt Posnanski will count him. (That reminds me of some kid a few years ago--after I'd moved from full-time to supply--doing some survey and asking me "Do you count as a teacher?")

Was going to suggest an Immaculate Grid component too, but that might be an inverse relationship since most players are looking for rarity.

As someone pointed out, these new shorter entries are clearly meant to dovetail with that other countdown of his, the HOF plaques. Which is strange.

#26 - Harper
#25 - Schmidt
#24 - Bo Jackson
#23 - Rickey
#22 - Ortiz
#21 - Johnson
#20 - Clemens
#19 - Seaver
#18 - Ozzie
#17 - Strawberry
#16 - Bench
#15 - Brett
#14 - Pujols
#13 - McGwire

I'd quibble with Schmidt--whose greatness exceeds his fame, I'd say--and Strawberry, maybe; not sure his fame has endured over the years.

He might be talking about fame at the time they were playing, to an extent. Schmidt qualifies in that way, every time your team faced him back in the day, you were well aware of that he was by far the greatest slugger of his era. In terms of length of career and absolute clockwork like consistency, no one else was really close. Reggie overlapped a bit but his greatest seasons didn't coincide with Schmidt's peak, Murray was a consistent 25-30 hr kinda guy, Murphy had a brief peak, Winfield and Dawson had their big slugging years but didn't ascend nearly as high as frequently, etc. Schmidt was practically the Aaron Judge of the '80s in terms of power dominance. I do think that like a lot of players from that time, he's just not nearly as appreciated now as he was then of course so that point is correct. That's a baseball fan I'd probably consider Strawberry to be a decent pick but I'm really not sure about that placement, there's no way he was higher on the fame chart than Schmidt and Rickey.

*as a baseball fan

TIL schmidt is a 100 war guy

mike schmidt was a god to me. on the same level as like burt reynolds and george brett and sylvester stallone and chuck norris.

We all agree that Schmidt was godlike as a player; I'm just suggesting that his fame didn't match his ability. It was really only when--sorry, but true--James started hyping him in the Abstracts that he started to get his due. Up till at least '78 or '79, I think most fans actually thought Steve Garvey was a better player than Schmidt because Garvey got 200 hits every year and Schmidt was a .250 hitter.

The other thing I'd say is that except for his four-HR game, I'm sure Schmidt had the kind of stories that make someone famous with a broader spectrum of the public. Brett is the obvious comparison: the pine-tar game, the quest for .400, legendary post-season HR, the hemorrhoids. Maybe I'm forgetting stuff, but I don't remember Schmidt being famous in that way.

Seriously--I'm in NO way trying to diminish him as a player.

I'm sure = I'm not sure

just to be clear i'm not making a case for burt reynolds or chuck norris' abilities with a baseball bat

mike schmidt had a movie star like aura to me, and i think to a lot of people

Interesting--never heard that before.

Reggie overlapped a bit but his greatest seasons didn't coincide with Schmidt's peak

In my mind, Reggie has to be top five on this countdown.

Thinking of the top 10, I might go with:

Either Mays or DiMaggio #1.

Williams, Aaron, Koufax, Mantle, Reggie near the top.

Bonds and Ohtani somewhere in there.

Which leaves one other spot for whoever I've egregiously overlooked.

Maybe Clemente or Jeter or A-Rod for the other spot.

Ha! "Egregious"--if it's post-war, I'm thinking Jackie Robinson just might be Top 10 (could conceivably be #1, even).

Bob Gibson has at least three big fame markers: 1.12, his post-season heroics, and his reputation (exaggerated, I've read) for being willing to throw at his own grandmother.

Yogi Berra could crack the Top 10 too.

Headline on today's blog post: "Nothing Beats a Great Pennant Race. Here's Why."

Is nothing safe from this kind of thing? Better than "Nothing Beats a Great Pennant Race--and here's why that's bad for Harris," but not by much.

so wait, is that not ok?

Posted some "fine start"-related stuff in the HOF thread the other day. Tom Tango's hopped on--couple of follow-up notes.

1) Now has a better name: "Nolans." (Game Score of 58 or better; Clemens actually had a few more than Ryan for his career.)

2) The opposite--not-so-fine starts--also has a name now: "Moyers." (Game Score of 40 or less.)

3) Tango, because he’s Tango, figured out Wins Above Average based on Nolans and Moyers, and here are the 10 best seasons since 1969:

Pedro Martinez, 2000, 8.3 WAA
Dwight Gooden, 1985, 7.6 WAA
Roger Clemens, 1997, 7.6 WAA
Randy Johnson, 1999, 7.5 WAA
Pedro Martinez, 1999, 7.5 WAA
Pedro Martinez, 1997, 7.2 WAA
Mike Scott, 1986, 7.2 WAA
Greg Maddux, 1995, 6.9 WAA
Steve Carlton, 1972, 6.8 WAA
Randy Johnson, 2001, 6.8 WAA

Neat seeing Mike Scott there--he was indeed awesome in '86.

mike scott had a weird career -- an even more extreme jake arrieta

Read up a little bit, trying to understand what happened to him in '86--thought maybe that was the year he developed his spitter. His Wikipedia page twice makes reference to rumors of scuffed/doctored baseballs.

Ugh: spitter = splitter.

Joe writes about the Red Sox (long) and Kershaw today. I think this takes you to where you can subscribe for free:

https://www.joeposnanski.com/subscribe?ref=NtRLktbp1q&_bhlid=bf7a73b936aab597b0df9777ef50b28c5a049d32

You can read it here - https://www.joeposnanski.com/p/the-red-sox-did-what-6110

Nothing very enlightening imo. Joe speculates that the FO intended Devers to get disgruntled in order to give them an excuse to get out of his contract.. seems a little 5D chess to me

May or may not work: Zack Wheeler as a possible HOF'er.

https://www.joeposnanski.com/subscribe?ref=NtRLktbp1q

You can read it here - https://www.joeposnanski.com/p/the-red-sox-did-what-6110🕸

Nothing very enlightening imo. Joe speculates that the FO intended Devers to get disgruntled in order to give them an excuse to get out of his contract.. seems a little 5D chess to me

Nah I think he’s dead accurate here

In my mind, they KNEW that Devers would be furious about being moved to DH. They knew EXACTLY what promises had been made by the organization. They were more than happy to let him hang himself in the court of public opinion by saying so. I think they wanted all along to get rid of Devers and dump that salary … and if they got a couple of prospects they could hype in the process, all the better

He was getting straight up hate from all sides during spring training until he eventually came out and said he’d DH and he even said the fear of being thought badly of was an influence on his behaviour. Meanwhile every dog in Boston was barking with the fury of the so called fans and what they were lining up to say about him.

At least SF isn't nearly as racist as Boston. I feel like Red Sox players of color have additional hurdles to clear outside of the usual fanbases.

Correct

On the Zack Wheeler question, I think he’d have to do a bit more to get in there. I don’t see him at this point as being someone who’s accomplished more than Dave Stieb in terms of career achievement, he’s no Corey Kluber in terms of peak (not far off but Kluber had five legit seasons), he just seems like the hall of very good. He could age really well and put up three or four more seasons like this and then it could happen, if he’s like Verlander then maybe it’s pretty likely. But right now, if after this season he was not a HOF level guy, I just don’t see it.

he claims he's gonna retire after 2027, which would hamper him. if he keeps this level up, he'd finish with 50+ fwar, which is just below the hall threshold for healthy players

Can you imagine the Giants 2014 SP rotation if they hadn't traded Wheeler away?

Madison Bumgarner
Jake Peavy
Tim Hudson
Matt Cain
Zach Wheeler
Ryan Vogelson
Tim Lincecum

Wheeler's a super longshot for sure. But I like that he threw the idea out there. The HOF is about career and peak. For the longest time--except for Koufax, Dizzy Dean, and a few other cases (and certainly players held back because of segregation)--career was much more important. The relative importance of each is clearly in transition now, moving towards peak. So I just took the column as, Wheeler's taken care of the peak part, now he has to pitch well till he's 40 and get to the bare minimum that would take care of the career part.

Preemptive and (obviously) speculative, but Posnanski thinks if it were 1977, Raleigh would edge out Judge for MVP:

2) I’ve been thinking about how the American League MVP voting would go if this was, say, 1977. It seems to me that MVP voting in those days came down to (A) How well the team did, (B) Batting average, (C) RBI, and (D) Did that player win the MVP last year because the voters didn’t like repeat winners, and maybe (E) Catchers getting a slight bit of extra credit for being catchers.

3) With that in mind, you look at Judge v. Raleigh — (A) the Yankees and Mariners have roughly the same record and are both currently in the wildcard race, (B) Judge’s .355 batting average would be a huge factor, Raleigh is hitting just .259. (C) Raleigh’s lead in homers and RBI would certainly be taken into account. (D) Judge DID win the MVP last year and also two years before that, and (E) I think Raleigh would get some credit for being a catcher, especially because he won the Gold Glove last year but I don’t know if the voters would have given him the full “Thurman Munson Leader” bonus.

4) And in the end? Whew, it’s SUCH a tough call. On the one hand, Judge’s batting average seems to me the decisive factor. The voters rarely gave the MVP to a batter who hit less than .300 (or thereabouts) and NEVER gave the MVP to someone hitting .259. On the other hand, they did give the MVP to Johnny Bench in 1972 when he hit a mere .270, and I really think the voters would have gone to extremes not to give yet another MVP award to Judge.

5) In the end, I’m going to guess: Assuming that Raleigh is leading the league in homers and RBI at the end of the year AND the Mariners make the postseason, the 1977 voters would have given him the MVP award.

What about the 1974 voters? What about the 1975 voters? What about the 1976 voters? What about the 1978 voters? What about the 1979 voters? What about the 1980 voters? What about the 1981 voters? What about the 1982 voters? What about the 1983 voters? What about the 1984 voters? What about the 1959 voters? What about the 1961 voters? What about the 1905 voters? What about the 1923 voters? What about the 2020 voters? What about the voters beaming in their opinions from 2172?

On the one hand, Judge’s batting average seems to me the decisive factor.

tell me you wear readers without telling me you wear readers.

WmC -- I assume by 1977, he picked a year that stood in for a 15- or 20-year window.