I had never heard of Joe Posnanski before he wrote “The Baseball 100” in The Athletic during the 2020 pandemic.
Day by day for about four months, he counted down his list of the top 100 baseball players ever to play the game, starting with Ichiro Suzuki at 100 all the way to a number one that wasn’t Babe Ruth or Shohei Ohtani.
To be fair, Ohtani didn’t make the list as all. It was 2020 and he was more potential greatness than actual greatness.
So if No. 1 wasn’t the Babe, who to be fair was second on this list, who was it?
Who else but Willie Mays?
Baseball scouts rate prospects on five different tools — hitting for average, hitting for power, fielding, throwing and running. Mays could do it all. He was the greatest player of his generation, and if he wasn’t the most beloved, he was close.
He was beloved behind another great player, and if we’re going to be honest about why more American kids loved Mickey Mantle in the 1950s, we have to admit it was because he was white. Oh, Mantle was a great player and a true Hall of Famer. Maybe one of the 20-25 best players ever.
But in the pre-integration days of the ’50s, the most beloved American baseball player was always going to be a white man. Mays hit 660 home runs, second only to Ruth at the time he retired, and he missed 80 percent of the 1952 season and all of 1953 to serve in the Army.
Those missed games probably wouldn’t have reached Hank Aaron’s 755 home runs or Barry Bods’ 761, but Ruth’s 714 would definitely have been within reach.
Everyone who loves baseball has heard of the famous catch pictured above from the 1954 World Series, but he made a better one in Pittsburgh as a rookie. The Pirates’ Rocky Nelson hit a long drive to left center, and Mays realized at the last second that he would not be able to get his glove out far enough to make the catch.
So Mays reached out with his right hand and caught the ball barehanded.
Naturally his teammates ragged the rookie by ignoring him when he came into the dugout at the end of the inning. After a few seconds, they reacted with unbridled joy. Pittsburgh’s general manager, Branch Rickey, was the man who integrated baseball four years earlier with Jackie Robinson.
He saw the 1951 catch and he gave Mays the credit he deserved.
“The finest catch I have ever seen and the finest catch I ever hope to see.”
Mays is one of the last living heroes of his generation. He turned 93 on Monday and doesn’t get out much anymore.
Forty-eight years ago, a president introduced a queen to a king. There is something about this picture what makes me happy just to see. All three of the people pictured lived into their nineties and Mays is the only one left.
All that said, I thought “The Baseball 100” was flawed, mostly because rating players from different eras is difficult. Posnanski says Negro League star Cool Papa Bell was the 84th best player ever, right behind No. 83 Phil Niekro.
Negro? Niekro?
Probably not, but Posnanski took a little away from the legitimacy of his list by fooling with the numbers. Jackie Robinson wasn’t the 42nd best player (or maybe he was), but Posnanski put him in 42nd place because that was his uniform number. He didn’t have a No. 19 because 1919 was the year the Black Sox threw the World Series.
I couldn’t really disagree with his top 10, even though I’m embarrassed to say I had never heard of his No. 5, a great star from the earliest days of Negro League baseball.
From 10 to 1, Satchel Paige. Stan Musial, Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, Ted Williams, Oscar Charleston, Hank Aaron, Barry Bonds, Babe Ruth and Willie Mays. I saw three of the top four play and I have baseballs signed by five of them. And while a lot of people resented seeing Bonds so high on the list, he has probably the best player in baseball before he started using steroids.
I wouldn’t have minded seeing Honus Wagner (12th) in the top 10, but I don’t know who I would have bumped.
I have wonderful memories of baseball, of games I attended and people I saw play. And I had a wonderful friend who played in the American League from 1939-57. Walt Masterson wasn’t a Hall of Famer, but he won 78 games and was the starting pitcher for the AL in the 1947 All-Star Game.
I recently picked up Posnanski’s most recent book, “Why We Love Baseball,” and I have been much more impressed than I was by the earlier book. It’s subtitled “A History in 50 Moments,” and he counts them down from 50 to 1. Some are personal, like Posnanski’s favorite baseball player sending him memorabilia, and some are world-famous, such as the one that tops the list — Aaron hitting home run No. 715.
If I were to do a top 50, Aaron would be in the top five for a different reason. I was covering a Braves farm team in 1984 and Aaron — the team’s minor league director — came to town to scout some players. He and I sat in lawn chairs outside the press box and watched the game.
I have a feeling I’m going to love this book.