Who are the ten most important players from 1900 to now?

[RShack]

But both were similar athletes - Mantle showing more raw power and strength. It was fun to be a kid in New York in the fifties! As a Giant fan, I hated the Yanks even then!

With 3 teams there, did the MFY's and Giants play home games at the same time?

Or did they do home-and-away scheduling with Brooklyn treated like another city?

[Avsfan]

Mays matched Mantle's significance, I think. How do you separate them?

Mantle was much more of a celeb...the whole Yankee persona. New York City was in his hands, and he could do (and did) anything he ever wanted.

Everyone knows Mays was probably the better player...but didn't get quite the attention that Mick' did.

[bobmc]

With 3 teams there, did the MFY's and Giants play home games at the same time?

Or did they do home-and-away scheduling with Brooklyn treated like another city?

No freakin' idea...those brain cells are long gone!

[RShack]

No freakin' idea...those brain cells are long gone!

I understand, believe me...

If they did play at the same time, I wondered if the two stadiums were close enough that you could hear cheering from one place at the other one...

[BaltimoreTerp]

I understand, believe me...

If they did play at the same time, I wondered if the two stadiums were close enough that you could hear cheering from one place at the other one...

I'm sure you know this already...

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The high-rises on the left are where the Polo Grounds was (the green just behind it is Coogan's Bluff).

So...I'm betting yes, particularly when Yankee Stadium had most of a 70,000+ full house

[SteveA]

Shoeless Joe Jackson? I realize he wasn't the "most guilty" of the Black Sox but he was the most notable and renowned of them, the public face of the biggest scandal in baseball history.

Cap Anson? He gets a lot of blame for the establishment of the color barrier in baseball. It wasn't always there, you know. Imagine if it had never been established, how different hte game might have been in the 20s/30s/40s with some of the great Negro League players getting a shota t the majors.

Also:

I have to agree with those that say Frank Robinson shouldn't be on there. First of all, a key reason for putting him on there was his being the first black manager. Well, your original post said players. If you start opening it up to people based on their managerial or other non-playing role, you would HAVE to put Branch Rickey on the list, and probably some of the more innovative managers (some subset of McGraw, Weaver, LaRussa). Once you've opened the non-player can of worms you have to include Marvin Miller, or perhaps

[BaltimoreTerp]

Shoeless Joe Jackson? I realize he wasn't the "most guilty" of the Black Sox but he was the most notable and renowned of them, the public face of the biggest scandal in baseball history.

Cap Anson? He gets a lot of blame for the establishment of the color barrier in baseball. It wasn't always there, you know. Imagine if it had never been established, how different hte game might have been in the 20s/30s/40s with some of the great Negro League players getting a shota t the majors.

Those are both good choices, but I don't think they are top-ten material. As you said, Shoeless Joe may have been the most visible, but there were seven others with various levels of involvement.

Anson, again, was the most visible, but with all of the Southern and Northern-rural players that were turning to baseball, eventually the situation would have gone the same way. The Walker brothers, who Anson objected to, were the last ones for a reason.

Also:

I have to agree with those that say Frank Robinson shouldn't be on there. First of all, a key reason for putting him on there was his being the first black manager. Well, your original post said players. If you start opening it up to people based on their managerial or other non-playing role, you would HAVE to put Branch Rickey on the list, and probably some of the more innovative managers (some subset of McGraw, Weaver, LaRussa). Once you've opened the non-player can of worms you have to include Marvin Miller, or perhaps

I think that one's managerial tenure can be valid as long as it is on top of one's playing career. Robinson had very strong cases for both. Someone like Weaver or LaRussa had a negligible playing career.

[Moose Milligan]

I took some liberties and expanded it to all of baseball

1. Babe Ruth - obvious.

2. Branch Rickey - Not only broke the color barrier by signing Jackie Robinson, he drafted Roberto Clemente, the first hispanic superstar. Set the framework for the modern minor league system and introduced the batting helmet.

3. Jackie Robinson - Obvious

4. Satchel Paige - One of the Negro Leagues biggest stars, was able to reach the majors for a little bit and showed us what could have been.

5. Curt Flood and Marvin Miller - sacrificed his career for the player's union, and though they lost that battle, they won the war and it dramatically changed the sport. Have to include Miller here as he is the one who fueled the whole thing and in my mind they are always linked.

6. Kenesaw Mountain Landis - Cleaned up baseball after the Black Sox in 1919. His decisions to suspend Jackson in particular are felt today as Jackson still has a large base of people who believe he should be inducted to the HoF.

7. Joe DiMaggio - For reasons outlined above. Cultural icon.

8. Barry Bonds - I hate putting him on this list because he's a raging dickhead, but for awhile there, he was incredible. I've never heard a buzz in the crowd at OPACY like I did when he came to the plate other than Ripkens 2130 and 2131 games. And this was a meaningless August Sunday game.

9. Hank Aaron - Obvious.

10. Bill Veeck - Planted the ivy on the outfield wall at Wrigley, created the hand operated scoreboard still in use today, signed Larry Doby (First African-American in the AL) and Satchel Paige, did a bunch of other stuff...and sold the St. Louis Browns to an ownership group from Baltimore...

[DrungoHazewood]

I'm sure that there were others, but Candy Cummings made a pretty good case for having done it early on. In a long and entertaining article in 1908, he wrote that he started experimenting as a schoolboy during the Civil War, trying to do with a ball what he sometimes did with clamshells, making them curve in different directions. He said that he experimented for four years, trying different grips and windups, before he finally felt that he could get a reliable break:

It was during the Harvard game that I became finally convinced that I had succeeded in doing what all these years I had been striving to do. The batters were missing a lot of balls; I began to watch the flight of the ball through the air, and I distinctly saw it curve.

A surge of joy flooded over me that I shall never forget. I felt like shouting out that I had made a ball curve; I wanted to tell everybody; it was too good to keep to myself....

I get a great deal of pleasure now in my old age of going to games and watching the curves, thinking that it was through my blind efforts that all of this was possible.

Whether he was the first will probably never be known, but the sincerity of his account makes me believe that it did happen the way he claimed, and 1867 is pretty early in the evolution of the game.

Just FWIW.

Cummings gets a lot of credit for that, but like most Genesis stories there's probably a lot more to it. Baseball had been played in a semi-serious way for 20+ years before 1867, so I find it hard to believe it took that long for anybody to figure out they could make a ball cuve. I'm sure he did help to popularize the curve.

Wee Willie Keeler would be on my list. Not just for the old O's but those guys changed the way the game was played.

The old Orioles did do some innovating, but much of what they're often credited with (say, the hit-and-run, or bunting, or whatever) were things other teams or people came up with and they adopted. The main "innovation" they came up with was, well... there's no way to frame this nicely, but they led the movement to make baseball into a full-contact sport. They combined skill, cheating, and physical intimidation in a way never seen before or since. Within 10 years of the '94 Championship that style had been largely eradicated by folks who didn't want MLB to be a niche sport that was rapidly becoming oldtime version of the WWE.

Shoeless Joe Jackson? I realize he wasn't the "most guilty" of the Black Sox but he was the most notable and renowned of them, the public face of the biggest scandal in baseball history.

I was going to suggest Jackson, because without the scandal it's pretty likely that the powers-that-were would have crushed Ruth. Even in 1920 the establishment in baseball was extremely conservative, and without a major crisis they'd have found some way to keep the sport a base stealing, slap-hitting, "scientific" sport instead of one dominated by brute force slugging.

Cap Anson? He gets a lot of blame for the establishment of the color barrier in baseball. It wasn't always there, you know. Imagine if it had never been established, how different hte game might have been in the 20s/30s/40s with some of the great Negro League players getting a shota t the majors.

Anson didn't fit Frobby's criteria for 1900+ players, but he was arguably the most influential player of the 1800s. His role in the color line is greatly overstated - he was certainly a racist and someone who made those views known to anyone who'd ask (and many who didn't). But that was a mainstream opinion in that era. Had Anson never been born the color line would almost certainly have still been enacted about the same time.

And while we're making an end-run around the 1900 limit, I have to bring up John Montgomery Ward. He would certainly be among the top few most influential people in the sport's history. He began his career as a pitcher. In his rookie year of 1878 he led the league in ERA, then went 47-19 in '79. He eventually hurt his arm and played shortstop for almost 15 years. Somewhere along the line he got his law degree and became sort of the Marvin Miller of his day. He was the driving force behind the Player's League rebellion of 1890, and earlier attempts to organize the players. Then after the PL disbanded he continued to be involved in player's rights cases throughout the rest of his life.

He's basically a combination of Scott Boras, a much better Rick Ankiel, and maybe David Dixon (the guy who founded the USFL).

[DrungoHazewood]

Some other players who would be candidates for the list, maybe on the honorable mentions:

1) Some combination of Hicks Moran, Ed Walsh, Chief Bender, Roger Craig, Bruce Sutter. Guys who either invented or popularized the knuckleball, spitball, slider, and splitter. Sutter also gets extra credit for being the first save-situation reliever.

2) Firpo Marberry. The first good, young pitcher who was used primarily in relief. Before Firpo almost all relievers were either starters who couldn't cut it, were injury-prone or broken down, or were currently aces on their off days.

3) Carl Mays. The mean SOB who beaned Ray Chapman, and indirectly caused the banning of the spitball which heavily contributed to the Ruth era.

4) Bob Feller. Sure, he was a great MLB pitcher, even as a high schooler. But he was also the guy who caused great turmoil in the minor/MLB relationship when the Indians broke the agreement to not sign high schoolers directly. There were a lot of fights in the process that turned the minors from fully independent to completely servile, and the Feller incident was one of the biggest.

5) Jesse Orosco. One of the first pitchers whose job description was "get one lefty out", although he had other jobs before that, too.

6) Mike Andrews. He's kind of my representative for the change from owner-dominated to a more balanced baseball world. Andrews was the guy who made a couple errors in the '73 Series, and afterwards Charlie Finley forced him to sign a false statement saying he was injured and could be replaced on the postseason roster. Everyone rallied to Andrews' defense and Bowie Kuhn was forced to reinstate him.

7) Jim Bouton was mentioned earlier...

8) Fernando Valenzuela. Kind of a 1981 version of Cal, a player whose big performances coincided with a labor dispute and helped the sport recover.

9) Billy Sunday. Imagine if Juan Pierre retired from baseball and became Jerry Falwell.

10) John Tener. Major league pitcher in the 1800s who went on to become a congressman and governor of Pennsylvania. Similar to Jim Bunning.

[DrungoHazewood]

Sorry, keep coming up with more:

Sadaharu Oh. I think it's hard to overstate his impact on Japanese baseball.

Moe Berg. His legend is probably far greater than his reality, and his biography makes him out to be a kind of creepy guy. But he really was a Princeton grad, major league catcher, and WWII spy.

Fidel Castro. So he was probably a player who'd have had trouble getting regular innings in the Appy League, but his love of the game was probably the driving reason behind Cuba's dominance in amateur baseball over the past 30+ years.

[Nigel Tufnel]

He's probably not quite top-10 material, but I think Christy Mathewson deserves a mention. He's got the credentials in talent (inaugural Hall of Famer) and innovation (his 'fadeaway' was an early version of the screwball). But I think he was also one of the first college educated players.

I don't really know what the game was like in the early 20th century, but I always picture fistfights on the field, John McGraw holding onto baserunners' belts as they rounded third, and guys cutting across the diamond to go from first to third. I also picture lots of tobacco juice being spit, but that's not really important here.

Anyway, I suspect that baseball had kind of a rough-and-tumble reputation at this time, and players like Mathewson, who was famously both college educated and a gentleman, must have been important in popularizing the game, especially to women and children. So he gets my vote.

[weams]

1. Babe Ruth - no doubt he both revolutionized and popularized the game.

2. Jackie Robinson - for the obvious reason.

3. Hank Aaron - broke the game's most revered record under difficult circumstances, always handling himself with grace.

4. Mickey Mantle - Made a switch hitting Diety a possiblity.

5. Ty Cobb - the greatest practicioner of small ball ever to play, and a revolutionary on the bases.

6. Bob Gibson - Greatest pitcher of second part of the Century

7. Ted Williams - maybe the greatest hitter ever, last guy to hit .400, and the example he set by interrupting his career to go on active combat duty twice.

8. Cal Ripken - Showed that Big men could play middle infield. Eliminated the need for a backup shortstop on the roster. Saved the game of basball.

9. Walter Johnson - Greatest pitcher of the first half of the Century.

10. Frank Robinson - both a great player, and the guy who broke the color barrier on the managerial front, which was a huge deal in its day.

[RShack]

He's probably not quite top-10 material, but I think Christy Mathewson deserves a mention. He's got the credentials in talent (inaugural Hall of Famer) and innovation (his 'fadeaway' was an early version of the screwball). But I think he was also one of the first college educated players.

I don't really know what the game was like in the early 20th century, but I always picture fistfights on the field, John McGraw holding onto baserunners' belts as they rounded third, and guys cutting across the diamond to go from first to third. I also picture lots of tobacco juice being spit, but that's not really important here.

Anyway, I suspect that baseball had kind of a rough-and-tumble reputation at this time, and players like Mathewson, who was famously both college educated and a gentleman, must have been important in popularizing the game, especially to women and children. So he gets my vote.

If you like novels, read The Celebrant. It's a historical novel about Christy Mathewson, John McGraw, early 20th-C baseball, and the guy who designed the very first WS-ring. Wonderful book that just happens to be about baseball...

[DrungoHazewood]

If you like novels, read The Celebrant. It's a historical novel about Christy Mathewson, John McGraw, early 20th-C baseball, and the guy who designed the very first WS-ring. Wonderful book that just happens to be about baseball...

Very good book. Is the World Series ring stuff true? I never quite knew where the line between reality and fantasy was in The Celebrant.