50 greatest players: 40-31

#40: Mel Ott
Scores: 926.2/983.6/98.6/0/1954.8
Ott was sort of the bridge from Ruth to Williams as the best pure hitter in the game, yet his name never comes up in the same breath as those two giants. I think much of this has to due with his somewhat lackluster batting average as well as his playing for that "other NY team."

#39: Mariano Rivera
Scores: 793.8/1240.6/18.0/0/1958.0
The first of 4 pitchers on the list who could lay claim to being the greatest postseason pitcher ever. Rivera has also been spectacular in the regular season and has been perhaps the key player on the Yankees for the past 13 years.

#38: John Smoltz
Scores: 931.2/1019.2/13.0/0/1963.4
An unprecedented starter-reliever-starter run Smoltz is the only player with 200 wins and 150 saves. He won the Cy as a starter and finished 3rd as a reliever. He also has 3000 strikeouts and incredible postseason numbers.

#37: Bob Gibson
Scores: 859.9/1112.4/14.0/0/1986.3
The man with the single season ERA record had more longevity than Koufax, and at his peak may have been even more dominating. His peak was not quite long enough to put him up with Spahn/Seaver and he might be a bit overrated because of 1968, but he's a solid top 50 player.

#36: Yogi Berra
Scores: 870.5/1059.4/111.0/0/1991.6
The master of quotations comes in at the third highest rated catcher Berra is certainly helped by having more rings than anyone in history, but he was a big reason why he has all those rings.

#35: George Brett
Scores: 787.8/1158.8/105.3/0/1999.2
Helped more than just a little by 1980, Brett is probably rated a bit too high, but that does not change the fact that he was perhaps the best pure hitter of the 1980s.

#34: Johnny Bench
Scores: 782.0/1130.5/131.6/0/2004.4
The #2 catcher on the list and tops from the Big Red Machine is the first player to crack 2000. If defense were more quantifiable, he could rank as high as top 20 and would easily rank the highest of any catcher ever.

#33: Eddie Collins
Scores: 901.9/1112.6/71.9/0/2016.2
The #2 2nd sacker was a great hitter, baserunner, and fielder. Although he was on the 1919 Black Sox team, he was not one of the 8 men out and a as a result went on to have a productive HOF career. Lifetime .333/.424/.429 with 3315 hits and 744 steals.

#32: Ken Griffey Jr.
Scores: 833.8/1090.7/132.4/0/2017.0
It's true that Griffey was a truly great player at his peak both at the plate and in the field, but it is a complete fabrication of the truth to believe he would be a top 10 player had he stayed healthy. He was never as good as Mays, Mantle or Cobb, and would quickly have been surpassed by ARod had both stayed in Seattle. Griffey to me may have had a top 10 talent, but I don't believe he ever worked hard enough to keep himself healthy and reach his full potential. 0 WS rings, 0 180+ OPS+ seasons, and peaked during an unprecedented era of offense.

#31: Shoeless Joe Jackson
Scores: 833.5/1192.1/85.0/0/2045.4
Jackson is tough to rank because he was banned when he was near his career peak so his counting stats are a bit low, but his % stats are high because he had no decline phase. Still, there's no doubt in my mind he'd have ended up close to 3500 hits with a lifetime .330 average and could potentially have developed into a power hitter as the dead ball era ended.

The Future of Cooperstown Part one.

A little over a decade ago at a time when I still thought that batting average and wins were important stats I visited the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown New York for the first time and I loved it. I had never seen anyone who was in the Hall play and looked mainly at the plaques of players I had heard of such as Ruth, Williams, Aaron and Mays. I was in awe of all the great players, the legends I had never seen.

Well a lot of time has past and I have not been back. Part of that is the location of the hall, but another is the shear volume of undeserving players that have been admitted. I have gotten to see most of the players admitted in the last ten years and with the exceptions of Ryan and Eckersley I haven't been very impressed. I feel like they are watering down the hall.

In my opinion, the hall should be reserved for the top 1-2% or so of players, so of the 1200 players currently on 40 man rosters, about 20 of them should make the hall. I don't believe in "magic numbers" and I think that 5 years of greatness should count more than 15 years of goodness, but 15 years of goodness should count more than 10 years of goodness and 10 years of mediocrity. For a long time i thought closers didn't belong in the hall, but I have made an exception for Mariano Rivera who is the best I have ever seen and has left no doubt in my mind that he could have been a solid starter.

There are 11 current players I see as absolute locks for the hall (suspected drug use makes Clemens and Bonds question marks): Maddux, Randy Johnson, Pedro, Glavine, Smoltz, Rivera, Griffey, ARod, Jeter, Pudge, and Manny. These 11 all had great peaks and great longevity and are in unless they Bonds or Rose their way out. There are also __ guys who have retired but are not yet eligible that should be locks: Piazza, Robbie Alomar, and Rickey Henderson arguments can be made against all of them but all will really be flawed and should not be listened too. At this point the debate can begin.

Curt Schilling actually ranks higher on Bill James's HOF Monitor list than Smoltz does. He doesn't have Smoltz's starter-closer-starter dominance, his unprecedented 150 saves/200 wins, or his one Cy Young, but other than that they are basically equal. Innings, starts, wins, strikeouts, era, and whip are all within a few percent of each other. I think that Schilling has to be in. He's certainly got the great peak and his longevity while not as good as some of the pitchers of his generation isn't bad. He's been great in the regular season, money in October, and in an era of relief specialists, he has thrown a ton of innings and complete games.

I'm a little less enthusiastic about Frank Thomas who ranks the highest of all remaining hitters on the monitor. Thomas was basically the best hitter in baseball for about 5 years in the mid 1990s, but he did it exclusively as a 1st base/DH type and after the run ended in 1997 Thomas struggled with injuries year in and year out and I just don't know if he had a dominant enough career at the plate to balance out his complete lack of skill in the field.

After Schilling and Thomas I don't think anyone has done enough to get into the conversation should their career end today. Obviously Pujols, Guerrero, and Chipper are well on their way as far as hitters go, and Mussina, Pettitte, and Santana are close on the pitcher side, but they aren't there yet. And David Wells and Kenny Rogers were very good, but not Hall of Fame material.

This leaves the relievers and guys who play difficult fielding positions, but don't have the hitting numbers to get in. Lets start with relievers. My thought has always been that relievers who never succeeded as starters should not be in the hall because if they were so good, why weren't they starters? Guys like Smoltz and Eckersley succeeded as starters, and Rivera was so incredibly dominant, especially in the post season, and often for multiple innings that it's likely he could have succeeded as a starter if given the chance. We shall continue with relievers in part two.

Closer: The Best Job In Sports

Oh to be a closer. You have all the glory, all the money, and all the fame of an everyday player or a starting pitcher and a small percent of the responsibilities. You get to record the last out of a win (and usually of the world series). You get a salary of 7 to 8 figures. Fan love you. Writers love you. Announcers love you. And the best part is: you get to spend almost all your time hanging out in the bullpen.

A good closer will pitch between 60 and 80 innings per year. That is about 1/3 of what a starter will throw, and about 1/20 of the time an everyday player will play the field. Yet they are paid almost the same amount per season.

Lets apply this to a typical American's life. We'll ignore position players and compare apples to apples. Johan is one of the company's top salesmen. He works 40 hours a week, brings in many potential clients, and is paid a nice salary. Joe gets almost all the clients after Johan brings them in. He generally closes the deal, but the client is almost always ready to buy by the time they get to Joe. Joe works 12 hours a week and is paid almost as much as Johan. The boss values them equally. After a few years Johan begins to draw interest from other companies and rather than giving him the raise he has earned, his boss lets him go to a company in a different industry. Joe immediately gets a huge raise making him the companies highest paid employee. Joe continues to do the same job, but without Johan bringing in the clients, Joe is having a hard time closing as many deals.

It's gotten ridiculous. Team now draft and groom pitchers specifically to be closers. But you can't because closers are sort of like running backs in the NFL. There are a select few who are good every year, but there are many more who are good for a year or two and then flame out and disappear.

Guess who led the AL in saves last year? Not Rivera. Not Nathan. Not Papelbon. Not K-Rod, Street, or Jenks. Not even JJ Putz. Nope, Joe Freakin Borowski led the league in saves.

I heard some talking head recently say that they believed Mariano Rivera was the most important player during the Yankee's dynasty from 1996-2001. Um... No. It was not Rivera. It wasn't Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada, or even Bernie Williams. It wasn't anyone in particular. It was their starting pitchers: Wells, Cone, Clemens, Pettitte, and El Duque. Those five pitchers carried that team from April-September and especially in October. The hitting helped, and Rivera was nice to have, but what happened when those pitchers got old? The team stopped winning in the playoffs. They tried to replace them with a long line of guys who didn't work out. Kevin Brown, Javier Vazquez, Jeff Weaver, Jose Contreras, Mike Mussina, Jon Lieber, Carl Pavano, Jaret Wright, Randy Johnson, Chin Ming Wang, and second go-rounds with Pettitte and Clemens. Except for Wang, every one of those pitchers has had success elsewhere, but they were all either past their primes or not able to handle the pressure of winning in New York. The closest they came to winning was in 2003 when they were beaten by the better pitching of Josh Beckett and the Marlins.

A recent article on MLB.com discussed the move of Joba Chamberlain to the starting rotation and how team sometimes keep their best pitchers as relievers. The only reason to ever keep a pitcher in relief who could potentially be a front line starter is if a team already has plenty of starters, a situation which rarely occurs. Such was the case with Rivera in 1997. Coming off a stellar 1996 campaign in which he threw over 100 innings in relief he seemed destined to be a starter, but when John Wetteland left via free agency, the Yanks concluded that they had plenty of starting pitching an needed a reliever. With Wells, Cone, and Pettitte leading the way, I'd tend to agree with them that Rivera would not have been much more than a marginal improvement in their rotation. The rest is history. The same scenario occurred in Boston last year when the Red Sox kept Papelbon in the pen, and so far it's turned out quite well.

Don't get me wrong, relief pitchers are an important part of a team. But is the 9th inning guy that much more important than the guys who pitch the 8th inning, or the occasional 6th and 7th innings? And he certainly can't be considered as important as the guy who pitched 1-7, right?

The 4 best pitchers of the last 20 years are Clemens, Greg Maddux, Pedro Martinez, and Randy Johnson, and its not even close. With the exception of Clemens, they're all first ballot HOF locks and Maddux should set the all time % of the vote record. To consider mentioning any closer, even Rivera, in the same sentence with these four is an absolute insult to them and what they accomplished. They were just as dominant if not more that the best closers, and they did it throwing 3 or 4 times as many innings. Pedro has a career WHIP of 1.04, Rivera's is 1.03 in 1/3 of the innings. Pedro's career best is 0.74, Mo's is 0.87 despite only having to dominate for a much shorter portion of time. Can you imagine what would have happened if Pedro had been a closer for his career? His lifetime ERA would have surely been under 1.50, and he may have had a few years with a 0.00 ERA. The Red Sox however would have struggled mightily without their ace and likely would have missed the playoffs every year from the time he arrived until 2004 when they finally had put together a well rounded pitching staff.

Rivera has had a stellar career, no doubt hall of fame caliber, but I wonder how good a starter he could have become. I can say that almost every ace starter could be a successful closer, but I cannot say the same about closers becoming starters. It's interesting to see guys like Dempster, Smoltz, and Lowe go from starter to closer and back again successfully. Dempster has arguably been the best pitcher on the Cubs this year, and one of the big reasons for their success. He has made an impact that he could not have made if he was still closing.

2005 AL All Manning Teams

Here we are the end of the season. There are still two weeks left, but it's time to name the end of the year all stars. The Rules: primary FIELD position only plus one DH for each league. The DH can be anyone, much like a utility player in fantasy. Each outfield must have at least one centerfielder, but right and left field can be played by anyone. Players must qualify for the batting title meaning they must have 502 plate appearances by the end of the season. For purposes of simplification, anyone on pace for 502 that is not done for the year, will be said to qualify.

All AL Team
C: Victor Martinez - Indians. Sorry Jason Varitek, but no one has been more important to his team's success since the all star break. Since the break, Victor has posted pecentages of .447, .577 and1.024. Varitek hasn't been bad with .366, .462, and .828, and he had a far better first half. But, Martinez's overall numbers are almost the same and his on-base is higher.

1B: Travis Hafner - Indians. Yes, he has served primarily as a DH, but the true first basemen don't excite me and Hafner's defense is certainly superior to DH counterparts David Ortiz and Jason Giambi who have about as much range as a spitball shooter. Hafner is 4th in the AL in OPS at .967 and 3rd in on-base at .405 his 26 bombs and 90 RBIs aren't bad either considering he missed two weeks with a concussion. Mark Texeira and his 42 homers may have seemed like a logical choice until you consider his road numbers: a very pedestrian .335, .435 and .770, numbers that would put him on par with Ronnie Belliard. Maybe Buhrle was onto somthing...

2B: Brian Roberts - Orioles. Talk about a weak position. In the first half, this guy was the MVP posting Pujolseque .416 .591 1.007 numbers. He has fallen off over 200 points on OPS, but he is still worlds better than the next best AL second sacker in on base and OPS. Soriano is not even close and .316 and .840 vs. Roberts .388 and .901.

3B: ARod - Yankees. As much as we all can't stand this guy or his team, this is a no-brainer. He is considerably better than the next best thirdbaseman in every major catetogory: R, H, HR, RBI, SB, OBP, SLG, OPS and he plays stellar defense. He is not the best player in baseball, but is probably the best in the AL.

SS: Michael Young - Rangers. Perhaps the most competitive postion in the AL includes JhonnyPeralta, Young, Miguel Tejada and perenial cantidate Derek Jeter. Jeter is perhaps the best fielder and has the intagibles, but doesn't have the numbers to match up with the other 3 at the plate. Young is the leader in OPS, but much like Texeira, he fast off away from Arlington. Tejada is widely considered the best hitting shortstop in baseball, but is only a .753 OPS since the break with just 6 homers. He just doesn't take enough walks for me. Peralta has been as hot as anyone, but like Young, he falls off a lot on the road. In the end it is Young with the best OBP and OPS who takes the spot.

CF: Grady Sizemore - Indians. A month ago, Johnny Damon had this spot sewn up, but injuries and a red hot September from Sizemore have pushed him to #2. Grady leads all AL centerfielders in OPS (.839), SLG (.490) and extra base hits (63) and he plays very good defense.

RF: Vlad Guerrero - Angels. No brainer #1 top AL outfielder in OBP, SLG and OPS plus perhaps the best outfield arm in the majors and very good speed. The prototypical 5 tool talent.

LF: Manny Ramirez - Red Sox. No brainer #1 right behind Vald in SLG and OPS. Always an adventure in the field, but even in a semi-off year, he is still too good a hitter to pass up.

DH: David Ortiz - Red Sox. Did you really think it would be anyone else? As great as Giambi has been all year, he can't top Big Papi in OPS. Don't get me wrong, Jason really deserves to be on this team. His .442 on base is #1 in the league, but with the power and clutch hitting the Big guy provides, he must make it.

SP: Johan Santana - Twins. It seems like all the good ones are in the NL this year but when you get into the numbers, Santana is the obvious choice once again. First in BA, OBP, SLG and OPS against as well as Ks and his is second in innings. Apologies to Zito, Colon and Burhle.

CL: Mariano Rivera - Yankees. There is no debate here. Once again, he is the one. He is essentially keeping the Yankees in the race. The game is over when he comes in. Only Huston street is in the same breath. And that's only if it is a very long breath.

Batting Order:
1. Sizemore
2. Young
3. ARod
4. Ortiz
5. Vlad
6. Hafner
7. Manny
8. Martinez
9. Roberts
Manager: Eric Wedge