Here’s Your List of the 100 Greatest Players
...based on your votes in our “Greatest Players in Baseball” game.
Thank you to everybody who played our little “Greatest Players in Baseball” game. By choosing between one player and another over and over again, you gave us a Top 100, which I’m simply going to list below. Remember, this is YOUR list.
Next to each name, I’ll put two things:
Where they ranked in my Top 100 list from April.
A (very) quick comment.
The (very) quick comment, I hope, will be fun—I was curious how the top 100 players of today would compare to the top 100 players of some other random season. So I chose 1977 (not randomly—I was 10 years old) and, simply using bWAR and nothing else, I threw together a top 100 list from ’77. I’m hoping this will offer some insight into how the game has changed… and maybe be fun.
Let’s do this:
No. 1: Shohei Ohtani 📈 (No.2)
1977: Rod Carew. Shohei’s other level, of course. Carew almost hit .400.
No. 2: Mookie Betts 📉 (No.1)
1977: Rick Reuschel. Going to be a lot more pitchers on the ’77 list, I think.
No. 3: Bryce Harper 📈 (No. 15)
1977: Phil Niekro. I wonder how Harper would do against Niekro’s knuckler.
No. 4: Aaron Judge 📈 (No.5)
1977: Mike Schmidt. Love this comparison.
No. 5: Freddie Freeman 📈 (No. 6)
1977: George Foster. This was the year Foster blew our minds by hitting FIFTY-TWO HOME RUNS! We didn’t think that was possible.