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.