You might know that the great John Thorn, official MLB historian, has long been of the belief that the key word in the Baseball Hall of Fame is, yes, “Fame.” Let’s talk about that for a moment, and then I’m going to tell you about a little series I’m starting up.
coming to this article so late and can't read through 299 comments to see if it was posted, but I wondered if baseball card value would be a good correlative/predictor for "Fame." To me, Beckett's values always seemed entirely linked both to how good a player was...but also how famous. Card value walks the knife's edge between objectivity adn subjectivity built into that seems to mirror what Joe is after.
Scott Rolen? Today Helton? 8’s? I guess it depends on how you construct the scale, but I have them around a 5 or 6. They’re not well known at all outside of baseball fans, and there are very casual baseball fans who might pause at their names.
I think that JoeBlogs subscribers, as a cohort, are going to be uniquely terrible at identifying which baseball players are most famous. We all love baseball. We all know all of the most famous baseball players. So there's no difference between how many of us know about Babe Ruth and Shohei and Reggie Jackson and Derek Jeter and Mookie Betts and Duane Kuiper - it's 100%. To get at the real answer - how many people know about a given player - we are all speculating because our personal experience gives us no insight. If a player is a 6 or 7 on this fame scale, then close to 100% of us know about them.
I think that looking at fame as these numeric levels of pop culture penetration is probably getting closer to the answer. Maybe all of the 8s are known to most casual baseball fans. The 9s are known to most casual baseball-adjacent sports fans who don't pay any real attention to baseball but absorb it when they are watching SportsCenter or PTI or listening to sports podcasts or whatever.
The fame 10s - these are the players who are known to people who do not care or follow baseball or sports at all. From the NFL, Travis Kelce recently became a 10 - he's probably the most famous football player in the world right now. Every NFL fan has known who is is for years now, but his football accomplishments are not why my 10 year old niece and all of her friends know his name.
Most people in the world are not MLB fans. I found an article from 2023 where Forbes estimated there are 171M MLB fans. Other sites estimate there are about 500M baseball fans - who may or may not care at all about MLB. Casual MLB fans know about Mike Trout and Justin Verlander, Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson, Bryce Harper and Ken Griffey Jr., at least a top 10-20 list of the most famous players. Close to 100% market penetration. The true differentiator of fame, then, lies in the 7.5 to 7.8M people who do not care about baseball or MLB - how many of these people have ever heard of a player?
And I think the difference lies in pop culture crossover moments, into arenas where people do not care about baseball. Whether a retired player becomes a color commentator on baseball broadcasts is not super important - it will help him to be remembered by baseball fans, but is not introducing him to any new audience. If a player hosts SNL, or makes an appearance on The Simpsons, or does commercials that are broadcast on non-sports TV, or dates a Kardashian... now we are getting somewhere.
I happened to be married to one of these people who do not care about baseball or MLB, so I asked her to make a list of all of the baseball players she could name. It's too funny to me to not share. I kept her spelling because I thought it was insightful. We are from Toronto and about 40, so emphasis on the glory days of the local squad. (Round brackets are hers), [square brackets are mine].
Famous Baseball Players:
- Alex Rodrigez
- Mike Trout (Stupid Fish Name) [We were at a game and someone was heckling Trout with this one and it was very memorable for her, "why are they so mean to him?" Also, I talk about Mike Trout a lot]
- Roberto Alimar
Something Carter (Aaron?) [later she came up with Joe on her own, Aaron is of course the circa-2000 pop star)
- The Bash Brothers (Mark McGwire, who is the other one?)
- Something Sosa (Sammy?)
- Jose Cansuelez [was thinking of Canseco... mixed with a Gonzalez?]
- That Japanese guy that bought his team member's wife a car [This is how she knows about Shohei, from Joe Kelly's wife's instgram post]
- Jose Bautista [Bat flip!]
- Babe Ruth
- Jackie Robinson
- Michael Jordan lol
- The one Marilyn Monroe married - Joe Damagio!
- Derek Jeter
- There's a father and a son, and their name has something to do with baseball [Prince & Cecil Fielder]
Maybe this doesn't get said enough...but being made a "hall of famer" is an honorific. It's a title. It's like being knighted. It bugs me when people say, "how can you have a hall of fame without Bonds, Clemens, etc... blah, blah, blah...how can you tell the story of baseball...". Spare me. Those guys are ALL OVER the hall of fame. Just walk anywhere in the museum. HOWEVER, as we all know, for various transgressions, they have, for now, been denied the honorific and title of hall of famer.
Only partially relevant to the article, but I wonder whether Babe Ruth will be significantly less famous 50 years from now than he is today. When I was a little kid in the 90s, Babe Ruth was "the" baseball player, the first one that comes to everyone's mind. Now I feel like that player may be Jackie Robinson; at least it's a lot closer.
Here are some reasons Ruth's grip might be slipping.
1) The last generation who was Ruth play are currently in their 90s, and anyone who was born before he died is getting pretty old. We're getting further and further away from Ruth as a real person.
2) For a long time, Ruth was the unquestioned best player in history. Now, I think that might be changing with more attention paid to how competitive a given era was. Joe's Top 100 list (in?)famously put Willie Mays #1 and Ruth #2. See Adam Ottavino's comments from a few years ago as well.
3) Jackie Robinson's primary claim to fame is (re)breaking the color barrier. That has just as much cultural salience as ever. On the other hand, Ruth's "brand" of showboating, beer, women, and big home runs is less in fashion these days.
4) The Curse of the Bambino is long gone, as is the original Yankee Stadium.
5) (The depressing one). Baseball as a game is declining in popularity, and could crash unless the younger generations have a resurgence of interest.
Fame is important, but it does have to be tempered by what they did on the field. For instance, if the reports I have heard about the NFL HOF announcement today are accurate, 3 of the 4 defensive linemen from the 85 Bears are going to be in the NFL HOF as of today. And yet, the 4th is the most famous.
I’m also interested in how Joe is going to allow for Fame outside of the what they did on the field. Bob Uecker was never famous for me until he started doing Miller Lite commercials and movies. Same with broadcasters; many are more famous in that role than they ever were as players.
You know he was just so damn athletic I figured Bo must’ve played some centerfield. I know he played mostly left. So maybe that’s cheating a little bit.
I struggled to come up with any infamous catchers. I did know that Pierzinski was pretty widely considered a jerk when he played. I thought about Piazza or Pudge Rodriguez, because there was some steroid talk, but I didn’t think any of that was ever so widespread or proven so as to make them infamous.
Like the commentary a lot. Only quibble: Yogi would have been famous if only based on his record. But yes, even more famous because he was Yogi, as you say. 8 vs 10…?
I did a google ngram of mentions in the last 50 years of the players with the top 100 WAR. Ruth and Jackie Robinson are -- every year -- far, far above anyone else. Then there's a cluster of Williams, Mantle, Mays, Aaron (combining Hank and Henry) and Bonds. An interesting index of fame.
coming to this article so late and can't read through 299 comments to see if it was posted, but I wondered if baseball card value would be a good correlative/predictor for "Fame." To me, Beckett's values always seemed entirely linked both to how good a player was...but also how famous. Card value walks the knife's edge between objectivity adn subjectivity built into that seems to mirror what Joe is after.
Scott Rolen? Today Helton? 8’s? I guess it depends on how you construct the scale, but I have them around a 5 or 6. They’re not well known at all outside of baseball fans, and there are very casual baseball fans who might pause at their names.
I think that JoeBlogs subscribers, as a cohort, are going to be uniquely terrible at identifying which baseball players are most famous. We all love baseball. We all know all of the most famous baseball players. So there's no difference between how many of us know about Babe Ruth and Shohei and Reggie Jackson and Derek Jeter and Mookie Betts and Duane Kuiper - it's 100%. To get at the real answer - how many people know about a given player - we are all speculating because our personal experience gives us no insight. If a player is a 6 or 7 on this fame scale, then close to 100% of us know about them.
I think that looking at fame as these numeric levels of pop culture penetration is probably getting closer to the answer. Maybe all of the 8s are known to most casual baseball fans. The 9s are known to most casual baseball-adjacent sports fans who don't pay any real attention to baseball but absorb it when they are watching SportsCenter or PTI or listening to sports podcasts or whatever.
The fame 10s - these are the players who are known to people who do not care or follow baseball or sports at all. From the NFL, Travis Kelce recently became a 10 - he's probably the most famous football player in the world right now. Every NFL fan has known who is is for years now, but his football accomplishments are not why my 10 year old niece and all of her friends know his name.
Most people in the world are not MLB fans. I found an article from 2023 where Forbes estimated there are 171M MLB fans. Other sites estimate there are about 500M baseball fans - who may or may not care at all about MLB. Casual MLB fans know about Mike Trout and Justin Verlander, Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson, Bryce Harper and Ken Griffey Jr., at least a top 10-20 list of the most famous players. Close to 100% market penetration. The true differentiator of fame, then, lies in the 7.5 to 7.8M people who do not care about baseball or MLB - how many of these people have ever heard of a player?
And I think the difference lies in pop culture crossover moments, into arenas where people do not care about baseball. Whether a retired player becomes a color commentator on baseball broadcasts is not super important - it will help him to be remembered by baseball fans, but is not introducing him to any new audience. If a player hosts SNL, or makes an appearance on The Simpsons, or does commercials that are broadcast on non-sports TV, or dates a Kardashian... now we are getting somewhere.
Travis Kelce? I think he’s dating some pop star.
I happened to be married to one of these people who do not care about baseball or MLB, so I asked her to make a list of all of the baseball players she could name. It's too funny to me to not share. I kept her spelling because I thought it was insightful. We are from Toronto and about 40, so emphasis on the glory days of the local squad. (Round brackets are hers), [square brackets are mine].
Famous Baseball Players:
- Alex Rodrigez
- Mike Trout (Stupid Fish Name) [We were at a game and someone was heckling Trout with this one and it was very memorable for her, "why are they so mean to him?" Also, I talk about Mike Trout a lot]
- Roberto Alimar
Something Carter (Aaron?) [later she came up with Joe on her own, Aaron is of course the circa-2000 pop star)
- The Bash Brothers (Mark McGwire, who is the other one?)
- Something Sosa (Sammy?)
- Jose Cansuelez [was thinking of Canseco... mixed with a Gonzalez?]
- That Japanese guy that bought his team member's wife a car [This is how she knows about Shohei, from Joe Kelly's wife's instgram post]
- Jose Bautista [Bat flip!]
- Babe Ruth
- Jackie Robinson
- Michael Jordan lol
- The one Marilyn Monroe married - Joe Damagio!
- Derek Jeter
- There's a father and a son, and their name has something to do with baseball [Prince & Cecil Fielder]
Maybe this doesn't get said enough...but being made a "hall of famer" is an honorific. It's a title. It's like being knighted. It bugs me when people say, "how can you have a hall of fame without Bonds, Clemens, etc... blah, blah, blah...how can you tell the story of baseball...". Spare me. Those guys are ALL OVER the hall of fame. Just walk anywhere in the museum. HOWEVER, as we all know, for various transgressions, they have, for now, been denied the honorific and title of hall of famer.
Only partially relevant to the article, but I wonder whether Babe Ruth will be significantly less famous 50 years from now than he is today. When I was a little kid in the 90s, Babe Ruth was "the" baseball player, the first one that comes to everyone's mind. Now I feel like that player may be Jackie Robinson; at least it's a lot closer.
Here are some reasons Ruth's grip might be slipping.
1) The last generation who was Ruth play are currently in their 90s, and anyone who was born before he died is getting pretty old. We're getting further and further away from Ruth as a real person.
2) For a long time, Ruth was the unquestioned best player in history. Now, I think that might be changing with more attention paid to how competitive a given era was. Joe's Top 100 list (in?)famously put Willie Mays #1 and Ruth #2. See Adam Ottavino's comments from a few years ago as well.
3) Jackie Robinson's primary claim to fame is (re)breaking the color barrier. That has just as much cultural salience as ever. On the other hand, Ruth's "brand" of showboating, beer, women, and big home runs is less in fashion these days.
4) The Curse of the Bambino is long gone, as is the original Yankee Stadium.
5) (The depressing one). Baseball as a game is declining in popularity, and could crash unless the younger generations have a resurgence of interest.
Fame is important, but it does have to be tempered by what they did on the field. For instance, if the reports I have heard about the NFL HOF announcement today are accurate, 3 of the 4 defensive linemen from the 85 Bears are going to be in the NFL HOF as of today. And yet, the 4th is the most famous.
I’m also interested in how Joe is going to allow for Fame outside of the what they did on the field. Bob Uecker was never famous for me until he started doing Miller Lite commercials and movies. Same with broadcasters; many are more famous in that role than they ever were as players.
Need one hall of fame and one hall of infamy. You can be eligible for both.
Last 50 years by position
Hall of Fame
1b Pujols but I feel there are more famous players I’m forgetting
2b Morgan
SS Jeter
3b Rose over Brett and Schmidt
C Bench
RF Reggie barely over Ichiro
CF Bo
LF Bonds over Rickey
Starter Ohtani
Reliever Mariano
Hall of Infamy
1b McGuire but Garvey gets some votes
2b Rose hey, he was versatile
SS Vizquel
3b ARod
C AJ Pierzynski
RF Canseco
CF Puckett?
LF Bonds
Starter Clemens over Schilling
Reliever very tough, how about Ugbeth Urbana (isn’t he the one who murdered someone in South America?)
What's infamous about Pierzynski besides being super annoying?
I have to grudgingly admit he's a pretty good analyst. Much more knowledgeable about the teams than most national broadcasters.
Bo in "Center" field? I'm sure he could've played it but I don’t think he ever did. I'd put him in LF over Bonds.
You know he was just so damn athletic I figured Bo must’ve played some centerfield. I know he played mostly left. So maybe that’s cheating a little bit.
I struggled to come up with any infamous catchers. I did know that Pierzinski was pretty widely considered a jerk when he played. I thought about Piazza or Pudge Rodriguez, because there was some steroid talk, but I didn’t think any of that was ever so widespread or proven so as to make them infamous.
Is Joe suggesting Ringo Starr is not famous?
Like the commentary a lot. Only quibble: Yogi would have been famous if only based on his record. But yes, even more famous because he was Yogi, as you say. 8 vs 10…?
If Derek Jeter isn't #1, something is wrong
Last 50 years? Not sure. Reggie, Bonds, Ryan, ARod…hard to say.
I can only speak for myself but I’m 35 and Jeter is certainly the most “seen” and famous baseball player of my life
He's not the Goat, though....
Reggie had a candy bar named after him. Only one other than Ruth …
I did a google ngram of mentions in the last 50 years of the players with the top 100 WAR. Ruth and Jackie Robinson are -- every year -- far, far above anyone else. Then there's a cluster of Williams, Mantle, Mays, Aaron (combining Hank and Henry) and Bonds. An interesting index of fame.
Lol. Another countdown.
Fine, you twisted my arm. :)
and the next book is born
So Mike Trout is an 8?
What number would Mark Fidrych be? Super Joe Charboneau?
Mike