Posnanski: The Baseball 100

Joe Posnanski is doing "an absurd thing" at The Athletic. It starts tomorrow and will conclude on Opening Day of the 2020 season.

Over the next 100 days, I will be counting down the 100 greatest baseball players in history, each with an essay. In all, this project will contain roughly as many words as "Moby Dick." ...

You will probably get mad when you see which players I have left out, which players I have ranked way too low or way too high. You might want me to know just how dumb I am, just how little I know about baseball, just how insulting the ranking was. I totally get it. ...

But the point of this for me is not the ranking but the stories. Every one of these players has a fascinating story — about persistence, about confidence, about pure talent, about amazing moments ... The stories are what inspired me to do this bonkers thing. ...

I will not go into great detail about my ranking. Some of it is science, but admittedly some of it also art. I will give you a handful of guiding principles:

1. I think today's players tend to be underrated compared to those who came before them.

2. I lean toward players who were great at their peak, even if that peak only lasted a short time, and lean away from those who were consistently but not toweringly good for a long time.

3. I lean toward players who did multiple things well over specialists (no matter how great) who basically did just one thing well.

4. I take a lot of care to make educated guesses about players whose careers were shortened by things beyond their control — World War II, for example, or baseball's tragic and infuriating color line. I don't make the same adjustment for injuries. ...

5. I have done a lot of research about the Negro Leagues to estimate the greatness of the players there. I try to be as unsentimental about this as I possibly can. ...

This list is a moving target. ... This is because there’s no significant difference between a player ranked 72 and 48 and 31. I could swap them, for the most part, without it changing much of anything. ...

The toughest part of doing this list was cutting it off at 100. There are 25 or so players who I think are just as deserving to be on this list as anyone in the bottom 50. It was brutal narrowing things down, but that's how such lists go. ...

And away we go.