Monday Links: Baseball's Four Greatest Living Ballplayers

Last week was the All-Star break in Major League Baseball, and as part of the promotional items pushed by MLB was the "unveiling" of the fan choices for the Four Greatest Living Baseball Players.  The choices were Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Johnny Bench, and Sandy Koufax.  In response, great sports writer Joe Posnanski (and I sincerely mean great, he is one of the best) wrote this piece about how the selection fails to tell a larger baseball story as they are all from the same era - generally, playing in the late 50s through early 70s.

Posnanski's overall point, I think, is that the fact that there were no players from the last 30 years does tell an important story, and not a good one for baseball.  It "tells the story that baseball stopped mattering a long time ago," and that if you are under 40 (like me), you missed the best baseball.

I don't think Posnanski is really trying to suggest or write one of those ubiquitous "baseball is dying" articles.  Baseball has more competition in the national landscape than it did in the 1950s and 1960s.  Yet, from a regional standpoint, from fan attendance to ratings for all those regional sports networks, the sport is very healthy.  But, I digress.

I think he is suggesting that there is a problem with the lack of a single player from the last 30 years in the group, but I think he mis-attributes the cause.  For Posnanski, it seems, this signals that people believed that baseball was better in the 1960s than now, and that this is ultimately sad.  I think this ultimately represents our tendency to mythologize the past, the "golden days," where everything was always better (and in this case, so was the baseball).  Its not so much that a single player from the last 30 years isn't one of the greatest, its that they haven't had an opportunity to be "properly" mythologized yet (and honestly, and more importantly, I think, we don't know how to handle/consider players from the "steroid era").  Folks like me, in my thirties, grew up hearing the older baseball fans talk about how great the players in the 50s and 60s were, be it Mickey Mantle, Aaron, Mays, Koufax, Bench, Al Kaline, Clemente, Bob Gibson, and so on.  Their more legends than ballplayers.  Yet, when one reads baseball history from those times, Mantle wasn't as good DiMaggio, no one compared to Ted Williams (or the long shadow of Babe Ruth), or Lou Gehrig or Rogers Hornsby.

Thirty years from now, baseball fans will share the stories of the players they watched, from Barry Bonds and Greg Maddux, to Randy Johnson, Cal Ripken, Jr. and Ken Griffey, Jr.  And the players in the next 30 years won't be able to compare to the legend status that those players will now have.  Time and memory seem to work that way, even in a timeless game like baseball.

Plus, it's not like the selection of those four players (Aaron, Mays, Bench, and Koufax) are terrible players.  They are "inner circle" Hall of Famers, so to speak, and have the credentials along with the mythology.  But I think where Posnanski sensed a problem, and where I do as well, is how players such as Bench and Koufax, while great, made it over players such as Bonds, Clemens, Maddux, etc.  Take for example this list detailing the career leaders in WAR (Wins Above Replacement - kind of an all inclusive stat determining value of players).  Bench is 77th on the list (both alive and dead), while Koufax is 313th (Mays and Aaron are 5th and 7th on the list, with Bonds the only living player ahead of them).

And ultimately, that's where the disconnect is for me with the list.  I would have Aaron and Mays, and believe they are clearly two of the four greatest living ballplayers.  Barry Bonds, steroid issues and all, is clearly one of the four greatest living players.  His at bats from 2000-2004 were "must see TV" as much as possible for baseball.  We may not be able to understand how to handle the steroid era yet, but by any reasonable, objective standard, Koufax and Bench are nowhere near the player Bonds was.

As for a fourth living player, more difficulty.  Stats (and the seeming desire to have a pitcher) make a strong case for Roger Clemens, with all the baggage he would also bring.  But he essentially had a career that doubles Koufax, having a two peaks almost as good as Koufax's one peak.

So, greatest living four ballplayers, for me - Mays, Aaron, Bonds, and Clemens.  And perhaps the real story is not that fans under 40 have missed this greatest era of baseball (as Posnanski suggests), but that fans still have no idea how to approach the steroid era and the players so entangled in it.