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Thursday, February 05, 2009
Sabermetric greats unrecognized by the mainstream
If you put Poz and Neyer together, you have the closest thing this generation has to Bill James as a baseball writer. And if you remove the sabermetric angle, you’d have to put Neyer and James together to match Poz. These three guys should really get married already.
Anyway, Poz‘s latest inspired this post. And since America loves lists, give me your ten best MLB players that sabermetrics recognizes, but the mainstream doesn’t. Excluded from your list is:
- anyone in the Hall of Fame (Molitor, Boggs, etc)
- anyone who received at least 50% + 1 votes for the Hall of Fame (Blyleven, etc)
- anyone still active or has not yet appeared on a Hall of Fame ballot (Beltran, Larkin, etc)
- born before Willie Mays (Hodges, etc)
I mean, I might as well call this The Tim Raines Award. Ok, I will. In the running for The Tim Raines Award, and not limited to these players, in no particular order:
Tim Raines
Dwight Evans
Darrell Evans
Lou Whitaker
Alan Trammell (I feel sorry for Tigers fans)
Rusty Staub
Dick Allen
Albert Belle
Bobby Grich
Dennis Martinez
Orel Hershiser
Dave Stieb
Dan Quisenberry
Bret Saberhagen
David Cone
Bob Welch
Steve Rogers
Jimmy Key
Nominate your players, and then I’ll create a 5-man ballot. I’ll probably exclude Raines since the award is named after him.