Author: Graham Womack

Organized baseball history dates more than 150 years, with more than 17,000 men having played in the majors and countless other individuals having helped in other capacities. Baseball history being what it is, a lot of people have made noteworthy contributions to the sport over the years.

Who then has been most important?

I wrote a post last week offering who I considered to be the 10 most important people in baseball history. My research for the post and subsequent reader response has led me to believe there might be something more worth looking at. In that spirit, I invite anyone interested to vote on the 25 important people in baseball history.

A ballot with 190 of baseball’s most memorable players, executives and other figures can be found here. Please VOTE HERE [anyone who has trouble with the Google Form I’ve created can email me their votes at thewomack@gmail.com.]

As always with these projects, there are few rules aside from the following:

1) Anyone is eligible to vote. Please feel free to share the link to the ballot with anyone who might be interested.

2) Any person in baseball history is eligible and I welcome write-ins. The ballot includes, but is certainly not limited to, anyone who I felt had a reasonable shot at the top 25.

3) Please use any voting criteria– “most important” is a deliberately subjective term and I’m interested to see what direction people go with it. I’ve included a broad enough range of candidates on the ballot for voters to go in any number of directions. On a related note, I do little to no active campaigning and encourage voters to work independently.

4) Please have all votes in by Sunday, October 26 NOVEMBER 2 at 8 p.m. Pacific Time. I’ll unveil results Monday, November 3  NOVEMBER 10.

On a different note, this project also has a charity component. Two years ago, I raised $1,600 for 826 Valencia, a non-profit that teaches journalism to middle schoolers. Now, I’d like to raise $2,000 for the American Brain Tumor Association to help fight glioblastoma multiforme, a malignant type of brain cancer that’s had a noticeable impact on baseball in recent years. For more information and to donate, click here.

Clayton Kershaw’s 7.4 WAR as of this writing belies the fact he might be having the best season by a pitcher since Pedro Martinez in 2000. Kershaw’s WAR doesn’t immediately stand out like his 1.87 FIP, 0.86 WHIP or 1.80 ERA, all best for a pitcher who qualified for the ERA title since Martinez in 2000. At this juncture, though, the fact that Kershaw has compiled 7.4 WAR in 190.1 innings places him in rare company. Kershaw is scheduled to make one more start this season and could become the seventh pitcher in baseball history with at least 7 WAR in under 200 innings.

Here are the six pitchers who’ve done this, according to Baseball-Reference.com’s Play Index tool:

Lefty Grove, 7.0 WAR in 191 innings in 1939: In August, I wrote of Grove as the most underrated player of the 1930s. I based it off seasons like this when Grove was an aging junk ball pitcher, with traditional stats far less impressive than before he blew out his arm in 1934. Per inning, though, Grove might have had the best season ever by a 39-year-old pitcher in 1939. Only Phil Niekro and Dazzy Vance managed more WAR in their age 39 seasons, with Niekro needing 334.1 innings to compile 10.1 WAR in 1979 and Vance needing 258.2 innings for 7.1 WAR in 1930.

John Hiller, 8.1 WAR in 125.1 innings in 1973: Hiller’s celebrated in the sabermetric community, with my friend Adam Darowski rating him higher than Lee Smith, Trevor Hoffman or Dan Quisenberry. It’s partly due to Hiller’s 1973 season, which might be the most underrated one in baseball history. That said, Hiller’s work that year didn’t go unnoticed. He finished fourth in American League Cy Young and MVP voting after going 10-5 with a 1.44 ERA and 38 saves for an aging Tigers club.

Goose Gossage, 8.2 WAR in 141.2 innings in 1975: As the saying goes, those who don’t remember history are doomed to repeat it. Every few years in baseball, someone forgets about what happened with Gossage because of this season and unsuccessfully tries to turn another reliever into a starter. Gossage’s brilliance in 1975– 1.84 ERA and an AL-best 26 saves– was a distant memory as he stumbled to a 9-17 record and 3.94 ERA the following year as a starter. On the bright side for Goose, he returned to the bullpen for good thereafter, collecting another 280 saves over the rest of his Hall of Fame career.

Mark Eichhorn, 7.4 WAR in 157 innings in 1986: I run an annual project having people vote on the 50 best players not in the Hall of Fame. The first year I did this project, someone gave Eichhorn a write-in vote because of his superb 1986 rookie season. I’d never given Eichhorn much thought before I saw the vote, though it strikes me that he posted a 200 ERA+ with three different teams. Looking at pitchers with at least 50 innings in a season, only Roger Clemens, Keith Foulke, Billy Wagner and Joaquin Benoit have matched that feat.

Pedro Martinez, 8.0 WAR in 186.2 innings in 2003: Martinez gets far more attention for his eye-popping stats from 1999 and 2000, though proportionally, this season wasn’t far off. Were Martinez to have pitched the same number of innings in 1999 and 2000 that he did in 2003, he’d scale to 8.5 WAR and 10.1 WAR, respectively.

Josh Johnson, 7.2 WAR in 183.2 innings in 2010: Johnson was 11-6 with a 2.30 ERA when the Marlins shut him down for the 2010 season after his September 4 start. While it was probably a wise move for the young right hander, who’s battled injuries much of his career, it helped keep him to a distant fifth in National League Cy Young voting. If he’d gotten the starts he missed thereafter, Johnson might have led the NL in WAR.

1. Babe Ruth: When Ruth died in 1948, Grantland Rice wrote, “No game will ever see his like, his equal again. He was one in many, many lifetimes. One all alone.” That about sums it up. More than 75 years after his last game, the New York Yankees legend looms eternally large, forever baseball’s greatest slugger, icon and savior. No player before or since has dominated the rest of baseball like Ruth did. No one transformed the game so much.

2. Ban Johnson: Since the National League’s founding in 1876, many rival circuits have come and gone from the Players League to the Federal League to the Continental League to name a few. Johnson started the only rival to the National League that’s lasted, the American League in 1901. “He was the most brilliant baseball man the game has ever known,” Johnson’s successor Will Harridge said. “He was more responsible for making baseball the national game than anyone in the history of the sport.”

3. Kenesaw Mountain Landis: Baseball’s first commissioner and still, 70 years after his death, the standard by which all other commissioners are measured, Landis like Babe Ruth helped save baseball after the 1919 World Series. Where Ruth restored fan interest, Landis effectively rid the game of gambling, which had been endemic in the sport for at least 20 years before Landis took office. Imagine any commissioner today ruling so autocratically or effectively.

4. Branch Rickey: Rickey did at least three major things to change baseball. First, he created the farm system. Then he signed the first black player in the majors since the 1884. Then in the late 1950s, Rickey helped spur baseball to expand by heading up the Continental League, a circuit that would have operated in parts of the western United States where the majors had not yet reached. Though he doesn’t get much credit for it, Rickey’s part of the reason there are teams today in cities like Houston and Denver.

5. Jackie Robinson: Rickey knew before he signed Robinson in October 1945 that the wrong player would set back integration in baseball by 20 years. Without Robinson’s stoicism and unruffled playing ability, there’s no telling how many stars the majors would have lacked over the decades that followed.

6. Marvin Miller: The greatest travesty in baseball today is that this man isn’t in the Hall of Fame. No one in the past 50 years has had a greater effect on the game than Miller who, as executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, led the successful fight to abolish the Reserve Clause.

7. Hank Aaron: That many people still consider Aaron the true home run king is a testament to his legacy. That Aaron made his mark in the most trying of circumstances– reams of hate mail during the summer of 1973 and a bodyguard provided by the FBI– only adds to the mystique. He’s been a fine elder statesmen for the game in retirement, too.

8. Rube Foster: The father of black baseball and, with respect to everyone who came after, its most important figure, Foster founded the first successful black baseball circuit, the Negro National League in 1920.

9. Al Spalding: Nineteenth century baseball had a lot of pioneers. Spalding may have been the most multifaceted of them, making his mark as a player, executive and sporting goods distributor, among other things. Among his many contributions, Spalding wore the first glove during the 1870s and organized a world tour for the game during the 1880s.

10. Henry Chadwick: Things like the box score and many stats that modern fans take for granted were Chadwick’s creation in the late 1800s. That has to be good for something.

In keeping with yesterday’s theme, here’s another historical rarity in baseball: players who posted at least a .500 slugging percentage while qualifying for a batting title their final season.

Just as pitchers generally keep getting work if they have anything left in their arms, batters can expect to remain in the majors if they can still hit for power.

Generally.

Here are the six players since 1871 who, for various reasons I’ll detail below, defied historical trends and left the majors after slugging at least .500 their final season:

It’s probably worth noting the reasons that each player’s career ended:

• Felsch and Jackson were among the eight members of the Chicago White Sox banned for throwing the 1919 World Series. The White Sox really got screwed on this on this one. Felsch and Jackson are also two of the three players since 1920, along with Albert Belle, to have at least 100 RBI their final season
• Orr and Puckett retired due to injuries– a stroke for Orr and glaucoma for Puckett
• Arlett had a one-season career in the majors, possibly due to fielding issues; Bill James, among others, had written of Arlett as the Babe Ruth of the minors
• Will Clark, after a triumphant final season where he helped spur a playoff run for the St. Louis Cardinals, retired to spend more time with his autistic son

Bill James wrote in his 2001 historical abstract:

Play along with me here. Take out your pen, and write down the names of ten pitchers who won 200 or more games in the majors leagues. You pick ’em– players from the forties, fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties, lefties, right-handers, American Leaguers, National Leaguers, Hall of Famers or guys who just hung around a long time. Your list.

What do all of these men have in common? I’ll tell: they were all above the league strikeout average early in their careers. Probably seven of your ten led the league in strikeouts at least once.

One of the things I enjoy about Bill James’ writing is that it has a certain timelessness to it. Now, just as it was in 2001, strikeout pitchers are highly valued in baseball. In fact, it’s extremely rare for a pitcher with any power left in his arm to not get work the next season.

Between 1901 and 2012, just five pitchers had at least 150 strikeouts their final season. [Another six pitchers who haven’t pitched this season due to injuries had 150 strikeouts in 2013, though I’m omitting them here as I assume they’ll pitch again.]

Sandy Koufax, 317 strikeouts in 1966: There’s a great story about Koufax, repeated in a 1999 Sports Illustrated retrospective. Tom Verducci wrote:

In his 50s Koufax was pitching in a fantasy camp when a camper scoffed after one of his pitches, “Is that all you’ve got?” Koufax’s lips tightened and his eyes narrowed– just about all the emotion he would ever show on the mound– and he unleashed a heater that flew damn near 90 mph.

Koufax famously quit baseball at 31 because of his arthritic left elbow. I assume after a break from playing and a reduction in his workload, something less than the obscene 323 innings the Dodgers required of him in 1966, Koufax could have pitched more years in the majors.

Britt Burns, 172 strikeouts in 1985: Just 26 his last season, Burns finished baseball at the youngest age of the men here. He won a career-high 18 games for the White Sox who dealt him to the Yankees that December. However, Burns never played for the Bronx Bombers because of a degenerative hip condition. He attempted a comeback in 1990, going to spring training with the Yankees and briefly pitching for two teams in their farm system.

Chuck Finley, 174 strikeouts in 2002: Finley went through an ugly divorce from actress Tawny Kitaen during his final season, with divorce paperwork including accusations he’d used steroids. The St. Louis Cardinals declined to resign the 39-year-old after the season ended and while Finley’s agent told the Associated Press his client intended to play in 2003, no one bit.

Mike Mussina, 150 strikeouts in 2008: Next to Koufax, Mussina might have the best final season by a pitcher in modern baseball history. After going 20-9 with 5.2 WAR and finished sixth in American League Cy Young voting, the 39-year-old voluntarily walked away.

Javier Vazquez, 162 strikeouts in 2011: Still just 38 at this writing, it’s a wonder Vazquez hasn’t pitched in three years. He’s spoken of coming back and has pitched internationally since the Marlins let him leave following the 2011 season. Vazquez never became the ace people expected though his career numbers via Fangraphs– 53.7 fWAR and 3.75 xFIP– suggest he may have been a little underrated.

1. Hank Greenberg, 25 homers, 1947: After missing nearly five years for military service, Greenberg was coming off a resurgent 1946 campaign when the Detroit Tigers sold him to the Pittsburg Pirates. As recounted in The Glory of Their Times, Greenberg considered retiring until the Pirates offered to move their left field fence in, let him choose the amount he was paid– $100,000– and release him at year’s end. Greenberg is primarily remembered from 1947 for mentoring Ralph Kiner, though the 36-year-old put up stats suggesting he could have played a couple more years. Aside from a 131 OPS+, Greenberg tied for the National League lead in walks with 104 and cost the Pirates just two defensive runs.

2. Ted Williams, 29 homers, 1960: According to a piece by Glenn Stout referenced in an Out of the Park Baseball forum, Williams turned down $125,000 to pinch hit for the New York Yankees in 1961. Like Greenberg, Williams’ final season suggested he had more to offer. His .645 slugging percentage is tops, by far, among players with at least 300 plate appearances their final season. Williams’ 190 OPS+ his last year is also far and away best and, interestingly, identical to his lifetime rate. Had there been DH’s during Williams’ career, the Splendid Splinter could have played until he was 45.

3. Dave Kingman, 35 homers, 1986: Kingman has the most homers his final season of any player. In almost every other respect, though, he was historically bad in 1986. His slash was a ghastly .210/.255/.431. His -3 Wins Above Average are the worst of any player in their last year. His 126 strikeouts are second-worst. In addition, Kingman sent a live rat late in the season to my future editor Susan Fornoff, one of the first female reporters allowed in locker rooms. Not surprisingly, the Oakland A’s let him walk. Save for a brief stint the following season with the San Francisco Giants’ Triple-A club, he was done.

4. Mark McGwire, 29 homers, 2001: Big Mac’s final season is a little underrated, since he declined dramatically from what he did the preceding five years and hit below the Mendoza Line. That said, it might be the best sub-.200 season a hitter’s had, with McGwire homering once every 10.3 at-bats and offering a 105 OPS+ thanks to his power and on-base abilities. While he was an injury-riddled mess at the end of his career, he remained a threat when healthy.

5. Barry Bonds, 28 homers, 2007: That Bonds had a 1.045 OPS his final season and couldn’t get work thereafter is a testament to how cancerous of a player he became or at least was perceived. Only Williams and Shoeless Joe Jackson have also had OPS’s over one their final seasons.

6. Jermaine Dye, 27 homers, 2009: Dye peaked late, hitting 187 of his 325 homers after age 30. That said, when he declined, it may have been in a hurry. Dye was on-pace for 40 homers and a .300 batting average through the first half of the 2009 season.  The Chicago White Sox declined to resign him, though, after he posted a .179/.293/.297 slash in the second half with just seven homers.

Long after Hal Chase left the majors, he could be found playing in outlaw leagues. The same could be said of several of the Black Sox banned following the 1919 World Series, including Shoeless Joe Jackson. Even Benny Kauff scouted for 22 years after he was banned for participating in a stolen car ring. It isn’t that surprising, really. What’s a person to do deprived of their livelihood? Long before Chase, Jackson and Kauff continued baseball careers in obscurity, Jim Devlin trod a similar path.

Devlin may rate as one of the sadder stories in baseball history. His 13.3 Wins Above Replacement in 1877 are the most of any player in his final season as he was the Louisville Grays’ only pitcher that year, racking up a staggering 559 innings. He went 35-25 with a 2.25 ERA and was rated by Bill James in his 2001 historical abstract as the best pitcher of 1877. Late in the season, Devlin and three other Grays were among the first players banned from baseball for throwing games. Suspicions rose after a seven-game losing streak where they muffed easy plays and were later seen with diamond stick pins. Banished from baseball, uneducated and semi-literate, Devlin and his family faced bleak prospects.

Devlin lived six more years, dying in 1883 of consumption exacerbated by alcoholism. Around September 1882, he got a job as a policeman in his hometown of Philadelphia. For most of his life after 1877, though, Devlin did two things: 1) Annually petition baseball to be reinstated, with the minor league National Association doing so in 1879; 2) Continue to play baseball, with Devlin being connected with at least nine teams after his ban from the majors. John Thorn wrote in Baseball in the Garden of Eden that Devlin may have played for still more teams under assumed names.

Devlin’s continued career after his ban offers a reminder of how disjointed 19th century baseball was and how little relation it bears to the current game or even the majors 50 years later. For instance, the SABR bio of Gene Paulette, the first player permanently barred by Kenesaw Mountain Landis, talks about how an industrial league couldn’t put him in uniform thereafter because no team would play it. While Chase played in the Pacific Coast League after he left the majors, he and some of the Black Sox later consigned themselves to the outlaw Frontier League in Arizona. Sal Maglie may have been last to play during a ban. Maglie’s SABR bio, which Jacob Pomrenke pointed out to me, talks of him barnstorming unsuccessfully and playing in a Canadian league after his five-year ban from the majors for jumping to the Mexican League in 1946.

Devlin needed no subterfuge after his ban. He pitched for at least three teams in 1878, including in a benefit game at Troy on October 9. Earlier, the Chicago Daily Tribune reported on March 8, 1878 that Devlin would be going on the variety stage and that a team named the Marions would be assembled around him in Philadelphia. Two months later, the Tribune noted Devlin pitching for a Philadelphia amateur team. Without clarifying if it was the Marions, the Tribune added that a Philadelphian was interested in launching a team for Albany with Devlin and Levi Meyerle. While that may have fallen through, Devlin found other baseball work in 1878, with the Tribune noting on November 17, 1878:

During the past summer he played with a Canuck club, and as a reward for his services was beaten out of the greater part of the salary promised him. During the season he became convinced that there was no chance for mercy at the hands of the League, and since then his efforts have been directed toward the International Association.

Meanwhile, Devlin was continuing to lobby for reinstatement. There’s a famous story about National League president William Hulbert tearfully giving Devlin $50 from his pocket at a private meeting and then telling him he could never let him back in the league because of his transgressions. The Chicago Daily Tribune noted July 6, 1879 upon Devlin’s reinstatement to the National Association:

But, even while seeking pardon for the past offenses and promising honesty for the future, Devlin was at his old tricks. When in Chicago last year he was actually given money by charitably-disposed persons who believed his story of poverty and sufferings, and in less than three hours this same money was used by him for the purpose of gambling.

Nevertheless, Devlin’s playing career continued. Thorn told me via email that Devlin signed with Forest City of Cleveland in August 1879. The following year, Devlin played for the San Francisco Athletics of the California League, a team that featured a few notable members including future Hall of Famer Pud Galvin. The San Francisco Chronicle even reported on July 26, 1880 that Devlin pitched a three-hitter against future 191-game winner Jim Whitney.

Devlin wasn’t done. The Cincinnati Enquirer wrote that Devlin might play in St. Louis in 1881. Thorn’s email also noted that Devlin played center field for Trenton in October 1881 and that he signed with Lone Star of New Orleans to play winter ball with in 1881 and 1882. I haven’t found any evidence Devlin played baseball beyond New Orleans, though that doesn’t mean it isn’t out there for someone willing to dig in deep with a newspaper archive. The man could seemingly not stop playing even in the most obscure and depressing of situations. With respect to Chase, Kauff and Shoeless Joe, I don’t know if there’s been anything like it in baseball since.