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The voters have spoken: They like outfielders who put up monster numbers in the pre-expansion era.

It's not too surprising, of course, that Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, Ted Williams and Stan Musial are our semifinalists in the Greatest Season Ever bracket. Ruth, Williams and Mantle were three of the top four seeds. But as I wrote Wednesday, it was arguably easier to put up big numbers in the old days.

Let's take a closer look at the two semifinal matchups (vote here!).

Babe Ruth 1921 versus Mickey Mantle 1956

• Ruth came over to the Yankees in 1920 and exploded with 54 home runs, a mind-numbing total at the time that shattered his record of 29 set the previous season. As often noted, Ruth hit more home runs in 1920 than every American League team. In 1921, he upped his mark to 59, still better than five AL teams.
• Ruth set the all-time record with 119 extra-base hits, added 44 doubles and 16 triples. Remember, this wasn't the fat, big-bellied Ruth we remember. In 1921, he was still a slim, powerful athlete, as opposed to just a powerful slugger. It should be noted, however, that hitting 16 triples wasn't a rare feat back then: Ruth ranked fourth in the AL that year. Outfielders played much more shallow so it was easier to leg out three-baggers.
• Ruth scored 177 runs, tied for second all-time (Billy Hamilton scored 198 in 1894, a crazy ridiculous season that would require a post of its own). The Yankees did score a lot of runs that year -- 948 -- but Bob Meusel was the only other hitter in the lineup in the top 10 in the AL in OPS.
• Ruth did tower over the rest of the league -- the No. 2 AL guy in OPS was Harry Heilmann at 1.051, well behind Ruth's 1.359. The No. 2 guys in WAR were Tris Speaker and Ty Cobb at 6.6, well behind Ruth's 14.0. To some extent, Ruth's dominance has perhaps been exaggerated a bit. Yes, he was the first guy to put up these kinds of numbers. But in 1922, Rogers Hornsby hit .401 with 42 home runs. The same year Ken Williams of the St. Louis Browns hit 39 home runs and drove in 155 runs. In 1923, Cy Williams tied Ruth for the major league lead with 41 home runs. Soon thereafter, sluggers like Lou Gehrig and Jimmie Foxx were putting up comparable numbers.
• Ruth played mostly left field in 1921, and Baseball-Reference.com estimates his defense as about average. (For his career, they do rate him a little above average overall.)
• Ruth led the Yankees to their first pennant, but it ended in a disappointing World Series loss to the Giants in eight games (it was a best-of-nine that year). Ruth .313/.476/.500 with one home run and four RBIs, but was limited to six games as he battled an infected arm and a knee injury suffered in Game 5. He didn't play in Game 6 or 7 (both Yankees losses) and pinch-hit in the ninth inning of Game 8 with the Yankees down 1-0, but grounded out.
• Mickey Mantle was 24 years in 1956, already a four-time All-Star and the reigning AL home run champion. But he took his game to a new level in 1956, hitting .353/.464/.705 with 52 home runs and 130 RBIs to win the Triple Crown. He led the AL with 132 runs and 376 total bases and was the unanimous MVP as the Yankees won the pennant by nine games.
• Like Ruth, Mantle dominated his contemporaries. His 52 home runs were 20 more than Vic Wertz, the No. 2 guy, and Yogi Berra was the only other American Leaguer to reach 30. His 132 runs were 23 more than any other player and he was one of only two players (Al Kaline was the other) with 300 total bases.
• Unlike with Ruth, we know Mantle's splits, and he was incredible with runners on base, hitting .444 with runners in scoring position and .392 with men on base. In so-called "late and close" situations he hit .373/.481/.791, with eight home runs in 67 at-bats.
• He hit .325 with 10 home runs against second-place Cleveland.
• Mantle was never in the class of Willie Mays on defense, but in 1956 he was still young and fast, his knees not yet completely ravaged. He rates as a slightly above-average center fielder and an excellent baserunner.
• He capped the season with a World Series victory, hitting three home runs, including one in Don Larsen's 2-0 perfect game victory in Game 5.

Stan Musial 1948 versus Ted Williams 1941

• Stan the Man did everything in 1948, leading the National League in average, OBP, slugging, runs, hits, RBIs, doubles, triples and total bases. He just missed the Triple Crown, hitting 39 home runs, one behind Ralph Kiner and Johnny Mize. His 1.159 OPS was nearly 200 points better than Mize's .959.
• His 11.5 WAR was well ahead of Mize, the No. 2 guy at 6.9.
• Musial scored 135 runs and drove in 131 despite having little help in the St. Louis lineup outside of Enos Slaughter -- the Cardinals scored 742 runs. Backup Ron Northey was second on the team with 13 home runs.
• Musial hit .415 on the road with 23 of his 39 home runs.
• He also stepped up against the Cardinals' main rivals. The Cardinals finished in second place behind Boston, but Musial hit .443 against the Braves and .391 with eight home runs against third-place Brooklyn.
• Musial split his time among all three outfield positions, starting 61 games in center, 51 in right and 41 in left. He rates as a slightly above-average defender. Somehow, he wasn't the unanimous MVP, collecting 18 of 24 first-place votes.
• Ted Williams was just 22 years old and in his third season in 1941. He'd hit .327 as a rookie and .344 in 1940. Nobody expected this kind of season, especially after he broke a bone in his right ankle in spring training, which limited him to pinch-hitting the first two weeks of the season.
• Once he got going, Williams hit .436 in May, .372 in June, .429 in July, .402 in August and .397 in September.
• Despite leading the AL in average, OBP, slugging and home runs and runs scored, Williams lost the MVP vote to Joe DiMaggio of the pennant-winning Yankees, 291 points to 254 points.
• During DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak, he hit .408/.463/.717 with 15 home runs and 55 RBIs. Over the same calendar stretch, Williams hit .412/.540/.684 with 50 RBIs.
• Against the Yankees, Williams hit .471 although with just two home runs.
• Williams slugged .735, a figure no AL hitter has matched since.
• His 1.288 OPS is a figure topped only by Babe Ruth and Barry Bonds.
• Hit .553 OBP is third-highest in MLB history, behind two Bonds seasons.

Here are the debut seasons of the 15 greatest position players in baseball history, according to Baseball-Reference.com's WAR (wins above replacement-level) statistic, listed in chronological order:

1897 (Honus Wagner)
1905 (Ty Cobb)
1906 (Eddie Collins)
1907 (Tris Speaker)
1914 (Babe Ruth)
1915 (Rogers Hornsby)
1923 (Lou Gehrig)
1926 (Mel Ott)
1939 (Ted Williams)
1941 (Stan Musial)
1951 (Willie Mays)
1951 (Mickey Mantle)
1954 (Hank Aaron)
1979 (Rickey Henderson)
1986 (Barry Bonds)

You see the issue here, right? Only two of the greatest 15 players debuted in the past 55 years. Yes, I cheated a little. If I'd listed the top 20 players, Alex Rodriguez slides on to the list; if I listed the top 30, Albert Pujols joins the list. Chipper Jones is the only other active player in the top 50. But the point is: WAR suggests the greatest of the greatest played 50 years ago or 75 years ago or more than 100 years ago.

As the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote in his essay "The Extinction of the .400 Hitter," there are common explanations for this: "The first, naive and moral, simply acknowledges with a sigh that there were giants in the earth in those days. Something in us needs to castigate the present in the light of an unrealistically rosy past." Gould also cites the simple explanation that pitching and fielding have improved.

There is another layer to the argument, something that sabermetricians from Bill James to Richard Cramer have argued, that the skill of the average player has increased through time, thus making it more difficult to exceed the norm like Ty Cobb or Babe Ruth or Rogers Hornsby did. Gould writes that "The disappearance of the .400 hitter is largely the result of a more general phenomenon -- a decrease in the variation of batting average as the game standardized its methods of play -- and not an intrinsically driven trend warranting a special explanation in itself."

Gould was writing about hitting .400, but the same idea can be carried over to WAR. Essentially, the reason the list of greatest players ever is backlogged with players from the early 20th century is the game hadn't fully developed yet. We saw more extreme results, as it was easier for the best players to excel in a sport that wasn't fully mature.

Here's an example. Hornsby's 1922 season, when he hit .401 with 42 home runs, was included in our Greatest Season Ever bracket. Hornsby was the best hitter in the National League that season. His WAR is calculated, in part, by comparing him to the other second basemen in the NL from that season. Besides Hornsby, there were nine other second basemen who accumulated at least 300 plate appearances:

Hornsby, Cardinals: 1.181 OPS (704 PAs)
Cotton Tierney, Pirates: .893 OPS (487 PAs)
Lew Fonseca, Reds: .882 OPS (318 PAs)
Frankie Frisch, Giants: .824 OPS (582 PAs)
Frank Parkinson, Phillies: .757 OPS (618 PAs)
Johnny Rawlings, Giants: .729 OPS (346 PAs)
Sam Bohne, Reds, .705 OPS (435 PAs)
Zeb Terry, Cubs, .677 OPS (571 PAs)
Ivy Olson, Dodgers, .653 OPS (595 PAs)
Larry Kopf, Braves, .630 OPS (530 PAs)

The overall National League OPS in 1922 was .753.

Now, compare that to National League second basemen in 2011. Running a similar query, we get a list of 17 players, ranging from Rickie Weeks (.818 OPS) to Jonathan Herrera (.612 OPS). And Herrera was an extreme case; the next-lowest OPS belonged to Aaron Miles at .660. The overall NL OPS in 2011 was .710, so only Herrera was more than 50 points below the league-average OPS figure. In 1922 there were three second basemen (nearly half the league; remember, there were only eight teams in the league back then) at least 75 points below the league-average OPS. I'm not going to suggest I completely understand how WAR is calculated, but I believe this suggests the replacement-level floor in 2011 was much higher than it was in 1922. Weeks isn't Hornsby, but even if he was, it would be more difficult for him to obtain the same level of WAR since the level of play is stronger in 2011.

That doesn't mean Hornsby wasn't a great player or didn't have a terrific season; I'm suggesting it was easier for him to excel against a weaker caliber of competition. It's like it would be if somebody invented a new version of chess or something: Initially, there would be a few people who excelled at the game, but over time others would catch on, adapt and learn the skills necessary to compete.

That's what happens in baseball. I would hope that most of you believe the quality of the game improves over time. Trust me: Babe Ruth didn't face many 6-foot-4 pitchers who threw 95 mph. (In fact, from 1920 through 1935, Baseball-Reference lists 35 pitchers at least 6-4, only 16 of whom pitched at least 100 innings in their careers. In 2011 alone, Baseball-Reference lists 218 pitchers at 6-4 or taller, 58 of whom threw at least 100 innings.)

At some point this becomes a philosophical argument, I suppose, because in the end you can only mathematically compare a player to his contemporaries. But while I believe there were giants back in 1922, I also believe there are giants in 2012.

* * * *

OK, the quarterfinals. Ken Griffey Jr. upset Barry Bonds in the second round, proving (not surprisingly) that there is no love for Bonds' 2001 season. I do wonder how he would have fared if I had chosen his magnificent 1993 season. The matchups:

• 1921 Babe Ruth versus 1967 Carl Yastrzemski: Our first of two Yankees-Red Sox battles. Can Yaz stop the Babe? I suspect not.
• 1911 Ty Cobb versus 1956 Mickey Mantle: Should be a close one. Mantle won the Triple Crown, but Cobb hit .420, stole 83 bases and scored 147 runs.
• 1997 Ken Griffey Jr. versus 1948 Stan Musial: I suspect many of you may know this, but Griffey and Musial were both born in Donora, Pa.
• 1927 Lou Gehrig versus 1941 Ted Williams: Williams hit .406, but Gehrig hit .373 with 47 home runs and 175 RBIs. Gehrig in an upset?

Follow David Schoenfield on Twitter @dschoenfield.

We've moved on to the second round of the Greatest MLB Season Ever bracket. All top-10 seeds advanced, but there were three upsets; interestingly, all involved shortstops. Alex Rodriguez lost to Ken Griffey Jr. in a Mariners death duel (got destroyed, actually, 87 percent to 13 percent); Hank Aaron defeated Robin Yount, 61 to 39 percent; and Jimmie Foxx creamed Cal Ripken, 71 to 29 percent. Maybe I'll have to write up a post on the value of positional scarcity.

I'm not surprised about Rodriguez; even though I chose one of his "pre-steroid" seasons, he's not exactly a fan favorite. Griffey has no PED stain on his reputation, a huge advantage in a popular vote like this. I was surprised Ripken lost so easily to Foxx, despite Foxx's awesome power numbers in 1932 (58 home runs, 169 RBIs). Ripken remains one of the most beloved players ever, and while his raw numbers in 1991 might not immediately impress (.323, 34 home runs, 114 RBIs), those were tremendous numbers for that season and especially tremendous for a shortstop in the pre-Rodriguez/Jeter/Garciaparra era.

But here's what stands out to me: Baseball fans still show great respect for the old guys. Foxx beat Ripken. Aaron over Yount. Stan Musial over George Brett. Joe DiMaggio edged out Albert Pujols in the closest first-round vote, 52 to 48 percent. Ty Cobb easily outvoted Rickey Henderson. In fact, in every matchup in which there was a sizable generation gap, the older guy won. Now, some of these weren't necessarily surprises -- it's not surprising that Mickey Mantle would beat Mike Piazza, for example -- but could you imagine this happening in other sports? No football fan thinks Bronko Nagurski was better than Walter Payton or Emmitt Smith. Sammy Baugh wouldn't outpoll Peyton Manning. George Mikan wouldn't beat out Shaquille O'Neal. Bob Cousy doesn't beat out Magic Johnson or even a more modern guy such as Dwyane Wade.

But in baseball, we cling to the past. Yes, the sport has been around longer, so the framework of the game hasn't changed dramatically like it has in football or basketball. I always wonder why people will argue that football and basketball athletes have improved, but not baseball players. Of course, baseball players in 2012 are bigger, stronger and more athletic than the players Babe Ruth faced in 1921. Pitchers throw harder. Outfielders cover more ground. Infielders have stronger arms. That's the way sports evolve.

* * * *

OK, a quick look at Round 2 in which the matchups get a lot tougher to decide:

• Babe Ruth 1921 versus Joe DiMaggio 1941: The Babe remains the overwhelming favorite to win the tournament, but Yankees fans will be torn here. DiMaggio had the historic 56-game hitting streak and should get a boost from playing a brilliant center field.
• Carl Yastrzemski 1967 versus Honus Wagner 1908: Two guys who utterly dominated their leagues. Fans respect the old guys, but Wagner's stats were compiled in the dead ball era and might not impress the voting public.
• Ty Cobb 1911 versus Joe Morgan: I've made my case for Morgan. Not that Cobb was a slouch. Note that while Cobb hit .420 to Morgan's .327. Their OBPs were essentially identical (.467 to .466). And while 1911 was the dead ball era, consider this: The OPS in the 1911 AL was .696; the OPS in the 1975 NL was .696.
• Rogers Hornsby 1922 versus Mickey Mantle 1956: The Mick won the Triple Crown, but Hornsby hit .401 with 42 home runs and 152 RBIs. I expect a close vote.
• Barry Bonds 2001 versus Ken Griffey Jr. 1997: The most intriguing matchup of the second round. Bonds beat out Johnny Bench 65 to 35 percent, and while it was a decisive victory it's also clear that many voters held PED usage against Bonds. With a tougher second-round matchup, it will be interesting to see how he fares.
• Stan Musial 1948 versus Willie Mays 1962: What makes this even more interesting is that Musial played a lot of center field in 1948. Not saying he played it as well as Mays, but it makes his season more impressive than at first glance.
• Hank Aaron 1957 versus Lou Gehrig 1927: Two MVP winners, two beloved players. Both World Series champions as well. I'll say Gehrig pulls it out.
• Jimmie Foxx 1932 versus Ted Williams 1941: No matter the era, 58 home runs and 169 RBIs are impressive. But so is .406. I'll predict Teddy Ballgame rolls on.

In 1975, Joe Morgan hit .327 with 17 home runs and 94 RBIs. Those traditional statistics may not seem impressive, but Morgan’s season ranks as one of the best in the game’s history.

As we begin voting Monday on the greatest individual season of all time, consider Morgan's value that season:

• He drew 132 walks, giving him a league-leading .466 on-base percentage (the highest figure, by the way, in either league between Mickey Mantle in 1962 and Wade Boggs in 1988).
• Because of his ability to get on base, he created a lot of runs --about 145, 17 more than the No. 2 hitter in the league, Greg Luzinski. But he created his runs in an efficient manner. He used up 354 outs; Luzinski, by comparison, used up 443 outs. So Morgan created more runs while using up 89 fewer outs.
• He stole 67 bases in 77 attempts. Factor in his speed, and he was one of the best baserunners in the league.
• He was an outstanding defensive second baseman, not only winning a Gold Glove but also ranking as the third-best overall defensive player in the National League in 1975, according to Baseball-Reference.com.
• He did all this in an era when second basemen usually produced little at the plate. In 1975, National League second basemen hit a collective .267/.330/.353 (BA/OBP/SLG) -- with just 80 home runs. Morgan hit nearly one quarter of all home runs by National League second basemen. In 2011 terms, that would be akin to a second baseman hitting close to 50 home runs.
• The Reds won 108 games, Morgan was the near-unanimous MVP winner, and he even drove in the winning run in the ninth inning of Game 7 of the World Series.

Add it up, and you end up with a player who was the best hitter in the league and one of the best defenders and baserunners in his league, and he did so while towering over other players at his position and playing on a championship team.

The wins above replacement statistic attempts to capture all this. In 1975, Morgan’s Baseball-Reference WAR was 12.0, the best of his career and easily the best in the National League. During his 1972 to 1976 peak, Morgan rated as the best player in the NL four times, at least acording to Baseball-Reference.



In 1975, Morgan was a full five wins better than Mike Schmidt, an astonishing total. Only 12 times since 1901 has a player recorded a bWAR of at least 4.5 wins higher than the No. 2 position player in his league:

1921 AL: Babe Ruth (14.0) over Ty Cobb/Tris Speaker (6.6)
1924 AL: Babe Ruth (11.9) over Harry Heilmann (6.2)
1956 AL: Mickey Mantle (12.9) over Yogi Berra (7.3)
2002 NL: Barry Bonds (12.2) over Jim Edmonds (7.2)
1975 NL: Joe Morgan (12.0) over Mike Schmidt (7.0)
1924 NL: Rogers Hornsby (13.0) over Frankie Frisch (8.0)
1967 AL: Carl Yastrzemski (12.2) over Al Kaline (7.3)
1946 AL: Ted Williams (11.8) over Johnny Pesky (6.9)
1923 AL: Babe Ruth (14.7) over Harry Heilmann (9.8)
1926 AL: Babe Ruth (12.0) over Goose Goslin (7.2)
1922 NL: Rogers Hornsby (10.7) over Dave Bancroft (5.9)
1948 NL: Stan Musial (11.5) over Johnny Mize (6.9)

For what it’s worth, only three of those 12 seasons ended in a World Series title -- Morgan, Mantle and Ruth in 1923.

So maybe Joe Morgan didn’t hit 73 home runs or drive in 191 runs or bat .400. But his 1975 season ranks as sleeper candidate for greatest individual season of all time.

* * * *

It wasn’t easy picking the 32 best seasons. I had two rules: Only one season per player, so we’d end up with a bracket of 32 different players; and I considered only seasons since 1901 (sorry, Ross Barnes fans).

It was important to get a diverse list of eras as well as positions. I did put a little more emphasis on more recent decades; basically, the quality of the game has improved over time, thus making it more difficult to post seasons with huge WAR totals like Ruth put up. Here is the breakdown by decade:

1900s -- 1
1910s -- 3
1920s -- 3
1930s -- 2
1940s -- 4
1950s -- 3
1960s -- 2
1970s -- 3
1980s -- 3
1990s -- 4
2000s -- 4

And by position:

C -- 2; Johnny Bench, Mike Piazza.
1B -- 3; Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx, Rod Carew.
2B -- 4; Eddie Collins, Rogers Hornsby, Jackie Robinson, Joe Morgan.
3B -- 2; George Brett, Mike Schmidt.
SS -- 5; Honus Wagner, Ernie Banks, Robin Yount, Cal Ripken, Alex Rodriguez.
LF -- 6; Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, Carl Yastrzemski, Rickey Henderson, Barry Bonds, Albert Pujols. (Ruth played left field in 1921, and Pujols primarily played left in 2003.)
CF – 8; Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker, Hack Wilson, Joe DiMaggio, Stan Musial, Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Ken Griffey Jr. (Musial started at all three outfield positions in 1948 but played the most in center.)
RF -- 2; Hank Aaron, Sammy Sosa.

So there are our 32 players. I didn’t necessarily pick each player’s highest WAR season. In some cases, a player’s iconic season -- like Ted Williams’ .406 year or Hank Aaron’s 1957 MVP campaign -- was selected. In some instances, maybe a player had other things in his favor that would help him to potentially fare better in the voting, like a big RBI total. Certainly, WAR is a good baseline to use because it helps us adjust for differences in eras, but it shouldn’t be the only factor in determining the better season between two players. Was what Williams accomplished in 1941 more impressive than what Morgan accomplished in 1975? Is Yount being the best hitter in his league while playing shortstop more impressive than what Babe Ruth did in 1921 against an inferior brand of pitching? Maybe you prefer the all-around brilliance of Mays or DiMaggio over the pure hitting dominance of Rogers Hornsby or Lou Gehrig.

Which seasons just missed the cut? There were seven players who had a bWAR season of at least 10.0 who didn’t make the bracket -- Lou Boudreau, Jason Giambi, Ron Santo, Adrian Beltre, Home Run Baker, Norm Cash and Matt Kemp. Sorry, guys. (Just noticed there are three third basemen there; too late now to change the final 32, unfortunately.)

So get to the bracket and start voting. We’ll do one round per day this week, culminating in the final matchup on Friday.

Let the debates begin.

Follow David Schoenfield on Twitter @dschoenfield.

Just a little blast from the past to whet the appetite for spring training ...

While Chicagoans can celebrate Ron Santo finally getting his due from Cooperstown -- posthumously and several decades late -- it isn’t like the outcome of the "Golden Era" election was a perfect bit of resolution for baseball fans in the Windy City. White Sox great Minnie Minoso is still on the outside looking in, and that’s every bit as egregious an oversight.

Taken at face value, the big-league numbers for Minoso don’t make an overwhelming case, not the way that Santo’s did. Minoso led the league in steals three times in an era when people didn’t steal a ton of bases. He led in triples three times and hits once and total bases in another -- that doesn't exactly get statheads fired up. Tallying up 1,963 hits, 186 home runs, 205 steals and a .298/.389/.459 batting line doesn’t sound like much in isolation. Minoso did not win a major award, and he never played in the postseason. At first blush, it’s a very good career, but perhaps not an all-time great one.

That would be a superficial response, however. You can’t talk about Minnie Minoso’s case for Cooperstown without getting into his history in other circuits, playing at a time when opportunity was not equal, thanks to matters of race and the reserve clause. His first three years as a pro were spent in his homeland in Cuba (1943-45), followed by three more years starring in the Negro Leagues for the New York Cubans (1946-1948). Minoso then had to spend 1949 and 1950 marking time in the PCL because the Indians felt they were already stocked up in the outfield.

Minoso would only get his real break in 1951 after getting sent to the White Sox in a three-way deal. When, at long last, he made it to the majors to stay in 1951, Minoso was already 28 years old. (He was born in 1922, not 1925 as had been initially thought.) As a result, Minoso was already well through the years that are supposed to be a player’s peak seasons, years he hadn’t gotten to spend in the majors thanks to institutionalized racism and then limited opportunities. We don’t know, can’t know, how much of his career was lost to those factors, just that it was.

However, despite this late start Minoso went on a 10-year run that marked him as one of the best players in the American League. Not broadly speaking, or generously: We’re talking about Mickey Mantle, Ted Williams, and Minnie Minoso. Using Baseball-Reference’s version of WAR, from 1951-60 Minoso is second in the AL behind only Mantle. If you harbor a reasonable suspicion of defensive value, using offense alone Minoso falls from second ... all the way to third, behind Mantle and Williams.

Going year to year and using WAR, in 1951 Minoso was one of the four best position players in the league; count offense alone in that season, and he’s behind just Teddy Ballgame. Sticking with WAR, Minoso was one of the five best position players in the AL in 1951, 1953, 1954 (leading the league), 1956, 1957, 1958 and 1959 (tying with Nellie Fox for the lead). This isn’t a Ralph Kiner-like brief run -- Minoso was simply a great ballplayer, and consistently one of the best of his era.

Minoso’s career is often a case of just missing out, which is why his coming up short in this latest popularity contest can be especially exasperating. He just missed winning the 1951 AL Rookie of the Year, getting 11 first-place votes to the 13 given to Gil McDougald of the Yankees. In 1954, when Minoso was the best player in the league, he was one of five candidates to get an MVP vote in a fractured ballot; instead, the Yankees’ Yogi Berra won his second of three MVP trophies. Minoso also just missed the postseason during this era of Yankees’ dominance: he was on the White Sox in 1957 and in 1960, but because he’d been dealt to the Tribe (for Hall of Famer Early Wynn and outfielder/third baseman Al Smith), he missed being part of the 1959 pennant-winning team.

All of this neglects Minoso’s importance as an example and as a trailblazer as baseball’s first great black Latin player as well as the first black man to play for the White Sox. His popularity in Chicago was locked in from the get-go, as he was widely acknowledged as the reason why White Sox attendance crossed a million for the first time in franchise history in 1951, and then stayed there through the ’50s. Remarkably, the rookie was rewarded with a Minnie Minoso Day at Comiskey Park at the end of that same season. Those aren’t criteria, but a black Latin star becoming a big part of a franchise-wide turnaround is rightly remembered on the South Side as cause for pride.

This is not to trash the positive results of Monday's announcement. Santo’s selection is the closing note of a long campaign to right a wrong, achieving what many already believed -- that Ron Santo was a Hall of Famer, and always had been. The chicanery of the process isn't suddenly validated because this latest mechanism belatedly achieved the right conclusion. In light of the continuing oversight of Minoso, a healthy dose of skepticism that we’ll see the Hall eventually get it right in his case as well would be totally understandable. You can wonder if Minoso will be alive to enjoy the recognition that he too is due, should that day finally come. After what happened with Ron Santo, you have to hope not.

Christina Kahrl covers baseball for ESPN.com. You can follow her on Twitter.

I asked my colleague Jim Caple a simple question: "Who is on your short list of the greatest hitters of all time?"

He reeled off the names: Pujols, Bonds, Ruth, Williams ... Mays, Hornsby, Cobb (a little reluctantly on that one). We could include a few others, of course -- Gehrig, Aaron, Musial.

Anyway, maybe we'll do a more thorough examination of this question in the offseason. This is just a quick primer as we sit here waiting for the start of Game 4.

Here are the all-time leaders in FanGraphs' wRC+, which compares a hitter's runs created to an average player and is park- and league-adjusted, so a batter with a 150 wRC+ created 50 percent more runs than average:

1. Babe Ruth, 197
2. Ted Williams, 189
3. Barry Bonds, 175
4. Lou Gehrig, 174
5. Rogers Hornsby, 171
6. Ty Cobb, 171
7. Mickey Mantle, 171
8. Albert Pujols, 167

Here is the case against each of those eight, plus Willie Mays:

Babe Ruth
Case against: The advanced statistics don't factor in a timeline adjustment -- or what can be called the evolutionary improvement in the game. Overall, the players in Ruth's era were not as good, not as big and strong as today, the equipment wasn't as good, the fields not as good. This made it easier for a great player to excel above a league-average type of player. Put it this way: Ruth did not have to face guys like Alexi Ogando throwing 97-mph fastballs and 89-mph sliders. You think Ruth would be able to get the 40-ounce bat he used in 1927 around on a 100-mph Justin Verlander heater?

Ted Williams
Case against: The era he played in was perfect for him, a time when pitchers walked more hitters than now, amplifying Williams' skill-set -- patience the plate -- even more. Only hit 40 home runs once. While wRC+ accounts for Fenway being a great hitter's park, it perhaps doesn't fully factor in the advantage it gave Williams, who hit .361 there, .328 on the road. Integration didn't come until the second half of his career, and even then the AL lagged behind the NL.

Barry Bonds
Case against: Bonds through the 1999 season: .288/.409/.559; Bonds from 2000 (when he turned 36 during the season) to the end of his career: .322/.517/.724.

Lou Gehrig
Case against: Played in the 1920s and 1930s, the best offensive era in major league history. Played before integration. Since he got sick, his last season came when he was 35, so he missed the decline phase of his career, which would have lowered his career wRC+ number (although boosting his overall numbers).

Rogers Hornsby
Case against: Fabulous peak, but last great season came when he was just 33. Same arguments here as Ruth and Gehrig; without a timeline adjustment it was easier to statistically excel over an average player. Here's another example about the quality of play issue: In the 1920s National League, when Hornsby dominated, the strikeout rate never topped 3.0 per nine innings. Are we to assume the hitters were all just awesome back then? Or is it possible pitchers just didn't throw as hard, and thus it was easier to put the ball in play?

Ty Cobb
Case against: Talk about a different era. Fielders used gloves barely bigger than their hands when he played. He hit with a split-handed grip, which I'm not sure would fly against 97-mph fastballs on a regular basis. H&B factory records list his bat sizes in 1920 as 36 to 38 ounces, and 37 to 40 ounces in 1921-22. All this suggests a batting style more like a guy slapping the ball in play, as opposed to trying to drive the ball on a regular basis. (I'm not exactly saying Ichiro here; more like a slightly more powerful version of Tony Gwynn.) Could he have hit for power in a different era?

Mickey Mantle
Case against: Short career, too many injuries. Never played 150 games in a season after turning 30.

Albert Pujols
Case against: Has yet to enter decline phase of his career, grounds into too many double plays, doesn't walk quite as much as OBP kings like Ruth, Williams, Bonds and Mantle. The big question here: Has he entered the decline phase of his career? The biggest red flag to me on his 2011 season is that his walk rate dropped significantly from previous seasons, as he was more aggressive at the plate (he swung at 44 percent of all pitches this season, compared to slightly less than 40 percent over the previous five seasons). This change of approach could signify a guy who recognized his bat speed has started to slow slightly and thus swung more often early in the count. Or it could simply be a situation of him getting more pitches to hit with Lance Berkman and Matt Holliday hitting behind him.

Willie Mays
Case against: Career on-base percentage is nearly 100 points below Ruth and Williams, lowering his career wRC+ to .157.

To go with our Willie Mays package today, SportsNation worked up a list ranker with 30 of the greatest players of all time. Don't agree with me that Willie Mays was the greatest ever? Then Click here to vote yourself.

Here's my quick list without spending too much time thinking about it:

1. Willie Mays: He could hit, hit for power, run the bases and field with the best we've ever seen. Could have won as many as 10-11 MVP Awards.
2. Barry Bonds: If he had played center field instead of left, I'd consider him for No. 1.
3. Babe Ruth: I'd like to see him hitting 95-mph fastballs on a regular basis.
4. Hank Aaron: A testament to longevity, consistency, durability and greatness.
5. Stan Musial: Won three MVPs and finished second four other times.
6. Ted Williams: Maybe the greatest hitter of all time, but I give Musial the slight all-around edge.
7. Albert Pujols: Barring injury, he's this good.
8. Roger Clemens: We don't know what he did and if it helped. But we know what he did on the field. Greatest pitcher of all time.
9. Mike Schmidt: Dominated the mid-'70s to the mid-'80s. Eight-time home run champ and one of best fielding third basemen ever.
10. Walter Johnson: Could have dominated in any era.

11. Honus Wagner: Won batting titles, ran the bases and hit for power in the dead-ball era.
12. Lou Gehrig: Only strike against him is he didn't play a premium defensive position.
13. Alex Rodriguez: You can't deny the numbers.
14. Lefty Grove: The most underrated great pitcher of all time. Won nine ERA titles.
15. Mickey Mantle: If only he had stayed healthy.
16. Ty Cobb: Would love to go back in time and bring him back to 2011.
17. Josh Gibson: They say he hit 'em longer than the Babe.
18. Joe Morgan: The most underrated great position player of all time. Did everything well.
19. Rickey Henderson: The object is to score runs and nobody has scored more than Rickey.
20. Greg Maddux: 355 wins, fourth-most starts, more pitches painting black than anyone.

21. Cal Ripken: Overrated as a hitter, underrated as a fielder.
22. Tom Seaver: Mets fans still can't believe they traded him.
23. Pedro Martinez: At his peak, the best ever. Four pitches that made batters cry.
24. Frank Robinson: And to think he was only third-best NL outfielder of the early '60s.
25. Johnny Bench: Knees gave out, but those first 12 seasons were amazing.
26. Satchel Paige: Was he even the best Negro Leagues pitcher?
27. Rogers Hornsby: No denying his hitting numbers. Too low? Maybe so.
28. Pete Alexander: Won 94 games over one three-year span, impressive even for the time.
29. Cy Young: Yes, you can say I'm disrespecting the 19th century.
30. Sandy Koufax: A little bit of a product of his time and a huge home/road splits, plus short career for this list.

Follow David on Twitter: @dschoenfield. Follow the SweetSpot blog: @espn_sweet_spot.

This is somewhat shocking to me: A center fielder hasn’t won an MVP Award since Ken Griffey Jr. in 1997. (Josh Hamilton played some there last season, but the majority of his games came in left field.)

Before that, it was Robin Yount in 1989.

Since Yount won his MVP Award, a first baseman has won 11 times – sure, three of those trophies belong to Albert Pujols, but Frank Thomas (twice), Jeff Bagwell, Mo Vaughn, Jason Giambi, Ryan Howard, Justin Morneau and Joey Votto have also won.

This hasn’t always been the case. Willie McGee won the NL MVP Award in 1985 with a terrific all-around season. Dale Murphy won back-to-back trophies in 1982 and 1983. Fred Lynn won in ’75 and if you go back further, you get all-timers like Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle and Joe DiMaggio.

Anyway, I always thought of center field as baseball’s glamour position -- the guys who get to making leaping grabs at the fence, steal bases and belt home runs. More than any other position, center fielders are expected to do everything. As Nick Loucks discovered, however, 2010 was the first season of the live-ball era that no center fielder hit .300. Searching through Baseball-Reference’s wondrous Play Index, I also discovered that 2010 was the first season since 1944 that no center fielder recorded a WAR of 5.0 or better.

Are we in a lull of great center fielders? Maybe so. We have a nice group of power/speed guys like Chris Young, Drew Stubbs and Andrew McCutchen, but none of them are MVP-caliber hitters right now. A decade ago we had guys like Griffey, Jim Edmonds, Carlos Beltran, Andruw Jones and Bernie Williams out there. Everybody knows about Willie, Mickey and the Duke patrolling center field in New York in the mid-‘50s. It made me curious: What was baseball’s golden age of center fielders?

Using B-R’s search functions, I checked every individual season back to 1901, looking for center fielders who posted a WAR of 5.0 or better. I also broke each decade into five-year increments (2006-2010, 2001-2005 and so on) and checked cumulative WAR for center fielders over those five-year periods.

I think we’re only talking about good center fielders here -- nobody cares who the 23rd best center fielder is right now. So I focused on the top one-third – the top 10 center fielders in this era (30 teams), but adjusted downward to the top six when there were only 16 teams.

Best single years:

1954: Willie Mays (10.2 WAR), Mickey Mantle (7.8), Duke Snider (7.7), Richie Ashburn (6.2), Larry Doby (5.6). These guys all made the Hall of Fame, Mays won the NL MVP Award, Snider finished fourth in the voting. Doby finished second in the AL vote, and Mantle somehow finished 15th despite leading the AL with 129 runs and generally scorching the baseball. After those guys, you had the original Frank Thomas (23 home runs), Wally Moon (106 runs), Jackie Jensen (92 runs, 117 RBIs) and Gus Bell (104 runs, 101 RBIs). Not bad for a 16-team league.

1992: This was the final season before offense began jumping up. There were fewer runs per game in ’92 than any season between 1982 and 2010. The depth was extraordinary: Andy Van Slyke (6.9), Kirby Puckett (6.7), Kenny Lofton (5.7), Marquis Grissom (5.6), Ken Griffey Jr. (5.4), Devon White (5.3), Steve Finley (5.3), Ray Lankford (4.3), Brett Butler (4.3). And you had solid players like Lance Johnson, Mike Devereaux (107 RBIs), a young Juan Gonzalez (led the AL with 43 home runs) and an aging Yount.

1999: Andruw Jones (7.0), Brian Giles (6.7), Kenny Lofton (5.9), Carl Everett (5.9), Brady Anderson (5.4), Steve Finley (5.1), Bernie Williams (5.0), Ken Griffey Jr. (4.8), Chris Singleton (4.6), Carlos Beltran (4.4), Doug Glanville (3.9), Garret Anderson (2.7). Griffey led the AL with 48 home runs, knocked in 134 runs and scored 123 – and he rates as only the ninth-best center fielder that season (B-R gives him a very poor defensive rating). The list doesn’t even include Edmonds, who was injured that season.

OK, those are nice lists, but I think we’re looking more for an era, not a single season. One way to look at this was to simply average the five-year chunks of WAR for our groups of center fielders.

Under this method, it does show 2006-10 as the weakest era for center fielders since Joe DiMaggio headlined a nondescript group from 1936-40 (we didn’t count the 1941-45 war period). Carlos Beltran (26.3) had the best WAR over this period, followed by Grady Sizemore (20.5), Curtis Granderson (20.3), Torii Hunter (15.6) and Mike Cameron (14.6). A nice group of all-around players, but no future Hall of Famers.

OK, using WAR as the baseline, looking at things like MVP votes and making a few personal judgments as I desired, here are my top golden eras for center fielders:

5. 1986-1990

Top five: Kirby Puckett, Eric Davis, Andy Van Slyke, Lenny Dykstra, Brett Butler.
Next five: Robin Yount, Dave Henderson, Ellis Burks, Devon White, Gary Pettis/Willie McGee.

Great depth as the top six all accumulated 20-plus WAR. Lacks a signature superstar, but what gloves you had out there: Van Slyke, White and Pettis were all supreme flychasers.

4. 1916-1920

Top five: Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker, Edd Roush, Happy Felsch, Benny Kauff
Next five: Max Carey, Cy Williams, Hi Myers, Clyde Milan, Amos Strunk

You have two of the greatest center fielders of all time each compiling over 7.0 WAR per season, two other Hall of Famers (Roush and Carey) and a slew of other good players.

3. 1966-1970

Top five: Jimmy Wynn, Willie Mays, Paul Blair, Tommie Agee, Reggie Smith

Next five: Willie Davis, Matty Alou, Rick Monday, Curt Flood, Adolfo Phillips

Mays was starting to age but still racked up 28.0 WAR, just behind Wynn’s 28.3. There are those who will argue that Blair is the greatest gloveman ever in center. Smith later moved to right field, but he came up with the Red Sox as a power-hitting center fielder. Alou hit .327 over the five years.

2. 1996-2000

Top five: Ken Griffey Jr., Bernie Williams, Andruw Jones, Kenny Lofton, Ray Lankford
Next five: Jim Edmonds, Brady Anderson, Steve Finley, Mike Cameron, Lance Johnson

The top six all accumulated over 20 WAR. Griffey hit 249 home runs, Williams hit .324, Jones covered ungodly amounts of ground, Lofton brought speed and on-base skills and Lankford was one of the most underrated players of his era.

1. 1956-1960

Top five: Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Richie Ashburn, Duke Snider, Jim Landis.
Next five: Jim Piersall, Bill Bruton, Bill Virdon, Vada Pinson, Larry Doby.

I guess the song has it right. This era rates a little better than the 1951-55 period due to more overall depth. Doby and Snider had their best five-year stretch in 1951-55, but Mantle and Mays were dominating their leagues. Ashburn was a leadoff guy who rivaled Mays for defensive excellence and guys like Landis, Piersall and Bruton, while forgotten today by all but the most dedicated seamheads, were excellent players. And remember -- this came in a 16-team league.

Follow David Schoenfield on Twitter at @dschoenfield. Follow the SweetSpot blog at @espn_sweet_spot.

We're back with the much-anticipated final installment of my 50 greatest Yankees of all time. Here's ESPNNewYork's top 50 and photo gallery and here are the first two parts of my series, Nos. 50 through 31 and 30 through 16. The panel's ranking is in parenthesis.

15. Don Mattingly, 1B (11)
One of the prettiest swings you'll ever see. He was really only a great player for six seasons, before his back started to go, and just kind of hung around for six years after that. Is he more beloved than Jeter among Yankees fans?

14. Andy Pettitte, P (16)
Is he a Hall of Famer? The quick argument against him is that he finished in the top 10 in his league in ERA just three times. Bert Blyleven, who took 14 years to get inducted, finished in the top 10 on 10 occasions, including seven times in the top five. Jack Morris, similar to Pettitte in many regards, finished in the top 10 fives times and has struggled to get over the Hall of Fame hump. I think Pettitte faces the same obstacles, with 240 wins but a mediocre career ERA. Certainly, his 19 career postseason wins (more than any other pitcher) will give him a chance for election.

13. Thurman Munson, C (12)
When did the Yankees institute their no facial hair policy? One of the iconic baseball images of my youth was Munson's mustache and bushy sideburns. He looked tough and gritty and pugnacious, and by all accounts that's exactly what he was. Would he have made the Hall of Fame if he hadn't died? I'm not so sure. His bat had pretty much dried up his final seasons, with a .373 slugging percentage in 1978 and .374 in 1979. He never did walk much, so his on-base percentage was tied to his batting average. He was still a long ways from 2,000 hits and unlikely to make any more All-Star teams (he made seven).

12. Bernie Williams, OF (19)
Yankee most valuable players, according to Baseball-Reference's WAR (wins above replacement) statistic:

1995: Bernie Williams, 6.0
1996: Mariano Rivera, 5.4; Bernie Williams, 4.8
1997: Andy Pettitte, 7.6; David Cone, 6.7; Bernie Williams, 6.4
1998: Derek Jeter, 7.8; Bernie Williams, 6.1
1999: Derek Jeter, 8.0; Bernie Williams, 5.0
2000: Jorge Posada, 5.7; Bernie Williams, 5.0
2001: Mike Mussina, 6.5; Roger Clemens, 5.4; Bernie Williams, 4.0
2002: Jason Giambi, 7.3; Alfonso Soriano, 4.7; Bernie Williams, 4.4

Williams wasn’t usually the best player on the team, but during his eight-year peak (he topped .300 each season), he was always one of the three most valuable on the team. The advanced fielding metrics actually rate him as a poor center fielder, although he looked smooth out there to me, other than his weak throwing arm (he won four Gold Gloves). He performed well in the postseason (.275/.371/.480) and delivered as many critical playoff hits as Derek Jeter, just without as much fanfare or adoration from the media.

11. Red Ruffing, P (9)
Ruffing began his career with the Red Sox and went 39-96 with their awful teams of the 1920s. Traded to the Yankees for backup outfielder Cedric Durst and $50,000 in 1930, Ruffing apparently changed his motion slightly, became a Hall of Famer by going 231-124 with the Yankees and winning 20 games each season from 1936-39, when the Yankees won four straight World Series. He relied primarily on his fastball and a slider that the "Neyer/James Guide to Pitching" reports that "there's an abundance of evidence suggesting that he was among the first to throw a good one."

10. Bill Dickey, C (10)
One of the best-hitting catchers of all time, Dickey fashioned a .313/.382/.486 career line, impressive even for the high-octane offense of the 1930s. Later, he helped mentor Yogi Berra, who always gave credit to Dickey for helping him develop his catching skills.

9. Mariano Rivera, P (5)
He might have been pretty good if he had ever developed a second pitch.

8. Jorge Posada, C (21)
Posada ahead of Rivera? It's a close call, but I'll take the great-hitting catcher with solid defense (Posada was never great at blocking pitches but his arm was average or slightly above for most of his career) over the legendary closer. Their career value is similar: 52.9 WAR for Rivera, 46.0 for Posada. But generally speaking, the closer position is overrated; Rivera's most valuable season was actually 1996, when he served as John Wetteland's setup guy and pitched 107 innings. It's perhaps instructive that the season Posada missed with injury (2008) was the one season the Yankees didn't make the playoffs since the two joined the club.

7. Whitey Ford, P (8)
Ford went 236-106 with the Yankees, but won 20 games just twice -- 25 in 1961 and 24 in 1963. That was primarily because Casey Stengel never believed in Ford's durability (he was 5-foot-10), so didn't work him hard. His career high in starts under Stengel was 33 and he topped 230 innings just once. After Stengel was fired following the 1960 season, Ford averaged 37 starts and 260 innings over the next five seasons. His World Series record was excellent as well -- 10-8 with a 2.71 ERA in 22 starts.

6. Joe DiMaggio, OF (3)
DiMaggio played 13 seasons in the majors, appeared in 10 World Series and won nine of them. Perhaps no player in baseball history has ever been so identified as a "winner" as DiMaggio. So why rank DiMaggio only sixth? I'll admit: Something about him just rubs me the wrong way. He frequently held out, battled injuries and he had a lot of great teammates who chipped in with the winning. Of course, he was a devastating hitter who was severely penalized by the huge dimensions in left-center at Yankee Stadium when he played (he hit 213 home runs on the road in his career, 148 at home). His fielding was probably more average than great and nobody stole bases in his day (he had 30 career steals).

5. Derek Jeter, SS (7)
An amazingly consistent and durable player (his only injury came in 2003), Jeter is less than 300 runs away from passing Babe Ruth for the most runs scored in Yankees history. B-R actually ranks Jeter as the most valuable offensive player in the American League in 1999 and 2006, and that's why I gave him the nod over DiMaggio: A great-hitting shortstop who has played nearly every game for 16-plus seasons is more difficult to find than a great center fielder.

4. Yogi Berra, C (6)
Behind the "Yogisms" caricature, it's easy to forget how great he was: A three-time MVP who during his 1950-56 peak caught an average of 142 games per season, hitting .295/.364/.502 with 27 homers and 108 RBIs per season. Yogi's power was underrated: he finished in the top 10 in the AL in homers every season from 1949 through 1957. Casey Stengel loved to fiddle with his lineups, platoon and move players around, but the one constant he had was Yogi behind the plate.

3. Lou Gehrig, 1B (2)
It's often portrayed that Yankee scout Paul Krichell "discovered" Gehrig, a testament to the Yankees digging in haystacks to find their Hall of Famers. Sounds good, but it's not accurate. Gehrig was quite well known by the time the Yankees signed him. As a high school senior, Gehrig hit a grand slam at Wrigley Field, as his School of Commerce team defeated Lane Tech of Chicago. "Gherrig, a 17-year-old boy, who played first base for the easterners and who came here touted as the 'Babe' Ruth of the high schools of New York, lived up to his reputation by driving the ball over the right field wall of Cubs park for a home run with the bases filled," intoned one paper. His exploits at Columbia were well covered by the New York papers. A 1937 AP report says Gehrig was to make $37,000, tops in the majors. The story also indicates the Yankees would have by far the highest payroll, around $368,000 for the "hired hands." Of course, that salary barely pushed Gehrig above his own manager's $35,000 salary.

2. Mickey Mantle, OF (4)
You often read or hear things like, "Just imagine how good Mickey Mantle would have been if he hadn’t hurt his knee or drank so much." That might be true, but it also undersells Mantle's dominance. He won three MVP awards and finished second in the voting three other times. Baseball-Reference has Mantle as the AL's best player six times (and its best offensive player nine times). Since 1950, according to B-R, 13 AL players have compiled 10 or more WAR in one season. Mantle's 1956 season ranks No. 1, his 1957 season No. 2 and his 1961 season (when Roger Maris won the MVP award) No. 4. You can make an argument that his 1956 Triple Crown season is the greatest season ever. He hit .353/.464/.705, played a good center field, ran the bases and hit .444 with runners in scoring position. With 52 home runs, he hit 20 more than any other AL hitter, was one of six to drive in 100 runs (he drove in 130) and one of three to score 100 (132).

1. Babe Ruth, OF (1)
Babe Ruth won only one MVP award in his career, but that of course is misleading. For much of his career there was either (A) no award given, or (B) he was ineligible (for a short time, previous winners couldn't win again). So how many would he have won? And by that, I don’t mean how many years was he the best player in the American League (12, according to Baseball-Reference, including once as a pitcher), but how many times would he have likely been voted the winner, keeping in mind voters (by today's standards, at least) are usually reluctant to give it to the same player year after year and players on pennant winners have an advantage. Ruth probably would have won in 1916 (as a pitcher with the Red Sox), 1920, 1921, 1923 (the year he actually won), 1926 and 1928. I have him finishing second in 1919 (to Eddie Cicotte, who won 29 games for the pennant-winning White Sox), 1924 (to Walter Johnson, who led the Senators to the pennant) and 1927 (to Gehrig).

Follow David Schoenfield on Twitter at @dschoenfield. Follow the SweetSpot blog at @espn_sweet_spot.

Major League Baseball released its list of the 20 best-selling jerseys from the past season. Derek Jeter ranked No. 1 ahead of Joe Mauer and Roy Halladay, mildly surprising since you’d think most Yankee fans would own a Jeter jersey by now.

Anyway, it got me curious. Which jerseys would have been the top-sellers of all time? You know, if replica uniforms had actually been sold back in the old days and merchandise sales tracked and the old ballparks with wooden grandstands had official team stores.

1. Babe Ruth: He wasn’t just big in New York, but one of the most famous Americans of his time, along with Charles Lindbergh, Al Capone and Jamie Moyer.

2. Stan Musial: I think you’d be hard-pressed to find an athlete more beloved in his hometown than Musial. Played for the Cardinals for 22 classy seasons.

3. Roberto Clemente: Popular in Pittsburgh, but as one of the first Latino stars in the game, his reach would have extended across the nation.

4. Willie Mays: Maybe the greatest ballplayer of all time. When I was in second grade, my teacher gave me an old, wrinkled poster of Mays that I kept hanging in my bedroom for years. I would have loved a jersey.

5. Mickey Mantle: More popular than DiMaggio? I think so.

6. George Brett: He was Royals baseball for 21 seasons. Cool, clutch and every kid, teenager and adult in a 500-mile radius wanted to be him.

7. Jackie Robinson: My father-in-law grew up a Brooklyn Dodgers fan and he’s told me there’s nothing he’s seen like Robinson dancing on the bases, trying to rattle the opposing pitcher.

8. Christy Mathewson: In a time when ballplayers were considered ruffians and hooligans, Mathewson was a college-educated star for the New York Giants and the most admired and respected player in the game.

9. Cal Ripken: More than Jeter, I think his appeal spread outside his home city.

10. Carl Yastrzemski: Yes, ahead of Ted Williams, who notoriously feuded with Red Sox fans during his playing days. Yaz carried the Sox to the 1967 pennant, one of the greatest individual seasons ever, and then played 16 more seasons in Fenway.

Disagree? Let’s hear your thoughts below.

Follow David Schoenfield on Twitter at @dschoenfield. Follow the SweetSpot blog at @espn_sweet_spot.

Jim Edmonds announced his retirement on Friday, his 17 season career finally grounded by an Achilles' tendon injury. Edmonds is best known for his highlight reel catches in center field, but the remainder of his play has been oddly underrated over the years.

So we can begin the debate on whether Edmonds is Hall of Fame worthy. Some say yes (as Chad Dotson did here Friday), others no.

When we look at Edmonds' Hall of Fame credentials, we're struck by the numbers he put up in the five years after he was traded by Anaheim to St. Louis . Between 2000 and 2004, Edmonds put together a string of seasons that ranked him with baseball's elite. During this stretch, Edmonds averaged 7 Wins Above Replacement (WAR) annually, and posted an OPS over 1.000. Consider that during this same period, a guy named Alex Rodriguez was putting together some of his best seasons as a ballplayer; only during this stretch A-Rod's OPS was 14 points below that posted by Edmonds.

During the complete sweet spot of Edmonds' career (1995-2005, which includes his abbreviated 1999 season when he only played in 55 games), Edmonds was among the very best in the game, ranked by cumulative WAR (from B-R.com):



Any random slice of data creates issues, we acknowledge this. So if you're curious about Edmonds' career numbers, his 68.3 WAR places him eighth all time among center fielders. Filtering for center fielders who played since baseball integrated (1947- present), Edmonds ranks fourth in WAR, behind Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle and Ken Griffey Jr., and sixth in OPS+ at 132. Nice company.

One unfortunate thing about the table above: Unless the attitudes of the Hall of Fame voters change dramatically, very few of these players are going to make it to the Hall of Fame. Chipper Jones and Vladimir Guerrero have excellent chances to make it to the Hall. Jim Thome is a good bet to be elected to the Hall, thanks to what will likely be 600-plus home runs, not to mention being a Hall of Fame person. Bagwell's first year of HOF eligibility was shrouded in hints and allegations, putting him at 41.7 percent in his debut. Todd Helton might struggle, given concerns that his numbers were inflated by playing home games at Coors Field. [Larry Walker received a low 20.3 percent of Hall of Fame votes this year, presumably because of the Coors Field factor]. Pudge Rodriguez was named in Jose Canseco's book and will face increased scrutiny as a result. But Barry Bonds, Manny Ramirez, Jason Giambi, A-Rod and Sammy Sosa will likely be barred because of these players' association with performance-enhancing drugs, again, unless the attitudes of voters change. An entire generation of fans will have very few of the era's best hitters represented.

Edmonds might not have been the greatest player of his generation; he never finished higher than fourth in Most Valuable Player voting. He did not have 2,000 hits for his career, or 400 home runs, or hit .300, milestones that Hall of Fame voters tend to focus on. Still, it seems to us that this generation of players needs Hall of Fame representation -- if not Bonds and Sosa, then why not Edmonds?

Jason Rosenberg writes It's About The Money, Stupid, a blog about the New York Yankees. IIATMS can be found on Facebook, and you can follow Jason on Twitter. Larry Behrendt greatly contributed to this article and can also be followed on Twitter.

From Keith Olbermann's review of Jane Leavy's new book about Mickey Mantle:

Almost anyone who knows about Mantle knows that the frequently admitted presumption of early death is part of his legend. While Leavy disproves his depiction of a family in which all the men died by 40, she also convincingly identifies this specific fear as the likely outcome of Mantle’s having been repeatedly sexually abused as a child by a half sister and neighborhood boys, and produces heartbreaking on-the-record evidence to support this painful conclusion.

This is not, however, a dark book, no matter how dark parts of the life it portrays surely were. The hero worship of the fans, and the women who constituted a kind of endless batting practice in Mantle’s life, are presented thoroughly and fairly. There are revelations of hidden charity and great empathy, of a hero’s genuine inability to understand what others saw in him, and deeply endearing self-deprecating humor, even when a drunken Mantle is literally in the gutter. Almost everyone in sports over 40 has a “When I met Mickey” story, and Leavy weaves her own through five vignettes interspersed with the main chapters. Hers is too sweetly, horribly, blissfully, embarrassingly Mantlean to give away here.Whatever you might think of Olbermann's politics, he's a gifted writer.

So is Jane Leavy. There have been a number of books written about Mantle since his passing, and I have to confess having read none of them. I think I knew, subconsciously at least, that there would be no end to them, so I might as well wait until a great one arrived.

I think I'll see if Leavy's is the one.

(As an addendum, here's a little bit about Olbermann, the Yankees, and Mantle.)

"Hopefully it's just a sprain."

That's what Chipper Jones said after hearing a "pop" in his left knee while making a play in the sixth inning of Tuesday night's 4-2 win against the Astros.

It wasn't just a sprain. An MRI this morning revealed an ACL injury that will require surgery. Chipper's out for the season, and maybe forever.

This is lousy news for Jones, because he might not get the chance to exit the game on his own terms. After the brief talk earlier this season about retiring -- and the quick recanting -- he might now have that decision forced upon him.

Which would be, if nothing else, symmetrical. Chipper debuted in the majors in September 1993, but batted only four times. He'd played brilliantly that season in Triple-A, though, and was obviously slated for full-time duties with the big club in 1994.

It didn't happen. In spring training, Jones tore the ACL in his left knee. (Yeah, the same ACL in the same left knee that would tear 16 years later. Some knees have all the luck.) He recovered brilliantly, though, returning to the Braves in 1995 and launching his Hall of Fame-caliber career.

This latest injury is lousy news for the Braves, because they're in the middle of a pennant race, and the last thing they need is losing one of their better every-day players for the rest of the season. But -- and I know this is small solace today -- if the Braves have to lose an every-day player, Jones might be the best one to lose. They'll not be able to replace Chipper's .381 on-base percentage, but with Omar Infante and Brooks Conrad at hand, Bobby Cox at least has some viable options at third base. Cox, in his last season, might have to do one of his greatest managerial jobs to get the Braves into the playoffs.

This is lousy news for us, because we've not had a chance to say our proper goodbyes to the game's greatest third basemen since George Brett and Wade Boggs. I'm reminded of Mickey Mantle, another switch-hitter who didn't seem to enjoy his last season much. That was 1968, when the pitchers' general dominance masked the fact that Mantle was still an effective hitter. Plagued by various aches and pains, Mantle actually played 144 games and actually led the Yankees in home runs and on-base percentage. Nobody said goodbye in 1968, because Mantle didn't; he didn't announce his retirement until spring training the next year.

But maybe Chipper won't retire. Knee surgery and rehab is grueling, but he's done it before and almost won a Rookie of the Year Award. Maybe he'll do it again and become the Comeback Player of the Year in 2012. And there is the small matter of the large contract; the Braves owe Jones $13 million in 2011 and another $13 million in 2012. I'm not saying he won't just walk away from $26 million ... but would you?

My guess is that we've seen the last of Larry Wayne Jones.

But I've guessed wrong a thousand times. I hope this makes a thousand and one.

The particulars aren't particularly exciting. But the impact is worth mentioning, I think ...

Thanks to the diligent work of someone named Ron Rakowski, it's now established -- to the extent that something like this can be established -- that in 1961, Roger Maris was credited with an "extra" RBI and that Mickey Mantle was credited with an extra run scored.

The impact? Maris drops into a tie for the American League RBI lead with Jim Gentile, and Mantle drops out of a tie with Maris for the American League scoring lead. Maris and Gentile both drove in 141 runs; Maris scored 132 runs (vs. Mantle's 131).

I suspect that some of you don't really care. But those of us who write about baseball have to care. When we're writing about Mantle, we don't want to write that he co-led the league in runs in 1961 if he didn't, you know, actually co-lead the league in runs. So while this might seem somewhat esoteric, if not downright trivial, much of the discussion on this page and others involves esoterica and trivia.

Anyway, when researchers like Rakowski find these things, if they're high-profile (as these are) it can take years (as these did) to become official (whatever that means). It's finally happened, though. Here's Lyle Spatz, chair of the Records Committee:

I am pleased to see that Retrosheet, Baseball-Reference, Baseball Almanac, and the Elias Sports Bureau all recognize these numbers.

I know there are people who object to these types of corrections, even when they are done to rectify an obvious error such as a faulty computation or putting a number in a wrong column. This is especially true when the correction changes a league leader in a particular category. For those of you that do (I hope there aren't too many on the Records Committee) let me restate an obvious truth. Mickey Mantle was one of the game's great players. Does finishing his career with 1,676 runs scored rather than 1,677 make him any less a great player. Will anybody's assessment of Mantle's place in history be changed by the fact that he did not lead the league in runs scored in 1961? I don't think so.

We should try to get the numbers as accurate as we can, but we must also, as Neil Postman, a Professor at NYU and critic of technology run wild, said, "free ourselves from the belief in the power of numbers and not regard calculation as an adequate substitute for judgment, or precision as a synonym for truth."

Most of you will have trouble believing this, but there really are people who think that if a guy won a "batting title" in 1910 because everybody in 1910 thought he led his league in batting average, and later we discover he didn't lead his league in batting average ... We should ignore the new information!

Seriously.

Putting it bluntly, most of the people who think that way have died off. But some of them are still out there, and fortunately they're now routinely shouted down by other people who think that when your facts change, you follow them where they take you instead of pretending something never happened because it's ever so slightly inconvenient.

There is one argument that should, I suppose, be addressed. Some of those guys will ask, "If you start changing the numbers, where does it all stop?"

It doesn't. Not long ago, the casualty figures for the carpet bombing of German cities during World War II was revised downward. By one authority, anyway. Mind you, this is 65-plus years after the fact. For many decades, writers in good conscience, and only some of them with ideological axes to grind, relied on the old figures. Now we have new figures, and the historians who trust them will use them ... until somebody comes up with something better.

It doesn't stop. It's not supposed to stop. This is the way it works. We go with what we've got, while acknowledging that what we've got today won't necessarily be what we've got tomorrow. For many years, Royals infielder Frank White was credited with an appearance as a catcher, even though he never actually appeared in a game as a catcher. It was a simple mistake, and nobody noticed for a long time.

It's finally been "fixed" ... but there are many more just like it, especially as you travel back into history.

We go with what we've got, while we try to get more. As someone once observed, "There's no statute of limitations on the truth."

Thank you, Ron Rakowski. Some of us care an awful lot.