A (Mostly) Offbeat Look At Ten Favorite Ballplayers

The times we live in right now provide an opportunity for many of us to think about different things in sports, since we don’t have new games to watch. It still seem like it will be a while before we can actually watch a baseball game , and I was thinking today about how much I miss it. It led me to think about writing something, and this list came to mind.

I love baseball history and still spend a lot of time still flipping around an actual old hard copy of the Baseball Encyclopedia. My copy ends in 1984, and that’s fine, I can just go to Baseball Reference on my computer if I want to for anything after that. But literally just opening up to a random page and starting to browse can lead me to stay up far too late. I was going to write something about my man crush on Lefty Grove, and a little dose of that will close this out, but I have opted for something a little more weird. A list of players I have been big fans of, some for their great play, some for an odd story, some for them being overlooked, and some, well, just because. So here is a top ten list you almost certainly won’t ever see anywhere else.

10. (Wahoo) Sam Crawford
I have always been intrigued by the fact that someone as accomplished as this early 1900’s ballplayer is as anonymous a name as he is. He IS in the Hall of Fame, although it took forever (forty years after he finished his major league career in 1917). Crawford played mostly for the Detroit Tigers in the shadow of Ty Cobb, playing next to him in the outfield for most of his career. You have to love a guy who it was said never spoke to the irascible Cobb except to call him off a fly ball.

Crawford was a big-time power hitter in the dead ball era, leading the league in homers twice, first in 1901 with a rather lusty for the time 16, and again in 1908 with 7. But many of those were inside the park homers, in fact 51 of his 97 career “dingers”, didn’t leave the park. That is a major league record that certainly will stand forever, and so, too will be his staggering total of 309 triples, A big guy for the time at 6’1” and 190 pounds, he could run, too, and he and Cobb were renowned for their double steals.

Crawford also has an interesting post major league life, too. He played minor league ball in California for four years after he retired from the bigs, became a coach at USC, and eventually lived reclusively in a cabin near the Mohave desert. When reporters tracked him down to tell him he made the Hall of Fame, locals were stunned. He had never even mentioned he was a ballplayer. So maybe he was cool with being such an under-the-radar great of the game.

9. Dickie Thon
Not surprisingly, you are going to get a few Houston Astros on this list from this fan. Dickie Thon is in a club that includes players like Pete Reiser and Tony Conigliaro, whose careers headed toward superstardom were sidetracked by injury. Like Conigliaro, a beaning was the issue for Thon, who was trending toward greatness as a shortstop for the Astros when, in 1984, he was nailed by a Mike Torrez fastball near his eye, breaking an orbital bone, and greatly affecting his depth perception.

The previous year, in his age 25 season, he was an All Star, and finished 7th in the MVP voting. He had power (20 homers despite playing in the cavernous Astrodome), speed, and was a fine fielder. Just five games into the season where he likely would have cemented a spot among the game’s top stars, he was derailed. He actually won the Tony Conigliaro Award for courage for returning to the game midway through the following year, but he was a shadow of himself. He did persevere to play another decade in the majors, sometimes even as a regular, but was never the player who he could have become.

8. Bob Meusel
This selection is pure and simple the work of the board baseball game Strat-0-Matic. When a bunch of college buddies played in a damn serious league, we did it with historical teams. Meusel was the left fielder for the 1927 Yankees. Being a "1” on defense, the best you could be, was almost a requisite for even being drafted in this stunning collection of talent of great teams. Joe DiMaggio was often not drafted because he was a “2”. Meusel was also said to have the game’s best throwing arm at the time, and would replace Ruth in right field on sunny days because Babe struggled in that situation. Meusel’s 1927 season was a very good one, and he also missed some time, so his per game performance was pretty damn stout. He was a big dude, 6’3”, but he could run, too.

I think I drafted him every season we played, even though because he struck out a lot, and his power that year was down, so his Strato card was oddly constructed. But, he really inspired me to dig into the 1927 Yankees quite deeply, and even more into his career. He clearly could have been a true great. But he liked to have a drink, and chase women, to a fault apparently, and he was routinely described as a lazy ballplayer. Despite that, for the first eight years of his career, his OPS was never lower than .820. His age 28 season in 1925, when he played all 162 games, was a killer. He led the league in home runs and RBI, but the Yankees had a rare bad season then, and his season went unappreciated in MVP voting.

Clearly the least known of Murderers Row, a lineup in which he batted fifth ahead of Hall of Famer Tony Lazzeri, Meusel only played until age 33, sent to Cincinnati for his final year. His older brother “Irish” was a very fine player also for the New York Giants. They were both very quiet men, and shared an apartment. Since the schedule most of the time had the Giants and Yankees not in town at the same time, it was said that they would cross paths entering and leaving the apartment saying only “Hello” and “Goodbye”.

7. Steve Finley
This fine player almost led me to ditch my fanhood of the Astros. Steve Finley came to Houston in a disastrous trade by the Orioles who sent him along with pitchers Curt Schilling and Pete Harnisch for then slugging first basemen Glen Davis, who would immediately tank in Baltimore. Finley had just completed a pretty good age 25 season in Baltimore, and then for four years in Houston consistently get better. A fine center fielder who would eventually win five Gold Gloves, Finley had good speed, and would start to develop power, and since it was the late nineties, there may have been some assistance there, although the jump was not drastic, and the lanky Finley didn’t really look the steroid part.

Finley was the kind of player that a fan like me who had played the game as a fast outfielder, and was still weekend warrioring in softball, would make you feel like you could have been him. That is silly of course, but it is part of the appeal of baseball. By the end of his four year stint he had become my favorite player. So, of course, the Astros up and decided to make up for the steal they had executed in the deal that brought Finley to town by sending the future all-star Finley, future MVP Ken Caminiti, and others to San Diego for a bunch of players from which they would net only a couple of fine years of Derek Bell.

The eleven-player deal was the kind that seemed to have been cooked up after about twenty scotches by two GM’s at the winter meetings. It came after the strike season, and the Astros had been quite good that year and the Padres were a last place team with a bullet. Why the hell Houston felt compelled to shake things up is beyond me, and I was pissed, pissed enough I almost became a Padre fan. I calmed myself down, and stayed true, which was a good thing because the Astros were about to enter the “Killer B’s” era, which was fun. Bell was even a bit player in that. But my (then) guy Steve could have been part of it. His career took off from there, and he played very well into his early forties, but I really wasn’t along for the ride. The romance was fleeting.

6. Al Simmons
This is another example of a true great of the game who I think doesn’t quite get his due. “Bucketfoot Al” was an immediate star when he came to the major leagues in 1924 with the Philadelphia A’s, but he was surrounded by even brighter stars like Lefty Grove and Jimmy Foxx. But there was no denying his production, as he trotted out an OPS of over one thousand in five of his first eight years in the bigs, and went through a seven year stretch where his LOWEST batting average was .341. He capped that run by winning consecutive batting titles in 1931 and 1932, hitting ,381 and .390.

But one reason he may be slightly undervalued is that he never won an MVP award, although the circumstances of the at least three he should have are some kind of a cruel joke. His best two seasons were 1929 and 1930, the only two years there wasn’t an MVP awarded. The league had let it lapse and baseball writers didn’t pick it back up until 1931. But the third example is the perhaps biggest robbery in the history of sports awards. In 1925 in just his second season at age 23 Simmons hit .387 with 79 extra base hits for the second place A’s, and this is before the ball was jacked up. The Senators won the pennant and their plucky shortstop Roger Peckinpaugh took the prize, by hitting (you aren’t going to believe this) .294 with 4 homers and 64 RBI. Adding insult to injury he couldn’t even run, and he made almost thirty errors. It was Peckinpaugh’s last season as a regular at 34, perhaps the voters felt that Simmons would have many more chances to get his. He had chances, but he never won.

5. Bill Doran
You will notice by the end that this list consists of six players from three of my favorite teams. The Astros, period, the 1927 Yankees, and the 1929-31 A’s. I have particular affection for the last group, since if Connie Mack hadn’t blown up his mini-dynasty (for the second time no less, see 1910-14), they might have had a Yankees-like run. But Billy Doran is the second of my three Astros who were my favorite ballplayer until they were sent away, covering most of a two decade span.

Doran was the kind of player that fans love, a scrappy, baby faced, good-but-far-from-great player who gave you everything he had. He also was the kind of player you thought was building toward maybe all-star level, but in the end was what he was. He generally hit in the high .270’s and .280’s with some power, could handle the bat, could run some but got thrown out more than you should. In other words, he was what at the time was thought of as the perfect number two hitter. He was a good guy to have on a good team, and he was easily likable. My fondest memory of him was a straight steal of home at the Astrodome in a win against the Mets in 1987, the season after the crushing playoff defeat to New York. I was running the game on the Mets radio network, and watching the Mets telecast, and I was thrilled to pieces.

4. Larry Harlow
This nondescript outfielder who carved out a marginal six-year career in the majors as a .248 career hitter and good glove man, also made the greatest catch I have ever seen. It will remain the greatest because I will never see it again, and my memory can’t be tainted. I looked. The only You Tube video of Harlow, (well the baseball player, there is a famous Latin musician with the same name) is a walk-off double in game three of the 1979 ALCS for the Angels. But the catch that is burned in my memory came when he played center field for the Orioles in his previous stop.

The catch IS burned in my memory, but nothing else is. I don’t remember the batter, or even the opponent. The game was in Baltimore, I remember that, and it is vital to the story. Memorial Stadium was kind of a dump, and the outfield featured a not very sexy chain link fence about eight feet high. Playing center field, Harlow got a flying jump on a blast to left center. The ball had home run distance, but Harlow got there and leaped up and caught the ball with full extension maybe a foot over the wall. His momentum carried him over the fence facing away, and the top of the fence caught him waist high. The top half of his body smacked into the back side of the fence, and he was boomeranged back on to the field. He held on to the ball to complete the greatest catch I have ever seen, and I was at Kauffman Stadium for Jim Edmond’s beauty. I can watch that one today, I can only gloriously visualize the Larry Harlow experience.

3. Cesar Cedeno

I have Cesar Cedeno to blame for me being an Astros fan. Despite growing up in Boston (I WAS a Sox fan as a young boy), I eventually gravitated to enjoying National League ball more. They embraced minority players much earlier and in greater numbers, and it resulted in speedier, flashier, and for quite a while, just flat better play. For a too-short period, Cesar Cedeno represented all of that to a tee. Cedeno came to the majors at 19 and was a regular immediately and a full blown superstar at 21. With blazing speed, power, and a great throwing arm, he was so gifted that his manager Leo Durocher said he was the next Willie Mays. Durocher, of course, had also managed Mays.

Sounds pretty dumb now, but Leo wasn’t delusional. Cedeno could have, and perhaps should have, reached those heights. His age 21 and 22 seasons provided what should have been the jumping off point. An OPS over .900 each year, despite playing in the offense drowning Astrodome, over fifty steals, and the first of his five straight gold gloves. He stole over fifty bases his first seven years. But this potential Hall of Fame career was waylaid by off the field issues and a seriously broken ankle. After his fourth All-Star appearance at age 25, he would play over a hundred games only half the time, and was a good player, but never the meteor that flashed across the sky early.

His last blaze of glory came in his next to last season in 1985. Picked up by the Cardinals from the Reds in a stretch run deal, in just 28 games he had 6 homers and 19 RBI, batted .434, and posted an absurd 1.213 OPS. The Cards needed it. The Mets won 98 games, and the Cardinals had to put up 101 wins just to win the division. I am often asked how I became an Astros fan, and it allows me to tell a tale that now sounds almost surreal, about a player whose star was crossed, but shone ultra bright for a moment in time.

2. Ichiro Suzuki
So you now know that my man crush Lefty Grove will be number one, but certainly my man crush position player is Ichiro. A superstar before he even stepped on a major league field, Ichiro made any doubters looks like fools, as he tore up the majors from the jump. MVP and Rookie of the Year in 2001, for the next decade he would play virtually every game, get over 200 hits every year, steal bases, play right field magically, and had an absolute cannon for an arm.

The stats are easy to access, but their was a mystique about Ichiro for me. From his yoga contortions in the on deck circle on, I just loved everything about watching him play. The Royals didn’t draw well during this time, and with my credential, whether I was working or not, I could sit wherever there was a seat. When Seattle came to town, that was going to be as close to the on deck circle as possible. He was an artist at the plate, but a perhaps frustrating one. He clearly could have hit a bit of a different way. I saw what people talked about in batting practice when in his last couple of swings he would send bombs flying out of the stadium. But he wanted to make contact, get his pile of hits, score a bunch of runs. He really did things his own way.

One of my enduring baseball memories will always be watching Ichiro on a triple. An average sized guy at 5’11”, he looks taller, and his grace in flying around the base paths was breathtaking. You actually can take some shots at some of his stats. He really was a singles hitter, he’d hit five to ten home runs, a decent amount of triples, but not even many doubles. There was plenty of ballplayer substance to him , but it was the style I liked. And people kind of forgot that he only played a handful of seasons here in his true prime.
Just like in soccer, you kind of have to earn the right to use one name. He damn well did.

1. Lefty Grove
Lefty Grove is routinely considered at least one of the top ten pitchers all time. That’s not good enough for me. He’s the best lefty at least, and in my mind clearly the best of all time overall. Despite being stripped of at least three or four years of major league production because minor league teams like his Baltimore Orioles could hold onto valuable commodities as long as they liked (he won 108 games for them in five seasons), he put up staggering numbers. He won three hundred game despite throwing his first major league pitch at age twenty-five, and his .680 winning percentage is tops for all Hall of Famers.

His numbers in contrast to the times are what set him apart. He won the strikeout title his first seven years, and at double the average strikeout rate per game. He won NINE! E.R.A titles including four after an arm injury at thirty-four in 1934 stripped him of his fastball as a true weapon. One of those titles came in 1936 at 2.71, a year when the league E.R.A was 5.61, and the overall league batting average was .289. At his true peak prime, his back-to-back seasons of 1930-31 of 59-9 with a 2.25 E.R.A with the league E.R.A. double that should be game, set, match on any discussion. How about this one? In 1930, in addition to the pitching Triple Crown (wins, E.R.A, strikeouts), which he did twice……..HE LED THE LEAGUE IN SAVES!

You get the picture, and if you haven’t yet, go look at all the black ink splattered all over his Baseball Reference page. I’m far from an evangelist, but I am evangelical about Lefty. I kept that argument to two paragraphs, barely scratching the solid gold surface. So you’d likely not like to chat with me in person about it. It won’t be two paragraphs.

Hope you enjoyed this little exercise of celebrating greatness, boosting reputations, wondering what might have been, and visiting the deep recesses of my memory. I sure did, It is the type of fun that is not for all, but couldn’t be more of a joy in my little world. Let’s hope we can hear “Play Ball” soon.