One morning last month I checked email messages and saw three dispatches that began with the same words:
Mike Crawford!
Mike Crawford!
Mike Crawford!
A fourth began this way: “How could you possibly not include Chad Cislak on your list of top 10 Tucson high school pitchers?”
Several exclamation points were used.
I checked my cluttered notebook and found that I had put a star next to the names of both Crawford and Cislak, a not-so-safe system of alerting me that THIS GUY HAS TO MAKE THE LIST.
On that morning, I counted 17 pitchers whose name I marked with a star. The system overloaded.
A science, it was not.
Over the last three months, I authored 71 lists on the Top 10 of just about everything in Tucson sports. There was one common link: Too many worthy people were left out.
Marana basketball coach Joe Acker won almost 500 games in his career. He didn’t make my list of the city’s 10 leading basketball coaches. I heard about it for more than a week.
The list went on and on, with daily reminders of ranking someone too high, too low or not at all.
Where was Rob Waldrop? How about Carl Brunenkant? Somehow I didn’t include Dave Rubio’s 2001 Arizona Final Four volleyball team.
But on no list did I veer from historical accuracy as much as choosing Tucson’s top high school pitchers. In 1997, Cislak went 14-0 with a 1.32 ERA for Sabino, hitting .455, leading the Sabercats to the state title and signing with UCLA.
A year earlier, Crawford completed his Salpointe Catholic pitching career 12-2, coming off a 13-1 junior season. He finished his prep career with 29 victories, equaling Tucson High’s Tavo Alvarez’s city record. Alvarez was No. 1 on my list. Crawford and Cislak might as well have been 1-A and 1-B.
Not that the math will ever work.
Researching the Top 10 lists was a joy; ranking them was another story.
