For author Joe Posnanski, “The Baseball 100” has wavered between passion project and unhealthy obsession.
Posnanski first started working on his countdown of the 100 greatest baseball players of all time about a decade ago. He finally completed it, after multiple starts and stops, in April 2021.
Initially published on The Athletic’s website, “The Baseball 100” is now available in book form. It is as comprehensive an examination of the history of the sport — as told through the stories of its all-time greats — as you will find.
Posnanski will speak about the legends of the game and his writing journey at a pair of panels at the Tucson Festival of Books this weekend. Posnanski will join fellow authors Luke Epplin at 1 p.m. Saturday and Mirin Fader at the same time Sunday.
Posnanski started the project on his blog, and he intended to write just a blurb on each player.
“It was a pure side project, just for fun,” Posnanski said. “But what I found right away was — and this is sort of my own personality — I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t write just one or two paragraphs on each of these players.
“I wanted to tell a full story. So these pieces started getting longer and longer. And it was eating my entire life.”
Posnanski had day jobs with Sports Illustrated and NBC Sports. He was working on other books. He had a family. He didn’t have enough time to write about the 100 best players of all time the way he truly wanted to.
Despite fervent interest from his readers, Posnanski had to put the project on pause with about 40 players to go.
The Athletic gave Posnanski an opportunity to complete the countdown and get paid for it. The plan was to launch it in December 2019 and have the last entry run on Opening Day 2020.
“I was going to do it in 100 consecutive days, which was not necessarily the best life choice I’ve ever made. But I wanted the momentum to get it finished,” said Posnanski, 55, who grew up in the Cleveland area and now resides in Charlotte, North Carolina.
“I totally lived the project. There wasn’t a moment of any day that I wasn’t thinking about ‘The Baseball 100.’ It was truly every element of my life. Hopefully the writing reflects that.”
The countdown didn’t proceed exactly as planned. The coronavirus pandemic delayed the start of the ’20 season. The last several entries were spread over three weeks.
But Posnanski was able to see it through. He then turned it into his sixth book.
A winner of multiple national sportswriting awards, Posnanski spoke to the Star about “The Baseball 100” and the state of the sport. The conversation has been lightly edited.
You could have listed the players alphabetically. Yet you ranked them. Why did you do that and how do you go about it?
A: “I really did give very serious consideration to doing it alphabetically. But it felt a little bit like cheating. If you’re gonna do it, do it.
“It is utterly impossible to rank the 100 greatest players in baseball history, and it takes significant gall to actually put them (down) by number.
“Tom Tango, who is the guy who invented WAR (Wins Above Replacement) and is a really amazing statistician and analyst of the game, we came up with a formula together. He did the heavy lifting on it. That was where we started. Then I started moving people around and changing things up.
“The rankings, in many ways, are sort of artistic. I connect certain players to certain numbers. (For example: Joe DiMaggio is ranked No. 56; Jackie Robinson is No. 42.)
“There are a bunch of those. But the rankings are still the rankings. You get into the top 20, that’s where I put them. At that point, I left the numbers behind.
“I feel like I could defend every ranking. But ... no matter what you do, people are going to be angry. Nobody is going to say, ‘You know what? This is exactly how I would rank them.’ That’s never, ever going to happen.”
Which ranking do you get the most grief for from friends, colleagues and fans?
A: “There are a lot of them. There are certain players who were ranked towards the second half of ‘The Baseball 100’ that people are very angry about — that Ichiro (Suzuki) was No. 100 or Tony Gwynn was at 95. But clearly the one I’ve gotten the most grief over is at No. 1, where I put Willie Mays instead of Babe Ruth.
“Ruth has so long been established in so many people’s minds as the greatest player ever that even though I’ve fully tried to explain why Mays is my No. 1 and why he best represents who should be No. 1 ... people are like, ‘That’s just wrong.’ For them, it’s pure fact that Babe Ruth, as a dominant pitcher and the greatest hitter the game had ever seen and a guy who hit more home runs than entire teams ... could not possibly be eclipsed.”
You have many Negro League players in ‘The Baseball 100’ as well as Japanese star Sadaharu Oh. How did you go about incorporating them?
A: “It’s not a whole lot different than ranking somebody from 1896 to somebody today, or somebody (from the) dead-ball (era) to somebody in the ’50s and ’60s. The only real way to rank players is to rank them against players in their own time. That’s where you start. And then you start judging, ‘OK, well, what was the quality of (play at) the time? What was the quality of the league?’
“But in truth, so much of this is heart. The Negro Leagues are a very important and special part of baseball to me, personally, because I was very good friends with Buck O’Neil; my first book was about Buck O’Neil.
“You look at the great players who came into the major leagues after Jackie Robinson, just in a rush. You have Willie Mays, Henry Aaron, Roberto Clemente, Ernie Banks, Bob Gibson, Frank Robinson. Not just great players but all-time legendary players, all coming in a 10-year span basically.
“By the time the entire league was integrated, baseball had added some of the most extraordinary players in the history of the game. And then you just hit reverse and say, ‘Well, what was it like 10 years before Jackie Robinson? And what reason is there to believe that there wasn’t every bit the same level of talent before Jackie Robinson as there was after Jackie Robinson?’”
Is any particular chapter or story your personal favorite?
A: “I wanted to make each one special. I know that’s a cop out, but I really did. It was very important to me.
“Probably the one that stands out in my mind is the Carlton Fisk essay. I was about two or three weeks into the project. And he was the one that solidified what this was. Up to that point, it was still a ranking of players. But when I started telling his story — the story about him and his dad and him trying to live up to the impossible expectations and hopes of his father and their relationship — it felt like this is really a bigger story. This is the story of baseball. This is the story of America. This is the story of why we love this game and what it is that connects us to it.
“That was the one that gave me the sense that this could really be something more.”
Part of the MLB labor negotiations involved changing some of the rules. Do you feel as if the sport needs to be tweaked?
A: “I do. I feel like the game has gotten away from being entertainment and has become too much about trying to find these tiny edges to win. The fans feel like, and should feel like, they were cut out of the conversation.
“It’s as simple as there being so few stolen bases and so few triples in the game now; the ball doesn’t get put in play; you don’t get to see starting pitchers try to work their way out of trouble anymore. There are so many things that we used to love about baseball that aren’t really a part of baseball anymore. They’ve just been worked out.
“It’s your job, when you’re running a sport, to make sure that you’re giving the fans at least some of what they want. So I do think that there need to be changes. The problem is that they’ve allowed it to go too far. And now it’s going to take obvious changes to try to bring it back, when it should have been small, incremental things.
“The games are longer, and there are fewer balls in play. I don’t think you need to say a whole lot more than that. It’s not because the players are not as good as they used to be. They’re better, they’re more athletic, they have more talent, they get better younger, they have incredible training.
“What’s happened is that the game has shifted so that now you have five or six pitchers in a game. It gets harder to put the ball in play. Because it’s harder to put the ball in play, you try for home runs. You can follow every step along the way of why the game has become what it’s become.
“It’s still a great game. It’s still my favorite game. I still love it. They’ll never lose me as a fan. But as long as they want to keep growing the game, the game has to fundamentally change in some ways.”
