Crowdsourcing baseball's history of important persons

[John]

The 25 most important people in baseball history

More than 17,000 people have played Major League Baseball. Countless others have contributed to the game from working in front offices to writing about baseball and more. It’s hard to say who matters most, players or everyone else and it’s an age-old debate. Personally, I believe both groups are important. Few people can play at the highest level. And without a range of support, they wouldn’t do so professionally, at least not in a league that generates close to $10 billion annually.

That said, I decided recently to take this debate public. I spent several weeks asking anyone interested to select the 25 most important people in baseball history. I distributed a 190-person reference ballot with write-in candidates welcome and anyone eligible. There wasn’t a set criteria for importance. I prefer that voters for my projects work independently and make their own determinations.

In all, 262 people voted in this project. Here’s how the top 25 came out:

A little crowdsourcing of baseball history for your enjoyment. Feel free to rip this list for its faults. No DiMaggio? No Feller? Yes to Pete Rose and Barry Bonds? Interesting. This is the stuff debates are made of.

[Lions]

It's easy to quibble with placement on these sorts of lists, but overall, I think the list is perfectly fine for who it included and who it left out. You can make arguments for Buck O'Neill, Hank Greenberg, and a number of other people, too.

[richard_v]

This is actually really interesting to me anyway, having no memories of players pre-2005 I've always been told "this is the greatest list, unquestionably, without a shadow of doubt, ever." Instead when you throw in crowd voting, and anyone to do with baseball you get Bill James higher than Ted Williams and Lou Gehrig. Dr Jobe being better than any full time pitcher including Cy Young. A disntinct lack of Mantle and DiMaggio. Yet, it's a reasonable list and makes sense why it's came out that way.

Edit: managed to make a right mess out of trying to do spoilers

[Bill]

It's easy to quibble with placement on these sorts of lists, but overall, I think the list is perfectly fine for who it included and who it left out.

Ditto. Curt Flood is probably too high. If you literally asked 100 baseball fans who's lawsuit led to free agency, probably 99 would not know. He can't be THAT impactful. Selig doesn't belong either. If anything, he was short sighted letting baseball sucker fans back in after the 1994 strike by sticking his head in the sand about PEDs. Unless to want to consider the entire steroid era has detrimentally important I suppose.

Frank Jobe should probably be higher. TJ surgery is almost expected on starting pitchers now.

Bill James is probably most impactful on baseball fans. Maybe less so on the actual game (though obviously it is moving that way).

The one goofball group I'd add is the Daniel Okrent/Glen Waggoner/et al. group that invented rotisserie baseball (although I guess that is mostly for the fans too).

[Borealis]

I found it interesting as well, as I hadn't anticipated the non-players included on the list. It might be interesting fodder for the sim break to compose our own lists of the Most Important folks in the game!

An interesting addition to the list might be the Stoneham/O'Malley duo who moved MLB past the Mississippi (and Rockies), which opened up the entire country to MLB and expansion. I think it's a fair argument that the expansion of the early 60's (and late?) never happens if the Giants and dodgers stay in NY.

[Coqui]

OK, I'll play. It's a bit hard to quibble with a list like this, but here are some thoughts:

Pete Rose and Barry Bonds? Really? If you're going for an infamous figure, I'd prefer Shoeless Joe Jackson to Pete Rose. At least Shoeless Joe had an air of heroic tragedy about him. There's really nothing about Pete Rose the person that makes you feel sorry for his being left out of the HoF, unless maybe you believe that he just isn't terribly bright, and that so much so that he shouldn't be held responsible for any of his more imbecilic actions. Anyone who listened to his ill-fated sports talk radio show in the early-to-mid 90s has to at least consider that a possibility, I suppose. And Bonds? Meh. If we're going for a 'roidhead just because, A-Rod is far more emblematic of the greed and mendacity that some ascribe to the so-called steroid era. In my mind, the steroid era is the power analogy to the go-go 70's cocaine and greenies era. Neither era really bothers me all that much, but I don't think that we have to have a poster boy offender for the most influential list. /Rant

I can kind of see the Bud Selig thing both ways. I think he gets a bad rap among traditionalists, and I count myself a traditionalist. There's no doubt, however, that the game he is leaving is one that is much healthier than the one he inherited. He's one of the most successful commissioners in history by any fair accounting. I just have a hard time saying that over 10% of the top 25 influentials were Commissioners, and if I had to vote one off of the island, it would probably be Selig rather than Landis or Johnson, one who dealt adroitly with a scandal that threatened the game itself, and the other one of the founders of the modern game.

No media members, and particularly no radio announcers? Maybe the problem is that you can't just identify just one, but there is no doubt that the love affair between radio and baseball was a symbiotic relationship that made each bigger and better and more entwined into the fabric of America. Jack Brickhouse, Red Barber, Harry Caray, Jack Buck, and Ernie Harwell would all be appropriate radio selections. Joe Garagiola for his TV work? Mel Allen on This Week in Baseball, anyone? To me this omission is the most glaring. And you could probably say the same about the absence of any baseball beat writer/columnist, too. Just not George Will.

No one from literature? No Ernest Thayer (author of Casey at the Bat)? No J.P.Kinsella? Heck, I'd vote for Wilfred McCormick, author of the seminal Bronc Burnett sports series, which was mostly, although not entirely about baseball. After all, baseball has, for much of its history, been romanticized by adolescent boys.

Why Roberto Clemente? Don't get me wrong, Clemente was a fantastic player, but other than his untimely death, why him and not Frank Robinson or Stan Musial or Jimmy Foxx or Yogi Berra or Dimaggio or Mantle or fill in the blank with the inner circle Hall of Famer of your choice?

Why John McGraw AND Connie Mack? I suspect the voters thought they had to go with a Manager, and were split as to whether Mack or McGraw were the best choice. I'd have probably voted for Casey Stengel, myself, just because baseball is full or colorful characters, and this list is a bit devoid of that animal.

[Arroyos]

… It's a bit hard to quibble with a list like this …

Hard to quibble? I have nothing but quibbles with this woefully unrepresentative list.

To begin with, there are too many players on the list. With the exception of Ruth and Robinson and Flood, players rarely have a long term impact on the game itself. We love and hate them, they're the reason we watch the game, but even without my favorites, Aaron and Mays and Clemente and Paige, baseball will go on much the way it has. Others will fill in the missing story lines that those guys (and others) created.

The second problem is how myopic the list is. With rare exceptions, you can't even begin to judge the long term effect of one individual until decades or more have passed since their passing. Willie Mays was one of my favorite players growing up. He's on this list because of how prominent he was. But did he change the game? Would the game be played differently had Mays bent sent back to the minors after going 0 for 20 and never returned? Hardly. Ditto for Gehrig and DiMaggio and Mantle and Young and Bonds and Rose and ... Great players all. Great personalities. Great historical figures. But did they change the game like Ruth or Robinson did? No.

Which brings us to all the people the list leaves out. The people whose names we've largely forgotten. The people who made it possible for Robinson to survive in Montreal and Brooklyn. Yes, Branch Rickey is rightly on the list, but where are the black leaders who made it possible for Jackie to survive that first year? Where is Sam Breadon, the Cardinals owner who supported and made possible the farm system Rickey had only dreamed of? Where are the Dodger owners who supported, and funded, Rickey's scheme to get Robinson to the majors? Without them, Rickey would just have been another dreamer.

Curt Flood and Marvin Miller are rightly on the list, but WAY WAY too far down. If Rickey and Robinson had a major influence on integrating baseball, then Flood and Miller had an equally important influence on the way the game is organized today, chiefly through negotiations between the Players Union and the Owners. Prior to Flood's Supreme Court Case and Miller's development of the union, baseball was controlled almost entirely by owners. The balance we so value in today's game, and the exorbitant salaries that give players so much power in influencing changes in the game, are the direct result of the actions of Flood and Miller.

Finally, where is Larry Doby? Why is Larry always left out? Yes, Jackie integrated the National League; but just a few months later, Larry integrated the American League when that maverick owner Bill Veeck (at least he's on the list) finally got his wish: black players on his team. Veeck deserves more credit, and a higher ranking on the list, for being the first owner to challenge Judge Landis' hegemonic control of baseball. In 1942, before Rickey had begun to dream about integrating the Dodgers, Veeck nearly pulled off a scheme to buy the struggling Philadelphia Phillies and replace their talentless roster with Negro League stars. In the inevitable showdown with Commissioner Landis (whose "gentlemen's agreement" had kept black players out of the majors since he became Commish in 1920), Veeck blinked. The sale of the Phillies was nullified. And baseball had to wait another 5 years before Robinson and Doby arrived. Just two black players, instead of an entire team, as Veeck imagined.

Now those are men who changed baseball history: Veeck, Doby, Robinson, Rickey, Flood, Miller, and, yes, Landis. For better or, in Landis' case, worse, baseball would be very different without them. I don't think that can be said of any of the other players on the list, except Ruth.

[Bill]

Nice post Bob. You definitely have a point. The players themselves don't typically have so much of an impact on the game itself and agree that guys like Williams, Mantle, and Cy Young are just good players that baseball would have survived without. I would point out though that players like Clemente, Mays, and Aaron were kinda the first rockstar, HoF caliber players those minority groups really had. I'm OK with them being included. Look at how many Latinos are in the game now. Clemente had to have had an impact on that.

One exception may be Gehrig: I think ALS would be some obscure disease that would get little spotlight without having been Lou Gehrig's Disease for 60 years.

Doby's case is definitely a bit different. Robinson was a carefully orchestrated plan and he dealt with a lot more hate prior to even playing with the Dodgers. Doby pretty much just signed with the Indians and started playing that year. Robinson had dealt with 2-3 years of hate in the minors before that point. He was truly a tremendous human. Though Doby and Robinson clearly dealt with the same issues in the majors.

I'm actually not sure where Veeck belongs on the list. I think in some ways his importance gets overblown by the stunts he pulled (like sending Eddie Gaedel to bat). But Bob really highlights the lesser known parts that were impactful. I guess maybe he has the right amount of fame for the wrong reasons...lol.