What baseball player, did Dr. Mays tell, Your job is to play baseball?

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Ah, the cleft of the bat. The odour of fresh-cut grass. Munching on Cracker Jack while trying to avert being splashed past the massive beer barely clung onto by the inebriated fan sitting backside you. Nothing says summer quite like baseball, the American national pastime. Baseball's identify in the American zeitgeist comes, at to the lowest degree in part, from its long history and the general consistency of the game over decades—it's quite probable that your great-great-granddaddy would exist able to easily follow a modern game if he were magically plopped into the stands. This history and consistency brand it a bit easier to compare players from much unlike eras than information technology is to do so for other sports, which is what I'll be attempting hither. Let's encounter how it goes!

Roger Clemens

Roger Clemens
Roger Clemens, 2007.
© D. Silva/Shutterstock.com

Over the course of his illustrious 24-year career, Roger Clemens clustered a record seven Cy Young Awards every bit the all-time bullpen of the year in either the American or National League and threw four,672 strikeouts, the 3rd most of all fourth dimension. In 1986 he became one of the rare starting pitchers to win a league MVP award later on he posted a 24–iv record with a ii.48 earned run average (ERA) and 238 strikeouts for the Boston Cerise Sox. Moreover, he did all this while a number of opposing batters were taking steroids, which resulted in offensive statistics going through the roof at the fourth dimension. So why isn't he college? Well, it's very probable that Clemens himself took steroids, then his accomplishments aren't quite as stunning for the era as they appear. Plus he's quite possibly the player I've hated the nearly during my baseball fandom, so he gets a deserved place here but tin can't go any higher lest I render this list incomplete by tossing my keyboard out a window in a tizzy. Hurrah for subjectivity!
Honus Wagner

Honus Wagner
Honus Wagner.
Culver Pictures

A number of modern fans probably know Honus Wagner all-time every bit the subject of the most-valuable baseball card in history, the rare 1909–xi T206 Wagner card that was produced by the American Tobacco Visitor. The scarcity of the bill of fare is a big reason why it tin can fetch upwards of $2 one thousand thousand in a sale, but information technology wouldn't be nigh as valuable if the person depicted on it was merely a run-of-the-mill player and not 1 of the all-time to have ever stepped on a diamond. "The Flying Dutchman" (god, they came upward with such good nicknames back in the day) led the National League in batting average eight times over the form of his career and retired with a stellar .328 average despite having played during the criminal offence-killing "dead-ball era." At the fourth dimension of his retirement in 1917, he had tallied the 2d well-nigh hits (3,420), doubles (643), triples (252), and runs batted in (ane,732) in major-league history, and all of these totals still rank amidst the acme 25 of all time. A measure of Wagner'due south greatness is found in the 1936 balloting for the inaugural class of the Baseball Hall of Fame, where he was one of the five players selected for that award among the thousands who had played the game up to that point.
Stan Musial

Stan Musial
Stan Musial, 1964.
AP Images

Quite mayhap the greatest person on this list, "Stan the Human" was a historically skillful thespian as well as a model denizen. The beloved St. Louis icon played his unabridged 22-season career with the city's Cardinals franchise and is every bit inextricably linked with his boondocks as an athlete ever has been. Stan Musial led the Cardinals to 3 World Series titles (1942, 1944, and 1946) while racking upwards just as many MVP awards (1943, 1946, and 1948) and amassing a lifetime .331 batting average. Equally prove that he was a homo with a neat eye for the ball, Musial's highest single-season strikeout total was a paltry 46 (in 505 plate appearances) as a 41-year-sometime who started in the Cardinals' outfield. (He nevertheless hitting .330 that year.) His hitting was so consistently proficient that opponents often resigned themselves to their fate, as noted by pitcher Carl Erskine: "I've had pretty good success with Stan past throwing him my best pitch and backing up third."
Ty Cobb

Ty Cobb
Ty Cobb.
Pictorial Parade

And at present here's possibly the greatest humanity drib-off in list-item history. If Musial was a fairy-tale prince when it came to comportment, Ty Cobb was the evil troll under the bridge chucking boulders at passing children. An unrepentant racist who routinely sharpened his spikes to maximize potential injury to opponents on hard slides and who once fought a fan in the stands, Cobb was nevertheless a supremely talented player who has the greatest lifetime batting boilerplate in major-league history (.366). He led the American League (AL) in batting average a ridiculous 12 times in his 24-year career but was by no means simply a singles hitter, equally he also led the AL in slugging percentage (a statistic that measures a hitter's power production) on 8 occasions. He batted over .400 in three seasons (1911, .420; 1912, .409; and 1922, .401) and, in addition to his batting-average record, he retired in 1928 as the all-fourth dimension leader in hits (4,189), runs scored (2,246), and stolen bases (892), all of which were broken only late in the 20th or early in the 21st centuries.
Walter Johnson

Walter Johnson
Walter Johnson.
UPI/Bettmann Archive

The flame-throwing Walter Johnson was a generational talent who defined ascendant pitching for decades. He was and then peachy that he led the AL in strikeouts mostly, topping the league 12 times over the course of his 21-year career. Pitching his entire professional life for the Washington Senators, "Big Train" threw 110 career consummate-game shutouts, however the most in major-league history and a record that will never exist broken. (As of this writing, the electric current active leader, Clayton Kershaw, has 15 over eight and a half seasons.) In 1913 he won 36 games with a 1.14 ERA and an middle-popping 0.78 WHIP (walks and hits per inning pitched; a WHIP below one.00 is considered stellar) to win the Chalmers Honor, the equivalent of the modern MVP. He took a 2d MVP in 1924 every bit he led the Senators to their first World Serial title. Johnson's three,509 career strikeouts set a record that lasted 56 years, and his win total of 417 is 2d merely to Cy Young'south 511.
Hank Aaron

Hank Aaron
Hank Aaron.
Pictorial Parade

As the owner of the title Abode Run King for a generation, Hank Aaron is often idea of as but a tremendous power hitter, albeit arguably one of the best ever. However, his 755 career homers (a tape for 33 years) are but the tip of the iceberg for "Hammerin' Hank." His all-time-all-time 2,297 runs batted in and vi,856 total bases are, of course, indicative of his legendary power, but he besides put up a solid career .305 batting average and won iii Gold Gloves for his play in the outfield. The consistently not bad Aaron was selected to the All-Star Game 21 straight years and hitting at least thirty dwelling house runs in 15 seasons. In addition to his standing records, Aaron finished his career in 1976 with what were then the second most hits (three,771) and runs scored (2,174) in major-league history.
Ted Williams

Ted Williams has long been chosen "the greatest pure hitter who ever lived." His .482 lifetime on-base percentage is the highest of all time, and he ranks in the superlative 20 in total runs scored, home runs, runs batted in, and walks despite having missed about five full seasons of his prime to armed forces service. "The Fantabulous Splinter" (see what I mean about the nicknames?) was renowned for his uncanny eye, which helped him mail the terminal major-league season with a .400 batting average (.406 in 1941). Overall, the Boston Cherry-red Sox icon led the AL in batting average 6 times, slugging pct 9 times, and on-base of operations percentage 12 times in his 19-yr career. Not content with but beingness the best hitter ever, Williams has also been chosen both the best fisherman and best fighter pilot ever. Despite all the accolades (or perhaps because of them), he had a notoriously prickly relationship with the public. Simply as famed author John Updike put it when Williams refused to come out for a curtain call afterward hit a home run in his last career at bat: "Gods do not answer letters."
Barry Bonds

Barry Bonds
Barry Bonds hitting his record-setting 756th career home run, August vii, 2007.
Lisa Blumenfeld/Getty Images

Aye, I get it. He was cantankerous, preening, and almost assuredly a steroid user—not exactly the kind of guy who should go the benefit of the incertitude and earn spot number 3 on this listing. Barry Bonds is, in the eyes of many baseball fans, the poster male child for the steroid era and its supposed illegitimacy. But, well, he was already a surefire Hall of Famer before he allegedly began juicing, and steroids would have had no outcome on the unparalleled middle-hand coordination that produced an all-time high 2,558 career walks and staggering .444 lifetime on-base percent. And that'south the thing well-nigh steroids—you lot can never definitively say exactly what touch they have on a baseball player's operation. So permit's merely appreciate the incredible statistics Bonds piled upwardly: an unsurpassed 762 abode runs (including a single-season record 73 in 2001), a record seven career MVP awards, and 688 intentional walks, which is more than double the amount given to the actor with the second most of all time and a striking testament to the unparalleled fearfulness Bonds instilled in opposing pitchers.
Willie Mays

Willie Mays.
UPI/Bettmann Archive

Dissimilar his godson Bonds (whose father, Bobby, was Willie Mays'southward teammate from 1968 to 1972), Mays needs to be subjected to no mental gymnastics to justify his place on this list. Not only did Mays rack up phenomenal totals at the plate—including 3,283 hits, 660 abode runs, and 1,903 runs batted in—just his outstanding play in the outfield produced 12 consecutive Gold Glove Awards (1957–68) and led many observers to call him the greatest all-around player the game has ever seen. In fact, the about-iconic moment in Mays'due south career (and ane of the nearly iconic in baseball history) came on defense force: his over-the-shoulder grab at the warning runway in the eighth inning of a tied 1954 World Series game that helped the New York Giants win that contest and, somewhen, the championship. That was the just title of his career, just a relative lack of team success does nix to tarnish the reputation of the twenty-time All-Star and two-time MVP (1954 and 1965).
Babe Ruth

Babe Ruth
Babe Ruth.
UPI/Bettmann Archive

Well, here's a no-brainer if there ever was one. Yes, he played among an artificially limited talent pool before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947 and decades earlier advanced training regimens produced athletes who looked like, well, athletes, but Ruth was such a historic talent that he transcends these qualifiers. In fact, his arrival in the major leagues was and then seismic that it marked the end of the dead-ball era. When he joined the majors in 1914, the all-fourth dimension record for home runs in a season was 27. Within seven years he had more than doubled it with 59, and he eventually produced a personal-high 60 dingers in 1927. All told, he led the AL in habitation runs 12 times. He was such a prodigious ability hitter that his phenomenal .690 career slugging percentage remains the best of all time, and the gap between his marking and second identify is larger than the one between 2d place and ninth. Oh, and he likewise was a great pitcher during his early years, leading the AL with a ane.75 ERA in 1921 and pitching 29 and two-thirds consecutive scoreless innings beyond ii World Serial—because when you dominate the game as much every bit the Babe did, you may likewise exercise so in all facets, right? Moreover, the charismatic Ruth was the first transcendent American sports superstar, routinely garnering headlines across the country for both his on-field exploits and his off-field celebrity. His play with the storied New York Yankees teams of the 1920s catapulted baseball game to the prominence in the national consciousness that it still enjoys today. Not merely was Ruth the greatest baseball game player of all fourth dimension, just he was the most of import one too.