If Baseball Were Easy if Baseball Were Easy It Would Be Called Football

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Ah, the crack of the bat. The smell of fresh-cut grass. Munching on Cracker Jack while trying to avoid being splashed by the massive beer barely clung onto by the inebriated fan sitting behind you. Nothing says summer quite like baseball, the American national pastime. Baseball's place in the American zeitgeist comes, at least in part, from its long history and the general consistency of the game over decades—it's quite likely that your great-great-grandfather would be able to easily follow a modern game if he were magically plopped into the stands. This history and consistency make it a bit easier to compare players from much different eras than it is to do so for other sports, which is what I'll be attempting here. Let's see how it goes!

Roger Clemens

Roger Clemens© D. Silva/Shutterstock.com

Over the course of his illustrious 24-year career, Roger Clemens amassed a record seven Cy Young Awards as the best pitcher of the year in either the American or National League and threw 4,672 strikeouts, the third most of all time. In 1986 he became one of the rare starting pitchers to win a league MVP award after he posted a 24–4 record with a 2.48 earned run average (ERA) and 238 strikeouts for the Boston Red 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 time. So why isn't he higher? Well, it's very likely that Clemens himself took steroids, so his accomplishments aren't quite as stunning for the era as they appear. Plus he's quite possibly the player I've hated the most during my baseball fandom, so he gets a deserved place here but 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 WagnerCulver Pictures

A number of modern fans probably know Honus Wagner best as the subject of the most-valuable baseball card in history, the rare 1909–11 T206 Wagner card that was produced by the American Tobacco Company. The scarcity of the card is a big reason why it can fetch upwards of $2 million in a sale, but it wouldn't be nearly as valuable if the person depicted on it was just a run-of-the-mill player and not one of the best to have ever stepped on a diamond. "The Flying Dutchman" (god, they came up with such good nicknames back in the day) led the National League in batting average eight times over the course of his career and retired with a stellar .328 average despite having played during the offense-killing "dead-ball era." At the time of his retirement in 1917, he had tallied the second most hits (3,420), doubles (643), triples (252), and runs batted in (1,732) in major-league history, and all of these totals still rank among the top 25 of all time. A measure of Wagner's 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 honor among the thousands who had played the game up to that point.
Stan Musial

Stan MusialAP Images

Quite possibly the greatest person on this list, "Stan the Man" was a historically good player as well as a model citizen. The beloved St. Louis icon played his entire 22-season career with the city's Cardinals franchise and is as inextricably linked with his town as an athlete ever has been. Stan Musial led the Cardinals to three World Series titles (1942, 1944, and 1946) while racking up just as many MVP awards (1943, 1946, and 1948) and amassing a lifetime .331 batting average. As evidence that he was a man with a keen eye for the ball, Musial's highest single-season strikeout total was a paltry 46 (in 505 plate appearances) as a 41-year-old who started in the Cardinals' outfield. (He still hit .330 that year.) His hitting was so consistently good that opponents often resigned themselves to their fate, as noted by pitcher Carl Erskine: "I've had pretty good success with Stan by throwing him my best pitch and backing up third."
Ty Cobb

Ty CobbPictorial Parade

And now here's possibly the greatest humanity drop-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 average 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 merely a singles hitter, as he also led the AL in slugging percentage (a statistic that measures a hitter's power production) on eight 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-time 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 JohnsonUPI/Bettmann Archive

The flame-throwing Walter Johnson was a generational talent who defined dominant pitching for decades. He was so great that he led the AL in strikeouts more often than not, 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 complete-game shutouts, still the most in major-league history and a record that will never be broken. (As of this writing, the 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 eye-popping 0.78 WHIP (walks and hits per inning pitched; a WHIP below 1.00 is considered stellar) to win the Chalmers Award, the equivalent of the modern MVP. He took a second MVP in 1924 as he led the Senators to their first World Series championship. Johnson's 3,509 career strikeouts set a record that lasted 56 years, and his win total of 417 is second only to Cy Young's 511.
Hank Aaron

Hank AaronPictorial Parade

As the owner of the title Home Run King for a generation, Hank Aaron is often thought of as simply a tremendous power hitter, albeit arguably one of the best ever. However, his 755 career homers (a record for 33 years) are just the tip of the iceberg for "Hammerin' Hank." His all-time-best 2,297 runs batted in and 6,856 total bases are, of course, indicative of his legendary power, but he also put up a solid career .305 batting average and won three Gold Gloves for his play in the outfield. The consistently great Aaron was selected to the All-Star Game 21 straight years and hit at least 30 home runs in 15 seasons. In addition to his standing records, Aaron finished his career in 1976 with what were then the second most hits (3,771) and runs scored (2,174) in major-league history.
Ted Williams

Ted Williams has long been called "the greatest pure hitter who ever lived." His .482 lifetime on-base percentage is the highest of all time, and he ranks in the top 20 in total runs scored, home runs, runs batted in, and walks despite having missed almost five full seasons of his prime to military service. "The Splendid Splinter" (see what I mean about the nicknames?) was renowned for his uncanny eye, which helped him post the last major-league season with a .400 batting average (.406 in 1941). Overall, the Boston Red Sox icon led the AL in batting average 6 times, slugging percentage 9 times, and on-base percentage 12 times in his 19-year career. Not content with simply being the best hitter ever, Williams has also been called 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. But as famed author John Updike put it when Williams refused to come out for a curtain call after hitting a home run in his final career at bat: "Gods do not answer letters."
Barry Bonds

Barry BondsLisa Blumenfeld/Getty Images

Yeah, I get it. He was cantankerous, preening, and almost assuredly a steroid user—not exactly the kind of guy who should get the benefit of the doubt and earn spot number three on this list. Barry Bonds is, in the eyes of many baseball fans, the poster boy 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 effect on the unparalleled eye-hand coordination that produced an all-time high 2,558 career walks and staggering .444 lifetime on-base percentage. And that's the thing about steroids—you can never definitively say exactly what impact they have on a baseball player's performance. So let's just appreciate the incredible statistics Bonds piled up: an unsurpassed 762 home 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 player with the second most of all time and a striking testament to the unparalleled fear Bonds instilled in opposing pitchers.
Willie Mays

UPI/Bettmann Archive

Unlike his godson Bonds (whose father, Bobby, was Willie Mays's 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 astounding totals at the plate—including 3,283 hits, 660 home runs, and 1,903 runs batted in—but 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 most-iconic moment in Mays's career (and one of the most iconic in baseball history) came on defense: his over-the-shoulder catch at the warning track in the eighth inning of a tied 1954 World Series game that helped the New York Giants win that contest and, eventually, the championship. That was the only title of his career, but a relative lack of team success does nothing to tarnish the reputation of the 20-time All-Star and two-time MVP (1954 and 1965).
Babe Ruth

Babe RuthUPI/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 before 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 so seismic that it marked the end of the dead-ball era. When he joined the majors in 1914, the all-time 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 home runs 12 times. He was such a prodigious power hitter that his astounding .690 career slugging percentage remains the best of all time, and the gap between his mark and second place is larger than the one between second place and ninth. Oh, and he also was a great pitcher during his early years, leading the AL with a 1.75 ERA in 1921 and pitching 29 and two-thirds consecutive scoreless innings across two World Series—because when you dominate the game as much as the Babe did, you may as well do 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 to the prominence in the national consciousness that it still enjoys today. Not only was Ruth the greatest baseball player of all time, but he was the most important one too.