Top ten all time favorite players

I thought I’d take the time to reflect upon my favorite baseball players. The only rule I’m using is that I had to watch him play and remember him, so any Big Red Machine players are out. I’m sure I saw Johnny Bench play as a child, but I just don’t remember.

10. Paul O’Neill. I never really got over the trade. I never considered him a Yankee even though his best years were in pinstripes. He could have been one of the Reds greats if they’d have kept him. I have a picture of my family and me with him – I had to be in fifth or sixth grade and had a hideous perm, so that won’t be displayed on the mantle.

9. Derek Jeter. Maybe the one player whose entire career I followed, at least from Columbus on. Jeter’s one of those players who has that extra something that people who’ve never played competitive ball don’t understand, things like leadership and stepping up when things count. He’s played in the brightest spotlight and has never had a scandal. That’s something right there. He may not be the greatest shortstop in the game, but he’s good.

8. Ryan Zimmerman. This kid has a head on his shoulders and can be the next Brooks Robinson if he stays healthy. I can’t believe the Nationals haven’t signed him to a longterm contract yet.

7. Bret Boone. I liked him when he played for Seattle. I was thrilled when he came to Cincinnati. He was one of those players you can’t explain why you like, you just do. He was good, not great, but he was a big part of winning Reds teams and I was pretty sad when he left.

6. Sean Casey. Who didn’t like the Mayor? Nice guys are easy to love. It was pretty sad to see him retire this year. He’d make a great bat off the bench in Cincy.

5. Ryne Sandberg. Call it a WGN childhood. I loved Ryno. I had nearly every baseball card of his except the rookie cards – I only had the Fleer rookie card and spent a pretty penny on it back in the day. Maybe my Ryno love had something to do with the fact that my uncle got me a Sandberg Louisville Slugger when I first started playing Little League back in second grade. Sometimes you just develop an attachment to a player, but he was a pretty darn good one. I didn’t lose any love for him when his team got into that big fight with the Dayton Dragons last season.

4. Jose Rijo. 1990. The squirt gun. The Banana Phone pranks. What was there not to love about Jose? It was a bummer his arm didn’t love him, though. Bummer he might be in trouble, too.

3. Ken Griffey, Jr. Yes, yes, I have been hyper-critical of him in the last couple of years, and I even suspect that he had more of an impact on the Reds losing than we could imagine, but Junior was my favorite non-Reds player as a kid and my god, is that swing art. With time, I’ll forget all of the negative things about him, even the injuries, and remember him as the greatest centerfielder of my lifetime. I’ve already almost forgotten the bad and cannot wait to see him in a Mariners uniform again. I hope he hits forty out this year.

2. Barry Bonds. Yes, baseball’s all-time homerun hitter. But I don’t need to elaborate on why. I’ve written about it before. It’s just that I’ve never seen the atmosphere of a game change as it did when he came up to bat. There was electricity in the air. You just knew when he was going to hit one out.

1. Barry Larkin. One of the greatest shortstops in the history of the game. Born and bred in Cincinnati, Ohio. A pure Red.

Players who would have made this list but…:

Roger Clemens. I know, I know, it seems like a double standard loving Bonds and hating Roger. I used to love him, even as a Yankee. I remember taping a Clemens-Martinez matchup once and watching the game later. But the whole weirdness about his half seasons and his perceived craziness soured me to him. What can I say? You can’t help the way you feel. And I didn’t have the luxury to see him play on a regular basis like I did Bonds. Maybe it was the bleeding butt that turned me off.

Manny Ramirez. I loved Cleveland Indian Manny Ramirez. But then Manny became Manny, and the love stopped flowing.

Darren Daulton. Something about a guy who preaches that the end of the world is coming ruins the legacy.

Jose Canseco. Dude is just crazy. I loved him as a kid. But something about a rat just rubs me the wrong way.

I was surprised that there weren’t more Reds on my list when I really thought about it. I hope that one day I can rewrite this list and add Brandon Phillips, Joey Votto, Jay Bruce, Johnny Cueto, Edinson Volquez, and Homer Bailey to the list!
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Shake, shake, shake

I was surfing the net during lunch hour today and came across JoseCanseco.com, a self-promoting pile of interwebal garbage. You can even win a day with Canseco!

Remember when this guy was a sure Hall of Famer, a member of the Bash Brothers and the A's mini dynasty at the end of the eighties? The guy ended his career with 462 homers. Granted, those were juiced homers, but we'll never know how many he would have hit without the stuff. He hit 91 in his first four seasons when he was still a scrawny dude, so who knows? Just another of the many what-could-have-beens.

I was in sixth grade when the A's went to the series in '88. All of the boys in my class were wearing A's caps at the time, and, well, I wanted one, too, so my mom found a mesh one for me. Back then, wearing baseball caps to school was ok, because baseball caps stood for baseball teams and not gangs.

I remember the '88 Series quite well, which is strange, because I don't remember the '87 Series at all. I guess my twelve year old brain had finally developed some capacity for memory by then. I remember Dave Stewart, Dennis Eckersley, and Terry Steinbach as much as I remember Canseco and McGwire. What a team.

Of course, the '89 Series was even more memorable because of the earthquake. Strange coincidence (fate?) how the two Bay teams were playing in that Series. My mother was having a Tupperware or Home Interiors party or one of those types of things and I was in my bedroom, where I had been permitted to have the television so I could watch the game. I remember Al Michaels talking about the Series when suddenly someone said "Oh my god" and then Michaels said something like "I'm telling you, we're having an..." before we lost the feed. When it came back (I think they played some television show before it did) and I found out what had happened, I remember feeling something like I was watching the Apocalypse. Al Michaels was awesome - I think he won an Emmy or something like that for his account of what he saw at Candlestick. (It's a shame he doesn't do baseball anymore.)

It was a traumatic experience for a kid who'd never before witnessed the horrors that the real world had to offer. I cut out every article from the Dayton Daily News about the quake for weeks and pasted it into a yellow notebook, which I still have today. Then again, these were pre-themediaisinsane days and live coverage of disasters was not something that happened everyday, which helped viewers feel the magnitude of the catastrophe. Today it kind of feels like we're immune to such things.

I stopped liking the A's in 1990 when, of course, the Reds swept them in the World Series. I still like them a bit, but it's funny how they went from being THE team in baseball to a moneyball small market team.

Baseball sure has changed. Then again, so has America.
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