MLB History

All eyes will be on Albert Pujols for the next few days until he reports to Spring Training.

If his self-imposed deadline for a new contract comes and goes without an extension being reached with the St. Louis Cardinals, he will rule the headlines for the duration of the season.

Everywhere the Cardinals go, the top questions asked will be, “Where do you see yourself playing next season?” and “is your contract status a distraction?”

Baseball has been around for so many years that players are bound to be forgotten eventually. A new breed of talent always seems to find it's way to the surface and players of yesteryear fall by the wayside.

It takes a special type of talent to remain in baseball discussions for generation after generation, and an even more special talent to end up in the Hall of Fame.

Originally, the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York was created to honor the best and most important people in the game’s history. The first class of players—Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, Christy Mathewson, Walter Johnson and Ty Cobb—are some of the biggest names the game has ever seen (how Cy Young was omitted from selection that first year is baffling, given his credentials). 

In the decades that have passed since 1936 there have been many more entrants elected to the sacred hallways of Cooperstown, most deserving the honor.

Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays and Duke Snider rank among the greatest center fielders in baseball history.

Baseball is, for the most part, an exact science.

That is why we can compare Tony Gwynn and Tris Speaker, even though 75 years passed between their respective debuts. We know that Speaker's .345 average is still very comparable to Gwynn's .338.

Of course the game has changed slightly. Speaker averaged 25 stolen bases a season, four more than Gwynn. But 25 steals was less impressive in the 1910s than 21 was 80 years later.

The Seattle Mariners recently signed Moises Hernandez to a minor league contract. Not a huge deal, right? Well, he's the brother of reigning AL Cy Young Felix Hernandez.

I'll get into more specifics on that later in the next slide.

I started to think, though. How many other brother combinations have there been, and often did the shared genes translated to shared talent? The best duo was Lloyd and Paul Waner, who are both hall of famers.

The New York Yankees franchise has boasted some of the greatest players of all time. Players like Mickey Mantle, Babe Ruth and Thurman Munson have been clad in pinstripes and left their mark on our nation's pastime.

Creating a list of the top defensive studs who called the Bronx their home is far from an easy task. This team has such a rich history that the list could incorporate over 100 players, and that might not even be enough. 

Performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) have tarnished the last twenty years of Major League Baseball, and that is sad.  After witnessing perhaps the greatest era of individual performance in the game’s history during the last twenty years or so, we are forced to live with the reality that a lot of those accomplishments are tainted.  The problem now faced by those who love and respect the game is their lack of full knowledge of which of those accomplishments, of the records attained, are tainted and which are clean.  And

It is almost a foregone conclusion that, barring catastrophic failures, Alex Rodriguez will replace Barry Bonds as baseball’s all-time home run leader.  After he does, however, is there any other current player with a realistic chance of reaching 784 (Rodriguez’s projected total) and beyond?

Could that player be Albert Pujols?

Possibly, but it’s not likely.

Ted Williams, Ernie Banks, Don Mattingly.  You know the names because you've heard them a million times, and strung together you probably already know what the topic is: great players who never won a World Series.

In basketball, football and even hockey to a certain degree, greatness is measured with rings.  Despite complete and utter statistical dominance, Wilt Chamberlain is considered by knowledgeable basketball fans to be inferior to Bill Russell.  Why?  Count the rings.