The Baseball 100

Joe Posnanski, The Baseball 100. NY: Avid Reader, 2021.

Near the end of the book, I took an informal poll of coworkers: Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, Henry Aaron, and Satchel Paige got votes as the best ever; they rank 2, 1, 4, and 10 in Joe's estimation, suggesting that, Family Feud style, he's got a good list. But what is this really about?

The Baseball 100 isn't a history, in the usual sense, though it is Posnanski's story of the sport. It's a list, obviously, purportedly ranking players from all eras against one another (though that's admittedly subjective, almost intended to start arguments). What's it about?  The players -- each essay is a short biography and discussion of the career, a little bit of amazing. Yet each is so much more: the book is a discussion of greatness: what is it, what does it require? It's about relationships, fathers and sons, players and fans, social roles. It's about memory and myth, too, because too many of the best players were excluded from competition, so we have no way to really know how Negro Leaguers compared except what comes down as legend, and the very real loss this unjustified exclusion caused for us all.

And it is, before I've even finished, one of my favorite books.