But I’m not here to bust Joe’s chops. The point of such a list is never to read any writer’s opinion of which player ranks above or below another player, but rather what the writer has to say about each, or the writer’s methodology, or something other than the list itself. It’s probably a good idea to plan carefully who goes where before you get started publishing the list, but, hey, I’m not here to bust Joe’s chops.

I’m here to bust the chops of list-makers in general.

Who cares that you’ve ranked Grover Cleveland Alexander five places above (or below) Lefty Grove? (Early in the second half of the 20^th Century, when I was first getting curious about baseball in the first half of the century, I used to get these two greats mixed up all the time—each was a top pitcher before I was born, and each name contained a "Grove." Even today, I sometimes have to think which giant is which.)  I certainly don’t care, though I’ll listen attentively if you’ve got something to tell me about either man. The ranking is the least part of my interest in what you’ve got to say. The order you list players in is, ultimately, going to rest on your opinions, judgment calls you make on a variety of unrelated subjects such as recency bias (and its lack), where in time you cut off your list (Do you include 19^th century stars? Do you include current stars in mid-career? Do you penalize either? If so, how severely?), your definition of Major League-quality players (what do you do with Negro League stars, for example, or Federal Leaguers?), what you do with missing seasons for military service and other causes, how you’re balancing peak value with career value, and on and on. Depending on your answers to these and many other questions, your Top 100 listing is bound to differ from mine and everyone else’s in a way I find coma-inducing.

Unless you can write about the players, or explain your methods, in a fresh, insightful way. Fortunately, Joe Pos can, and so can Bill James and a tiny handful of other writers who just use their rankings as jumping-off points for mini-essays, without which I wouldn’t care a damn about their lists.

From a historical perspective, it might be interesting to see what experts in each section of these mega-lists make of players within their own spheres of expertise. If John Thorn would rank the 19^th century’s stars, for example, and some expert on Japanese baseball or Mexican League baseball would rank his own players, and so on, and then perhaps some generalist could decide how to blend all the specialists’ lists together, so it’s not so much  the expression of some subjective opinions as much as it is a consensus of expert thinking.

Perhaps more interesting would be to examine the differing opinions of various experts within an area of specialization. One of the more complicated and oddly satisfying discussions I ever engaged in was on a Mets’ fansite that I founded in the early 2000s, where we attempted to rank each player on each yearly iteration of the Mets’ roster that worked off a model of specialists>general discussion>revision by specialists.

The discussions within each year were fascinating in themselves. One of us nutty Mets fans was given the responsibility for ranking the players from their chosen years, where presumably they knew the players better than anyone else, though everyone was welcome to chime in, offer dissenting opinions, re-rank the players-- the chief ranker could, and often did, then revise his original list depending on which arguments he found persuasive. As it happened, my task was ranking the 1962 Mets, and in the middle of the discussion, I realized that Bill had ranked that team in order to illustrate some of the principles of his Win Shares book. So I incorporated Bill’s rankings into my own, and those of various dissenters, and we looked closely at the contributions of that wretched hive of 1962 scum and villainy. As I recall, at one point I was seriously arguing whether Gus Bell (.149 in 101 ABs) or Don Zimmer (.077 in 45 ABs) contributed more to Mets’ wins in 1962 –Bill and I differed on their relative contributions.

Eventually, the entire yearly debate got morphed into a synoptic ranking of the value each Met player from 1962 to the present day has contributed to the team. Far as I can tell (I got kicked off my own website over a decade ago), it’s still going on to this day, and is updated down to the third decimal point on a constant basis. It’s a ranking project that makes some sense to me, in that its goals are clear, and its methods are transparent.

It is the blending of various experts’ lists that brought that Mets-project to mind. In drawing up my initial numbered ranking of 1962 Mets, for example, I would first make separate lists of pitchers and non-pitchers, just to keep straight my apples and my oranges. When I had sorted out the best (or least-worst) pitchers, which is a hard enough task, I would have to slot them into my list of least-worst hitters. Separating longer lists into shorter, more specific lists yields a more manageable result.

Bill spoke about this process a few years ago in a public interview Rob Neyer did with him on Cape Cod, where he described his own method as breaking down large, unanswerable questions into smaller and smaller specific questions that did have answers. In this clip, at around the 14^th minute, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmU-y53B-VY, Bill credits the idea to his 19^th century namesake, William James, who "has a section in one of his books in which he talks about the highest level of questions and the lowest level of questions." The idea is to understand the huge, broad, unanswerable questions by figuring out their more manageable components. James’ paraphrase of James: "Building understanding is a matter of breaking down the great questions, which have no real answers, into smaller questions which have slightly more objective answers, and smaller questions yet, which have slightly more objective answers, until you get down to the level at which you reach questions which have answers--and then you can build up."

If, for example, I divide my list of 1962 Mets pitchers even further into "relievers" and "starters," and then divide that partial list of an already partial list into, say, right-handed relievers and left-handed relievers, then I’ll find that I’ve got a few (but very clear) answers: Ken McKenzie led the Mets’ lefty relievers in IP, in ERA, in WHiP, in W-L percentage, etc. , while Bob (Lefty) Miller threw only 20 ineffective innings, so one of them goes to the top of this mini-mini-list and the other goes on the bottom.

In that way, we can work off a base of knowable (if somewhat trivial) information, or at least hash out a broad discussion in manageable terms.  If I were drawing my own list of Top 100 players of All-Time (which I never will, because who cares?), I would want to start as small as I could. To revisit briefly one of the thorniest questions I have grappled with in these electrons, rather than trying initially to rank all of MLB ever, I would begin by trying to settle the issue of which Willie is greater, Stargell or McCovey.

Deciding such a small matter enables me to decide what principles I will follow. How important is career WAR in my computations? How about Win Shares? Lifetime OPS?  Games played? Championships won? Five-year peak? All-Star appearances? H.R.?  If I follow one set of criteria to adjudicate McCovey v. Stargell, then how I can apply different criteria to et al.?  Applying Occam’s razor, I certainly don’t want to set up competing criteria unnecessarily. That smacks of custom-tailoring my rankings to accommodate my opinions to each case, which smacks of creating the whole list in the first place in order to foist my opinions on the world, and who wants that? Not you, not me, not Occam, and not Lefty Miller.

When you begin answering a large question by settling a smaller question, as Bill suggested on Cape Cod, you establish a small but solid base of knowledge. If you adjudicate McCovey v. Stargell to your satisfaction, or any other case, you’ve got principles to work with and you’ve got precedent. By doing head-to-head comparisons, you get a basis for ranking Gehrig above both Willies, and for Bill Buckner ranking below. It’s not just your opinion, and you can use the criteria you’ve established to settle closer cases at all points on your first-basemen list.

Breaking lists down by position is, of course, far from the only way to break them down, but it seems reasonable that all your breakdowns ought to be consistent or else made to be so. (It was only a foolish consistency that Emerson warned against—nothing wrong with consistency itself.)  It might be (I’m just hypothesizing now) that McCovey ranks lower on your list of "1960s NL sluggers" than Stargell does, and that Stargell also wins your list of "1970s NL sluggers," so how might McCovey rank higher than Stargell on your overall "First-basemen" ranking? If he does, then you’ve got to look at your lists and figure out where you went wrong, or else make sense of the seeming contradiction. (Some possible solutions: your "1970s NL" list doesn’t credit McC. for his time served in Oakland, and your "1960s NL" list doesn’t credit him for his year of 1959, so those might represent Willie M.’s advantage over Willie S.  Or perhaps Stargell’s edge in games played at first base (assuming he had one) would push him past McCovey as a first-baseman while McC. keeps the edge in career slugging. Or, of course, it might just be that all of these explanations are insufficient and you’ve screwed up on one list or the other. But settling the issue leads you to find flaws in your process.)  

The idea of making up disparate lists and then blending them is what I took from the task of ranking Mets players. If I ended up, as I did, with two lists of 1962 Mets batters and 1962 Mets pitchers, ranked in order, I had to figure out then how to make one list out of the two, which was challenging. The Mets, as I recall, who had the strongest seasons with the bat, Richie Ashburn and Frank Thomas,  exchanged places, #1 and #2, several times during the discussions we had. But there was a large drop-off between Ashburn and Thomas and the #3 hitter. Did their top pitcher belong in the #3 spot? Or were there four, or six, Mets batters who had stronger seasons than any Mets pitcher? Or was that an illusion based on the Polo Grounds' compact dimensions? (The final ranking, minus the protracted discussion, is here: https://thecranepool.net/phpBB32/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=27933 .) I ended up deciding that Al Jackson needed to be slotted in as #3 Met behind Ashburn, and since Roger Craig had very similar numbers to Jackson’s, he would go right behind Jackson, and then perhaps the third-best hitter needed to be ranked as the #5 Met. By breaking down the whole roster into its component parts, I found the task far more manageable and sensible than tackling the whole roster at once.

I recommend Pos’s current list (available behind The Athletic’s paywall, I believe) of his 100 Greatest, because I’m pretty sure these will be 100 of the greatest mini-essays ever written about baseball players, though the concept of such a list doesn’t rise much above "clickbait." I clicked, in just this week, on a lot of worse websites than Joe Pos’s.