ST. LOUIS (AP) -- Casting Babe Ruth at the top of baseball's greatest 100 players was the easy decision for The Sporting News. Picking the rest of the players was another story.
John Rawlings, editor of The Sporting News, said there was no need for discussion about Ruth. “We just said let’s start at No. 2,” he said.
The Sporting News recently published “Baseball's 100 Greatest Players,” a coffee-table book already at bookstores with a retail value of $29.95. Its 224 pages are filled with pictures, profiles, charts and statistics, and include a foreword by Willie Mays, who’s ranked 2nd in the great list.
“We are looking at the close of the century and we thought it made sense that we'd be the somebody that says these are the best players,” Rawlings said.
The 112-year-old weekly magazine has been long known as the “Bible of Baseball.” In fact, when it started in 1886, baseball was the only pro sport and, up until World War II, the magazine focused strictly on baseball.
To produce the book, 12 editors spent six weeks evaluating statistics, reading clip files and discussing their personal knowledge and observations to cut a list of 15,000 players down to 100.
To start the ranking process, every editor was asked to pick the top 10 players. When those votes were counted, Ruth, along with Mays, Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson and Hank Aaron had secured places in the top five, respectively.
Then each voter was asked to select 15 more players, to round out the top 25. The process continued for places 26-50, 51-75 and 76-100.
“We looked for ways to do it strictly by the numbers. But you simply can't do that in baseball,” Rawlings said. “We just depended on everyone’s knowledge of baseball to compare eras and try to arrive at a list.”
The list includes former and current major league baseball players and former Negro League players.
“To me, it's a very intriguing book that any baseball fan would like,” said Erwin Fischer, historian at the Cardinals Hall of Fame. “Anyone who puts together a list of baseball players and ranks them, there's going to be some difference of opinions.”