Baseball

I generally pay attention to baseball, generally because the game is slow enough and patient enough to let somebody like me catch up to it. Baseball is not unlike a soap opera. What happened 30 years ago still is being considered as a part of the plot.

There is a blogger who goes by the handle of riverfront76 who has somehow crunched the numbers (either he did it or he used somebody else's methodology) to construct a list of the top 100 Cincinnati Reds players of all time.

I have no idea how this was done but it includes some guys named Hippo and Doc, Huey, Dewey and Luis ... people who played before I was born. Others, guys you probably heard of.

The No. 1 player in Reds history is predictably Pete Rose, ahead of Johnny Bench, Joe Morgan, Barry Larkin and Frank Robinson, in that order.

I doubt we needed the list as compiled by a saber-metrics operation to come up with this group of names, though Edd Roush and Heinie Groh are also in the top 10. Huh?

You need to know your Reds history to care about these men. All in all, the list was a revelation and a refreshing trip back through the baseball path. When I got to Vada Pinson, I remembered that ... yeah, baseball is like a soap opera. Not so long ago, it was.

Just yesterday.

http://www.sbnation.com/users/riverfront76

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