Bryant - Legends: the best players, games, and teams in baseball

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Copyright 2015 by Howard Bryant.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bryant, Howard, 1968

Legends : the best players, games, and teams in baseball / Howard Bryant.

pages cm.(Legends ; 1) Audience: Age: 8-12. Audience: Grade: 4 to 6.

1. BaseballUnited StatesHistoryJuvenile literature. 2. Baseball playersUnited StatesBiographyJuvenile literature. I. Title. GV867.5.B79 2015

796.35764dc23 2014031744

ISBN 978-0-698-17258-6

Edited by Michael Green. | Design by Semadar Megged.

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Version_1

For Ilan Robert Bryant,
a wonderful little boy who likes baseball,
but loves to read

A N OTE FROM H OWARD B RYANT

T HIS IS NOT A PERFECT BOOK . The best thing you, the reader, can do with it is disagree with it, debate it, change it, have fun with it, decide for yourself that THE 2010-2014 San Francisco Giants WHO WON THREE WORLD SERIES IN FIVE YEARS, are ABSOLUTELY a dynasty on par with the 1996-2001 New York Yankees, who won four World Series in six years (I would argue otherwise). Countless hours of your life are going to be spent debating stuff like which team was better, the 2013 Red Sox with their beards and that strange way they didnt seem to be that good and yet always found a way to win, found a way to be great at just the right time right through the World Series; or the 2000 Yankees, who finished the regular season so bad they couldnt even win two games in a rowuntil the playoffs started and then they got red hot, trampling the As, the Mariners, and the Mets to win the World Series for the third straight year. When you and your friends disagree, you can grab the Baseball Encyclopedia or get on baseball-reference.com and look up the stats and tell them theyre nuts to think that there was ever anyone better when it came to making a big play when a big play needed to be made than Derek Jeter, and theyll say that David Ortiz was the most clutch hitter there ever was. And another friend will say, Obviously, youre forgetting Babe Ruth, who invented the word clutch. And maybe someone else will say, You know, for as great as Ruth was, he DID make one of the biggest boneheaded plays you could make. He got thrown out trying to steal second in Game Seven of the 1926 World Series. True story! (And it is, for even the greatest players make mistakes, too.) When you look back one day, youll remember those debates as some of the best times of your life.

Baseball has been around so long that, no matter how hard anyone tries, there is no such thing as a perfect list. It just cant be done. The first World Series was played in 1903 between Boston and Pittsburgh, but baseball was being played thirty years before thatwhich was so long ago that the guys were hitting home runs and striking out less than ten years after the Civil Warand more than one hundred years after, to this day. The game has lived through twenty-six presidents and is now in its third century. It was played when the ball felt like a boulder (the old dead ball era, when a guy named Home Run Baker led the league with, yes, NINE homers); when it took eight balls for a batter to earn a walk (they changed it to four in 1889); and when pitchers threw underhand, like they do in softball. (That changed in 1884.) There was a time when none of the baseball parks had lights. The Reds played the first-ever night game in 1935, but the Cubs didnt play their first home night game until 1988. White men were once the only players allowed to play. Jackie Robinson and Roberto Clemente and Ichiro Suzuki changed history, and during that time great players did amazing things that people still talk about to this day, just as things are happening now on the field that people will talk about far into the future.

So who gets to decide what players, games, and teams are the best of all time? You do. This is just a road map to get you started, to go back into history through the years before television, before there were teams in San Francisco or Los Angeles or Seattle, and to add those long-lost teams and feats and deeds to the amazing plays being made in baseball today. The great players of today, like Mike Trout or Justin Verlander or Clayton Kershaw, compared to the likes of Babe Ruth and Willie Mays and Hank Aaron.

In the end, whether in 1914 or 2014, the game always finishes in the same way, with a group of happy ballplayers being the only team in the league to win the last game of the season, pouring champagne over each others heads.

What matters is what the sport means to you. When I first started reading about baseball, Bob Gibson, Sandy Koufax, Willie Mays, and Jackie Robinson became my favorite players even though I had never seen any of them play in person. I went outside, played second base, and thought I was Robinson, dirt under my feet, ready to steal second and, if the ball got by, ready to get up and take thirdeven though he retired twelve years before I was even born. How is that possible? He was that good, and at the end of this journey, hopefully youll do what this book is intended for you to do: Make your own lists; learn about and imagine the people who built the game of baseball and the moments and players who are building it now. After 150 years, baseball is still a fantastic trip worth taking.