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Baseball's Greatest Players: 140 legends and one reimagined approach for ranking all-time greats originally appeared on The Sporting News. Add The Sporting News as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
It was Bill James who famously said: "When baseball wanted to speak, The Sporting News cleared its throat.” And from its 1886 founding until today, “The Bible of Baseball” has provided a voice to every contour of the game.
But for all the game’s beauty and familiarity and evolution and symmetry and chaos, let’s face it — it’s about the players. It’s always been about the players.
In 1999, The Sporting News published its critically-acclaimed book, Baseball’s 100 Greatest Players, a defining resource of its kind. And now, as it celebrates 140 years, the collection expands to 140 players, organized in an entirely new way.
We researched and considered over 500 names, weighing not only fundamental changes to the game, but also factoring in modern metrics, recently uncovered Negro Leagues data, shifting league demographics and the evolution of today's stars. We stripped away preconceptions and applied objective, critical analysis to every player under consideration.
SN140: Ranking the greatest 140 moments in sports history
Once we landed on 140 names, we decided that traditional rankings simply don't work for baseball. How is one to honestly assess if Cy Young — a pitcher whose career began in the 19th century — is greater than Albert Pujols, a 21st-century slugger? How do you compare Josh Gibson in the Negro Leagues to Jackie Robinson in the National League?
Comparison is the thief of joy with rankings that run the risk of diminishing rather than celebrating.
Instead, we created 14 position-less rooms, each representing and articulating varying archetypes of greatness. From there, we slotted 10 players into each room with careers connected by defining common threads.
Every week through the end of the World Series, we'll unveil one room at a time — 10 players along with the numbers that define them — culminating in the Inner Circle, the 10 greatest to ever play, period.
But wait, there's more!
SN ARCHIVE:Access every SN issue since 1886, for free
Want to read about how Cy Young's 36-win season was covered in the moment in 1892? We've got you covered. Every week, we'll also republish stories exactly as they originally ran in print issues of The Sporting News, with every issue since 1886 now fully digitized and accessible for free via the online SN Archive.
Our “rooms” serve not only to honor the game’s greatest players, but to contextualize their standing in baseball history — for better or worse. Below is a short description of each room along with one player from each to whet your appetite.
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SN
Baseball's Greatest Players: The 14 rooms
Immortals
They shattered barriers. They broke records. They captivated nations. They inspired millions. Their imprint endures.
Membership includes: Jackie Robinson
MORE:Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier is SN's No. 1 sports moment
Artists
They rendered baseball an art form. We swung like them, fielded like them, pitched like them and ran like them. Few matched their production; none matched their signature style.
Membership includes: Tony Gwynn
Unicorns
They broke the mold by redefining excellence. The rare legends for whom comparison is impossible. What made them different made them great.
Membership includes: Mariano Rivera
Juggernauts
They delivered season after season, authoring some of the game’s most storied chapters. Their prolonged excellence sets them apart.
Membership includes: Oscar Charleston
Supernovas
They reached the game’s highest level, if only briefly. Their greatness is defined by an extraordinary peak.
Membership includes: Sandy Koufax
SN Archives (1964):Why Koufax's historic no-hitter locks up spot in Cooperstown
Unsung
They are among the greatest players ever, though they aren’t remembered that way, if remembered at all. Overshadowed and underappreciated, history has dimmed their brilliance.
Membership includes: Lefty Grove
Showmen
They commanded the stage. Through bravado and spectacle, they performed when the stakes were highest.
Membership includes: Rickey Henderson
What-ifs
They were shaped by circumstance. Legendary careers whose legacies hinge on an overriding factor.
Membership includes: Mickey Mantle
SN Archives (1963):Mickey Mantle picks his favorite Yankee team ever
Pioneers
They went first. By reimagining who could play and how to play, they built the foundation for those who followed.
Membership includes: Juan Marichal
Prodigies
They captured our imagination from the moment we first saw them. They are best remembered for their youthful emergence and the dreams their talents inspired.
Membership includes: Bob Feller
Stalwarts
They made excellence routine. Careers defined not by peaks, but by the steadiness and certainty they embodied.
Membership includes: Justin Verlander
Beloved
They proved that if you embrace the fans, their love lasts forever. Their greatness was forged through that bond.
Membership includes: Ernie Banks
Pariahs
They cheated. They lied. They discriminated. Baseball has exiled them for defiling the game’s integrity, yet its record would be incomplete without them.
Membership includes: Mark McGwire
Inner Circle
They are the greatest baseball players who ever lived.
Membership includes: Willie Mays
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Our process for picking Baseball's Greatest Players
There have been dozens of credible attempts to rank the greatest baseball players of all time.
Respectfully, we think all of them ignore a simple truth: Baseball has simply undergone too many iterations to fairly and objectively execute that exercise.
Consider these changes that have radically reshaped the sport:
From 1871 to 1892, the mound varied in distance before moving back to 60 feet, 6 inches, in 1893, where it remains.
The mound was lowered from 15 to 10 inches for the 1969 season after the “year of the pitcher.”
Until 1950, the strike zone went from the top of the batter's shoulders to the knees. It has since been modified six times.
Field conditions and equipment have improved dramatically. In 1886, the average game included 7.6 errors. In 2026, that number is 1.04.
The starting pitcher has been compromised as reliever usage has exploded. There were a total of 29 complete games pitched in 2025. Nineteenth-century pitchers would often complete that many individually in a single season.
Modern metrics have transformed the way we evaluate players. For most of baseball history, hitters strived to lead their league in batting average and pitchers in wins. We now know those stats are fairly meaningless measures of one’s contribution to their team.
Most importantly, baseball’s demographics have changed. For the first three-quarters of a century, the National and American Leagues were almost exclusively composed of white players. The year Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier (1947), 98.3% of the league was white. That figure now hovers around 60% amidst baseball’s international boom.
Further, projects like this have been created by baseball historians, not researchers. Thus, until now, the top such lists and the players that comprise them have practically been carbon copies of one another with minor updates as time has passed.
What we discovered is that, especially in baseball’s early days, a handful of writers wielded disproportionate power and influence in framing player reputations. And those framings have been largely unchecked by those who subsequently chronicled baseball history. We challenged ourselves to take a fresh look at every player under consideration, stripping away preconceptions and applying objective, critical analysis.
In all, how many players did you consider?
We researched, at least cursorily, more than 500 players.
Which statistics carried the most weight in your evaluations?
Wins Above Replacement (WAR) is the most important stat in baseball today, though our position on that metric is that it is most effective as a conversation starter (rather than a conversation-ending trump card). It is a highly reliable way to approximate the total value a player produced over an extended period of time and takes into account every way in which a player can impact a game (hitting, fielding, baserunning, pitching, etc.). Baseball Reference’s career leaderboard was the first place we visited when creating our player pool.
Baseball Reference’s OPS+ is a player’s adjusted batting line for which 100 is average (150 is great, 50 is awful, etc.). It is an especially useful metric because it accounts not only for scoring environments of a particular season/span of seasons, but for ballparks as well. And so, it provides the best way to compare hitting performance across eras. For example, Jimmie Foxx (played 1925-1945) and Mark McGwire (played 1986-2001) both produced a career OPS+ of 163.
Baseball Reference’s ERA+ is a pitcher’s adjusted pitching line for which 100 is average (125 is good, 75 is bad, etc.). Like OPS+, it accounts for scoring environments and ballparks, providing the best way to compare a pitcher’s run prevention across eras. For example, Grover Cleveland Alexander (pitched 1911-1930) and Randy Johnson (pitched 1988-2009) both produced a career ERA+ of 135.
Though modern metrics were an invaluable resource for us, we relied on more traditional and rudimentary standards as well. One of those was MVP voting, which has been the responsibility of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America since 1931. Those results provide an illuminating snapshot of player perception at the time they played. For example, in the seven seasons spanning 1950-1956, Yogi Berra finished in the top four of American League MVP voting in every one of them (3 wins, 2 runner-ups, 1 third, 1 fourth). This is a good illustration of his perception amidst a stretch of dominant Yankee baseball.
Certain conventional stats, like batting average and RBI and pitcher wins, have become popular punching bags as the baseball intelligentsia continues to get smarter. But in reality, sabermetrics are a new phenomenon. For the first 130-some years of baseball history (during which the vast majority of players in our collection played), player evaluations were made using traditional box-score, back-of-the-baseball-card stats. And as such, we elected not to discount achievements now considered outdated because of breakthroughs in math and data interpretation in the interest of fairness to those players.
What about Negro Leagues players?
In December 2020, Major League Baseball “corrected a longstanding oversight by officially elevating the Negro Leagues to 'Major League' status.” Functionally, the accomplishments of about 3,400 Black players in seven leagues spanning 1920-1948 were put on equal footing to their white counterparts in the American/National League. Though we did not need affirmation from the Commissioner’s Office to affirm the legitimacy of the Negro Leagues, it is our position, backed by data, that the quality of competition in Black baseball was comparable — and certainly not worse — than that in white baseball.
According to Robert Peterson’s 1970 book Only the Ball Was White, Black teams went 315-282-20 in exhibitions against white MLB teams during the first half of the 20th century. Over that same period of time, white MLB teams won 71 percent of exhibitions vs. white minor league teams, which underscores the chasm in quality between the minor leagues and the Negro Leagues. When playing white major leaguers head-to-head, Black teams won 53 percent of decisions.
Jackie Robinson, who broke the color barrier in 1947, was by no means considered the greatest player in Black baseball at that time. And yet, he won NL Rookie of the Year in 1947 and MVP in 1949. In fact, from 1949-1962, 11 of 14 NL MVPs were Black players (Robinson, Roy Campanella 3x, Willie Mays, Don Newcombe, Henry Aaron, Ernie Banks 2x, Frank Robinson, Maury Wills). If the best Black players could dominate white baseball, it only stands to reason that good ones and average ones would have experienced production comparable to their Negro Leagues’ performance.
The greatest challenge is the fact that Negro Leagues statistical data is incomplete, and very likely always will be. Thanks to painstaking research by Seamheads (Negro Leagues database) and Baseball Reference, which displays their data, we have more readily available statistics than ever with which to evaluate Negro Leagues players. And though the lack of historical record-keeping will not allow apples-to-apples counting stat comparisons to white players, enough information exists to effectively use rate stats and per 162 game stats to paint the picture of a player’s standing in the Negro Leagues.
And what about active players? Are they included?
Yes. Baseball historians who have attempted similar projects have disproportionately focused on long-past eras when celebrating baseball’s greats. We took care to ensure that players of all eras were represented, including active players and those who are top of mind for current baseball fans. Many players we are watching today on our televisions and devices have already earned their place among nostalgic legends, and we have done them justice.
We have included a number of players who could retire today and still deserve a place in our collection. A few more boast strong bodies of work in/through their twenties, and with conservative projections of performance through their mid-thirties, we are exceedingly confident they will eventually be deserving. We are also monitoring a small “watch list” of players who project as strong candidates and could be added to this collection over time.
What inspired this project?
Our many visits to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown revealed both its magic and its shortcomings. One cannot possibly peruse the plaque gallery — baseball’s holy of holies, where its deities are immortalized — without being moved. It is a place every fan should visit to soak in the incomparable history of a game considered our national pastime for more than a century-and-a-half.
The Hall of Fame’s stated mission is “to preserve the sport's history, honor excellence within the game and make a connection between the generations of people who enjoy baseball.” But even its most ardent supporters must acknowledge it has fallen short, especially of late.
In recent years, the election process — a democratic one that has been practiced since 1936 — has shut out arguably the greatest position player (Barry Bonds) and pitcher (Roger Clemens) of the last 100 years because of their connections to performance-enhancing drugs. Meanwhile, various committees have lowered the Hall of Fame standard considerably, electing players such as Harold Baines and Jack Morris, among a number of objectively lesser players in relation to many still excluded. The result is an institution annually under siege.
We made it our devout mission to get right what the Hall of Fame does not and perhaps cannot. Our 140-player collection means we feature baseball’s veritable cream of the crop (by comparison, the Hall of Fame includes more than 270 players).
This sounds awesome. Are you going to make it a book?
Definitely. Stay tuned.
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