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Posted By: Joann

This list is really fascinating to me. It is perfect evidence of how fans are biased by players they personally recall. Actually, bias is not even strong enough - more like domination. The list is overwhelmingly players that played during the time of the survey or likely within the voters' lifetimes.

Look at the vintage (defined loosely - no real date) names. Only five were voted in by fans:

Ruth
Gehrig
Cobb
Cy Young
Walter Johnson

These were huge, huge names. Not just for their time but for all-time, which is probably why people knew to list them.

The vintage players that got >100K votes but not enough to make the team:

Matty
Grover C Alex
Wagner

Again, very big names and probably included by name recognition only.

So although interesting, the result is meaningless in terms of any measure of best of all time, etc. It is far more sensitive to the timing of the survey (and who is alive and for what time periods) than any objective measure of greatness.

So 100 years from now, in 2099, who makes the list? Probably the same 8 vintage guys, give or take. But who else? Who will have the huge name recognition then? My guess:

DiMag
Mays
Williams
Mantle
Ryan
Clemens
Maybe Bonds

But I think that in 2099 no one will even know who the heck Mike Schmidt and Bob Gibson even were, despite their designation as "All 20th Century". They will be the Crawfords and Chesbros of their day, and the list will be again dominated by players from about 2040 and forward.

Joann