ESPN Top 100

[BobC]

Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth

It's a consistent position, but I guess my thought is you need to be flexible and when you have someone where it's pretty clear your assessment won't change much, it's fine to rank them. Pujols, Miggy, Verlander I would certainly put in that category. And I really have no issue ranking ANYONE based on performance to date, worst case you reassess later.

Of course, but the thing is, do you really want to have an all-time list where you have current players you have to reassess and move around every year based on how their last season was? It is bad enough when you have to move people around when someone finally retires and comes onto the list for the first time ever.

And besides, with this crazy world we have today, you never know what's going to happen. So can you really just go and make your judgements of someone as it appears they're nearing the end of their career, sure, if you want to. As in the case of Pujols, I doubt anything detrimental to him or his career will come out at this point, and till he retires. But what if it suddenly was discovered that he'd been using corked bats throughout his career, or maybe he gets caught failing a drug test for PEDs. Or how about an informant comes forward with the evidence and revelation that during his time with the Cardinals, that team was involved in a cheating scheme/scandal on a par with what Altuve and the Astros had been doing, and Pujols was directly involved and taking full advantage of it for years. I honestly don't believe any of that would ever happen, but you never know 100% for sure. I figure if a player is getting that close to finally retiring, why be chomping at the bit to hurry up and judge/grade him? If he's that close, let him finish his career, and then do the assessment and ranking. Just makes the most sense to me.