Customer Reviews

The Sporting News Selects Baseball's Greatest Players: A Celebration of the 20th Century's Best (Sporting News Series)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

My favorite sports is baseball, so reviewing this book was an easy choice. As with all books that rank the best of all time, the listing are subjective, although this list is very close to my personal choices. Sporting News is a respected name and that adds credibility to the book.

Starting with Babe Ruth, as most baseball ranking do, right to number 100 Early Wynn, there are stories, photos and quotes that make this book one the best. I was impressed by the vast collection of pictures throughout the book.

The book has a top 100 timeline of players, the All Time top 10 selections lists, all decade teams, top100 breakdowns and a top 100 quiz included in the book as well. For every baseball fan and purest, this would make the prefect gift or collectors item.

A great addition to my library, a book that I will share with my children for years to come, Baseball's 100 Greatest Players needs only to add a video to make the set complete!

GREAT BOOK, GIVEN AS A GIFT AND HE LOVED IT. READS IT AVIDLY EVERYDAY. WIFE TOLD ME HE ABSOLUTELY LOVES IT. I AM SURE IT WILL BE LOVED BY THE AVID BASEBALLL FAN. MAKES A GREAT GIFT OR IF YOU ARE JUST BUYING IT FOR YOURSELF ENJOY EVERY PICTURE AND LINE YOU READ.

Baseball is my favorite sport, and I love debating the greatest players of all time just like everyone else. And The Sporting News does a solid job of ranking the players, and offering why. The pictures are a wonderful addition to the text. And while they overvalue players like Rogers Hornsby and Pete Rose and undervalue players like Lou Gehrig, Honus Wagner, and Stan Musial, the idea of the book like this is to provoke arguments. Foolishy, they did not separate pitchers and position players, and I wish they would have written a little bit more about each player, but overall this is a great book. One final note: For the most part I believe that baseball's greatest players came from the bygone days, but Cal Ripken's 78 ranking in this book is an absolute travesty. He is a top 30 player. Overall, a great book.

Like their pro football book, this book selects what The Sporting News' editors felt who were the greatest 100 baseball players of all time. And it's very difficult to argue too hard with their choices. Babe Ruth at #1 is in my opinion a no-brainer. Ruth really saved the game at a time when it desperately needed a hero and he forever changed the way the game was played with his towering home runs on the field and his "carousing" off it. The book also features a nicely written foreword by the #2 all-time best player, Willie Mays. How honored I am that I got to see him play in his prime some 30 plus years ago as a boy.

I like that the choices in this book are unaffected by race, scandal or personality. Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige, Buck Leonard, Cool Papa Bell, and Oscar Charleston of the Negro League made this list. It's truly sad that so many talented ballplayers were kept out of the majors because of their race. Joe Jackson, is another "Top 100 member" who of course was banned after the Black Sox scandal. Others like Ty Cobb, who was a notorious hothead in his day are also here.

Reading through the book brought many smiles to my face as I recalled watching so many players, like Harmon Killebrew, Kirby Puckett, Willie McCovey (my all-time favorite), Ernie Banks, and Hank Aaaron just to name a few.

So many excellent choices, this book is well-done and a great momento to all the athletes who have made baseball the game it is today.

As national sports publications go, The Sporting News tends towards the low-brow; this can be charted both with the increase in recent years of NASCAR-coverage and by the quality of the copy itself--certainly not in the same class as Sports Illustrated, which, for all its faults, boasts the cream of the crop in terms of sheer sports journalism.
Thankfully, the book is not marred too noticeably by the usual TSN writing style; namely terse, fumbling little capsules that adhere strictly to certain familiar narrative arcs. The same cannot be said for the opinions therein, which are often almost painfully wrong-minded or dependent on faulty logic. It becomes clear that this volume was meant more as a stately coffee table book than a Bill James-style journey into the jungle of stats and lore to determine the pecking order of the great game.
I am a maniacal fan, to put it kindly, and one that must analyze history for its own sake. This book is intended for a fan of a slightly lesser level of obsession, which is not to say that it cannot be recommended heartily for most.

This is the greatest book that I have ever read about baseball's greatest players-and I've read a lot. It has a page on each player with a full-page picture. It is filled with information and has players ranked in order. The only things that I didn't like was how Ty Cobb was number 3, not first and Dizzy Dean was all the way back at number 85. Buy this book, it's worth the money!

OK, so there will be controversy and debate over the rankings. For me, that is the stimulating part of this book. More importantly is the education one gets from learning about players and putting their accomplishments into perspective. Neat, well written and LOADED with stats, history and trivia, this is a book that will get a lot of reading, re-reading and reading again.

GET IT!

This was a very interesting baseball book. I love baseball and everything about it, so when I heard about this book, I really wanted it. I agree with Ruth and Mays as the top two. I also agree with basically everything else, except for three players: Barry Bonds should not be 34. I think he should be about #40. Carl Yastrzemski should be much higher than #72 or whatever he is. He had 450+ homers and 3000+ hits. He should be in the top 25. Eddie Murray should be higher, too. He has an MVP, and is one of only 3 players with both 500 homers and 3000 hits. But this is part of what makes this book fun: You can debate on the selections. The photos, quotes, and bios are wonderful. This is one of my favorite books.

Leave it to the Sporting News to publish a quality book that doesn't bore the reader with cooked statistics. I agree with alot of the picks, particularly the first two (Ruth and Mays) and of course there are ones I disagree with. Frank Frisch shold have been higher and so should some of the Negro Leauge players. But I love this book. It's the perfect coffee table book if you enjoy picking fights with other know-it-all baseball fans.