That’s cool, @Southern_Yankee . I voted “YES” (obviously) and I’d enjoy having a few discussions here–we’ve got a lot of points to make on both sides. I have no problem with Rivera’s greatness (I did propose him to go to #20 after all, not to #37 and perhaps to further oblivion from there) just with his having reached his current spot because of a flaw in this voting, which demands that some player at the position of reliever MUST get voted into a dominant placement in the pantheon, which I don’t believe is true. Relievers are inherently limited in their impact on games–they don’t pitch a lot of innings, and they (like other players) sometimes have bad games, which further limits their impact.
And as I say, no one on this list so far has much of a complaint about suffering an insult–they’re all being ranked among the greatest of all time. So it’s a matter of which potential flaws can be found in their games, and I think innings pitched is a flaw in Rivera’s game, no fault of his, but still…
I actually tried to post a poll to move Rivera and Hoffman to the bottom of the list, but couldn’t figure out how to make it public via my mobile browser. Rivera was the most dominant closer of all time, but he’s simply not nearly as valuable or impactful as anyone else on the list (aside from Hoffman).
Let’s do this one step at a time, OK, @Munch? When my poll about moving Rivera to #20 is over, and if it succeeds, then bring up a motion to move him to #36. That way, we won’t be voting simultaneously on where to move him, and risking both of them failing because people are divided on where he should be placed. The result might well be: he should stay where he is because the “move him” is divided.
OK, I guess we’re done with that round of voting to place players differently. Here’s the new ranking, with Musial and Walter Johnson at #9 and #10, and Yaz at #37, while Mariano stays where he was: