FWIW, I finally laid this question to rest when I found this page at baseball-almanac.com: A Ballplayers Life by Sports Illustrated : A Legendary List on Baseball Almanac
According to them, it was a list from a July 1981 Sports Illustrated. Given that I only ever looked at February issues of Sports Illustrated (ahem), I doubtless saw it re-posted somewhere.
I’m confident that it is the list I was thinking of back in 2014 when I posted the OP, even though “rookie” isn’t on the list. In fact, that’s probably why I never Googled it up before, as I certainly included that in my search terms. I have no idea who I was going to pass it along to back then, but at least I found it. This is almost as good as that time I got to ask Brad Dourif what the deal was with the gesturing in Dune.