Step one. Pick a city (or a metropolitan area, like the Bay Area in California).
Step two. Pick who you think are the three best living athletes that played for that city’s teams.
There are only two rules. Besides the one that your three choices must be currently living; your three athletes must represent three different sports (you can’t have both Yogi Berra and Tom Seaver, for example.)
Though it’s not a hard and fast rule, I’d also suggest that your athletes should have had their best years while representing your chosen city. If you want to suggest Wayne Gretzky for Los Angeles; I won’t say you’re wrong, but really, his best years were with Edmonton.
I’ll start off by nominating a trio from Boston. Bobby Orr, Carl Yastrzemski and Larry Bird.
Have at it, Dopers. Which city do you think is best?
Abdul-Jabbar only played five seasons for the Bucks, but they’ve never really had a HoF-caliber player who played most of his career there.
Starr, of course, played for the Packers, but the Pack played roughly half of their home games in Milwaukee throughout his career. (I might have said Brett Favre, but the Packers stopped playing in Milwaukee early in Favre’s career.)
Shouldn’t this be people that came from your city and not people that your city hired to play for their team? Otherwise big markets will always win this one.
I’ll give you The Basketball Jesus over Russell (barely), but does Yaz clearly beat in-his-prime Pedro, Big “the greatest clutch hitter in the history of the Red Sox” Papi or others? I suspect The Metrosexual (you know, married to Giselle?) might be less controversial.
(And, besides, isn’t Ted Williams just, um, ‘animationally suspended’, not actually dead? He should count! )
Well, Yaz did have twenty-three seasons, compared to Pedro’s seven, and Papi’s seven and counting. He also has a Triple Crown, an MVP, a 1560 OPS in the last ten games of the 1967 season, and a .352 average in two World Series. Pedro’s seven season run was pretty sick, but I still like Yaz’s longevity.
