I don’t think anyone can beat Deion Sanders in this topic due to him playing for two different sports. Good luck finding another athlete that even comes close to that.
How can the main business of a league be selling players internally i.e. a zero-sum activity?
Bo Jackson was an All-Star in both baseball and football. Brian Jordan also played at a high level in both sports.
I don’t think that’s right. MLB doesn’t have “transfer fees.” Players can be traded for cash, but I don’t think that’s very common.
The reason successful teams break up their roster isn’t because the team receives money for trading away the players, it’s just to save on the salaries of those players. Reducing your payroll doesn’t actually earn you money. If your revenue remains constant, cutting costs increases profits, but I don’t think baseball teams actually generate revenue that way.
Bo only played for 4 total professional teams (Raiders in the NFL, Royals, White Sox, and Angels in the MLB). That’s less than half of Sanders. Sanders also had a career more than twice as long.
Brian Jordan is a better comparison but he still didn’t play for as many teams.
ETA: Sanders is also the only athlete to be in a Super Bowl and the World Series.
Ok, but your comment was:
I took “that” to mean “playing two different sports.” Bo Jackson and Brian Jordan not only come close to that, they match it.
But yes, Deion Sanders clearly has them beat in the number of teams played for. And while Brian Jordan played at a high level, he wasn’t an all-time great in either sport.
On the other hand, while Deion was clearly an all-time great at cornerback, he really wasn’t a particularly exceptional baseball player. He played on a World Series team, but that doesn’t make him an exceptional individual player.
Bo Jackson’s career was probably too short to count him as an all-time great, but in those few years at this peak, he was maybe the best running back in pro football and not only an All-Star in baseball but the All-Star game MVP in 1989.
Sanders did rack up the most MLB triples in ‘92, which, admittedly, indicates a specialized skillset.
4 guys played on 12 NBA teams but none were top notch players. Chucky Brown ,Joe Smith, Tony Massenburg and Jim Jackson Jackson averaged 14 points per game so he is the best of that group.
Gene Conley won championships in both pro baseball and basketball, appearing on eight teams total. He was a four-time baseball all-star.
Chuck Connors played pro baseball and basketball, plus he was a TV star!
Josh Lambo played in MLS and is a current NFL player. As far as I know, the only two sport athlete where soccer was one of them.
Five teams. He started his career in the WHA, with the Indianapolis Racers.
In the '60s and '70s, as soccer-style placekicking started to take hold in the NFL, a lot of the kickers were foreign-born, and came to the U.S. as teens or college students, having already been playing soccer before coming to the U.S. and taking up placekicking.
But, some of them, like Toni Fritsch and Garo Yepremian, had played soccer professionally in Europe; Fritsch, in particular, was an accomplished pro soccer player, and was on several Austrian championship teams before coming to the U.S. He is apparently the only player to win professional championships in both sports, as he was also on the Dallas Cowboys team which won Super Bowl VI.
Of the top players in baseball history by WAR, and the number of teams played for:
Rickey Henderson - 9
Babe Ruth - 3
Walter Johnson - 1
Cy Young - 5
Barry Bonds - 2
Willie Mays - 2
Ty Cobb - 2
Henry Aaron - 2
Roger Clemens - 4
Tris Speaker - 4
Honus Wagner - 2
Stan Musial - 1
Rogers Hornsby - 5
Eddie Collins - 2
TEd Williams - 1
G.C. Alexander - 3
A-Rod - 3
Kid Nichols - 3
Lou Gehrig - 1
Mel Ott - 1
Mickey Mantle - 1
Tom Seaver - 4
Nap Lajoie - 3
Frank Robinson - 5
Mike Schmidt - 1
Rickey is really in a class all his own.
Players by most teams played for:
Edwin Jackson - 14
Octavio Dotel - 13
Mike Morgan - 12
Matt Stairs - 12
Ron Villone - 12
Fernando Rodney - 11
Deacon McGuire - 11
Paul Bako - 11
Miguel Batista - 11
Henry Blanco - 11
Bruce Chen - 11
Royce Clayton - 11
Bartolo Colon - 11
LaTroy Hawkins - 11
Kenny Lofton - 11
Also 11- Terry Mulholland, Dennys Reyes, Julian Tavarez, Rick White, Todd Zeile. (I left out a few names who only played 19th century ball.)
There are too many guys with ten to bother listing them but as noted upthread, of all those guys only Kenny Lofton has anything resembling a Hall of Fame case.
Along with Rickey are dozens of players who played for 9 teams. Scores, really,
Definitely not the best player at his position, but speaking of placekickers, Ben Agajanian is worth a mention, given the number of teams for which he played, and the length of his career.
Over the course of a 20-year-long pro career, Agajanian played for nine different teams in three different leagues (the AAFC, the NFL, and the AFL). What’s even more interesting is that he didn’t even start playing pro football until age 26 (in 1945), and he had two multi-year stretches (1950-52, 1958-59) when he was out of the sport, before returning.
Not the best CFL QB ever, but Kevin Glenn has an unusual record: he’s the only player who has been with each of the nine teams of the CFL.
He’s joked that if the Atlantic Schooners ever set sail, he would want to have a one-day contract with them so that he can continue to hold the record of being with every CFL team.
Someone else mentioned Jim Thorpe, but I think it’s worth noting that in addition to the multiple pro football teams he played for (he won three championships), he also played for a major league baseball team and even won two gold medals in the Olympics.
Lionel Conacher played in multiple sports in the 1920’s and 1930’s. He was on a Stanley Cup (NHL hockey) team winning twice (two different teams); the Grey Cup (Canadian football) once; the Memorial Cup (junior hockey) once; was on a championship International League (baseball) team once. He also won wrestling, boxing, and lacrosse championships. He then spent some years in Canadian politics. He was voted Canada’s top athlete of the first half of the 20th century.
Zlatlan, Ronaldinho.
Shahid Afridi got to be there.
Excellent find!
Ref my earlier comment, playing in a large fraction of your league’s teams has to be worth extra specialness. You can’t beat playing ain all 100% of them.