You probably know Jayson Stark from his writing at ESPN.com or his frequent appearances on Baseball Tonight. Recently he found time to write a book, The Stark Truth: The Most Overrated and Underrated Players in Baseball History
Last Friday morning Jayson took the time to talk to me about the book and a few other issues. Enjoy...
BrokenCowboy:
Thanks for taking the time to do this. I know you must be pretty busy since we’re smack in the middle of baseball season.
Jayson Stark:
You know, there’s no time in baseball where you can kick back and say, “I think I’ll go to the beach for about four days,” unless you carve that time out. That’s all I do is juggle. I should join the circus.
BC:
What about during the off-season? How much does it slow down for you then?
JS:
In a typical off-season? Not a whole lot. Right after the World Series, and that week between Christmas and New Year’s, and generally right before Spring Training it’s not too crazy.
BC:
One thing I like to ask, especially of reporters, is that I assume you got into this gig because of a love of baseball?
JS:
Sure.
BC:
So I’m wondering, how has being a journalist, especially since you covered the Phillies for a while real closely, being that close to the game and the players, how does that affect your ability to relax and just be a fan?
JS:
Well, it changes it a little bit. I’m not a fan of any team. My family hates going to games with me. I love being there, but I don’t root for anybody, and that frustrates them.
BC:
Is that something that’s changed as a result of your job?
JS:
Yeah, sure. I think that’s a natural part of being a professional. You can’t root. But I’m a human being, and there are certain people, certain players, certain teams I like being around more than others. But I basically root for the best stories, I don’t root for any team. One thing you learn when you cover baseball is that every game you attend, there’s a winner, there’s a loser, there’s a hero, and there’s probably a goat. So they’re all a big part of the story, so you root for the story. You don’t root for any team. So that part has certainly changed the way I’m a fan, but I also think baseball is one of those games where the more you invest in it, the better it gets. The more you understand, the more you see. The more you put in, the more you get back. There are just so many levels to the game. I think I love the game as much as I ever have, if not more. I’m probably a different kind of fan of baseball than your average fan, but that doesn’t mean I’m not a fan of it. One of the things that I consider to be the greatest compliment that people in the sport give me is when they tell me they can see by the things I write or say on the air how much I care about the sport. And that means a lot to me, because that’s true. I really do come at it with a lot of passion for the sport.
BC:
One reason I ask that is because I would agree that from seeing you on ESPN and reading your work, that love definitely comes across. But there are reporters or on-air personalities where there’s a cynicism that you can taste, and I wonder sometimes if that comes from being too close. It’s easy for me to be a fan of the Yankees, for instance, because I’ve never been in their clubhouse and I may not know everything that goes on. And so I wonder sometimes -- if you’re up close and personal do you lose something?
JS:
That can happen. Everybody’s different. You start with that -- people are different, and everybody’s got a different way of coming at it and a different perspective, which is what makes it great. And I think that depending on where you work, what the reportorial culture is where you work, that can color the way you look at things, too. There’s a much different mentality covering baseball in New York than there is covering baseball in, say, St. Louis, Milwaukee, San Diego, right? And so I think that can have a lot to do with it, too. I know that Philadelphia is one of those cynical kinds of places, too, but what you see and what you read from me, it’s just a reflection of me. Sometimes people ask me if I really do come from Philadelphia. I’m a much more positive personality, I think, than you’ll find walking the streets of this town.
BC:
Now on to this book. When I first heard what you were doing with this book, it intrigued me because I think every fan has had this conversation at some point. When did it start for you? When did you get the idea to turn it into a book, and what was the process? Did this all come off the top of your head, did you speak to other people about it? How did that go?
JS:
I’ve been aspiring to write a book for a long time, but I could never find the right match of idea and publisher. I talked to different agents and different publishers with different ideas, but it never happened. The people at Triumph Books are fans of mine, and they actually approached me with this. I got a call last summer from a guy at Triumph Books who said, “We came up with this idea and think you’d be the perfect person in America to write it.” I didn’t think about it very long before I said, you know, you might be right. I think this is really right up my alley. I would love to do this book. The more we talked it over, the more excited we all got. It came together really quickly, for the most part. I would say I didn’t agree to write the book until some time late last July, and the fact that it’s out this spring is a miracle. I got three chapters done during the season last year, and then when the World Series ended I worked seven days a week until spring training to get it done, because that was the only way to do it. But it was such a fun project that it kept me going. Plus, there wasn’t time for writer’s block... The idea itself, overrated/underrated, is really fun. As you said, it’s one of those classic sports arguments, and we’ve all found ourselves in the middle of it on a talk radio dial or sitting on a barstool. It’s amazing that nobody ever wrote a book on it. Actually after I finished mine, Triumph approached me and said, “How’d you like to write a football version of it?” There’s no way I could possibly do that. So there’s actually a football version of it coming out in a week or two written mostly by Sal Paolantonio of ESPN. We all stumbled onto something here. It’s incredible that nobody ever did it before.
BC:
So were there people that you spoke to about this, or did you have a lot of these rankings already in your head?
JS:
Well, some of ‘em. I always say these selections were nominated by a distinguished committee consisting of me. Because it really did come down to me, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t talk to a million people about all different aspects of this book. Certain chapters, certain passages, certain names came much easier than other names. I really struggled with some of these choices. I spent a lot of time talking to people about some of them. I describe in the book how difficult center field was for me. Center field, I kicked around for weeks. Weeks! I couldn’t find any great center fielder from the past who I considered to be drastically overrated to the point where I could put him number one in the chapter. If we’re calling somebody the most overrated player in history at his position, I didn’t think it was right to put Juan Pierre or Mickey Rivers at a position like center field, so I really spent a lot of time on that chapter. I remember going around the winter meetings asking everybody I ran into about center field. I spent a lot of time actually listening to people talking about Joe DiMaggio. This is a different kind of argument than he’s great, no he stinks. This is really a relative term, overrated/underrated. It’s about perception vs. reality. Myth vs. reality. There were people arguing that there were a lot of myths that evolved around Joe DiMaggio that we know about now that we didn’t know about then. If it was a myth vs. reality book, why not him? But I just couldn’t bring myself to go there. I couldn’t bring myself to call Kirby Puckett the most overrated in history. So it really took me a long time before I settled on Andruw Jones. I tell people all the time that if I were doing this book differently and it was the fifty most overrated players in history, I don’t think Andruw would be in there. But because it was position by position, it’s a little different concept. So those are the kinds of debates, those are the kinds of challenges that I ran across as I went about writing the book. Every position and every name had its own set of complications, criteria, and differing needs to interview a lot of people or do the research than others.
BC:
I think for me the underrated side of the chapters tended to be more interesting. Sometimes confirming things that I believed, but other times there were some names that really surprized me. There were a few guys that I wanted to talk to you about. First of all, how can Babe Ruth -- the Bambino, the Sultan of Swat -- how can he possibly be underrated?
JS:
(Laughing) Well, obviously he wasn’t underrated as a hitter, but do you really think that many people are walking around with a working knowledge of just how dominating a pitcher Babe Ruth was?
BC:
I’d have to say no. I consider myself a big fan, a Babe Ruth fan, but there were some things that you pointed out in that section that -- you really have to say, wow! Thinking about Babe Ruth, it’s interesting to think about, what if he had never picked up a bat? How would history view him today?
JS:
Right. Exactly! It’s very possible we’d be looking at him as the greatest left-handed pitcher ever. Very possible! This was so much fun to do this chapter. This was one of the really fun chapters in the book, because I learned a lot myself. I didn’t know that those six seasons that Babe Ruth pitched he had the highest winning percentage of every left-handed pitcher. I didn’t know that! And when I started stacking him up against Walter Johnson...
BC:
That was amazing to me.
JS:
I realized that in his two full seasons as a pitcher, Babe Ruth was better than Walter Johnson! That blew my mind! Walter Johnson’s the greatest pitcher that ever lived, probably, right? And then the fact that they faced each other seven times and Babe won six and would’ve won the seventh, right, if he hadn’t blown that lead in the ninth inning? Unbelievable. The World Series dominance? Incredible. Again, this is about perception vs. reality. If all this was going on, and people haven’t noticed it, then that’s the definition of underrated or overrated for me, and that’s the way I went about the book. The other thing that was really important to me is that every name who was number one in a chapter, underrated or overrated, my criteria was it can’t be somebody that the reader will say, “who the heck is that?” Nobody cares if Hippo Vaughn was underrated or overrated, but Babe Ruth? That can get your attention. It’s a book written with the idea that people are supposed to react to it. That doesn’t mean I threw names out there for effect, it means I wanted this to stimulate debate. I wanted people to read this book and think. I want them to bring it to their next session with their buddies sittin’ around watching a game and say what about this guy? Can this guy really be underrated, or can this guy really be overrated? I wanted to make them think and debate and laugh. A lot of people think I wrote it to make people mad. That really was never the intent. It was really to make you think.
BC:
And what about Bert Blyleven? Recently, in the last -- I don’t know, it feels like the last three or four years -- it’s become kind of popular to champion his cause for the Hall of Fame.
JS:
Right.
BC:
Do you think he’s ever gonna get into the Hall of Fame?
JS:
I think he’s heading in that direction now, I’m not sure. I don’t think it’s a slam dunk, yet. There was a time I thought he’d never make it. I admit, he’s one of the hardest candidates ever to appear on a Hall of Fame ballot for me. I have spent more time agonizing over Bert Blyleven than any pitcher who’s ever been on the ballot. But deciding whether he’s a Hall of Famer is a different process than deciding whether he’s underrated or overrated. He shares a lot of the same characteristics as Nolan Ryan, the stuff that caused me to say that Nolan Ryan was overrated, a lot of that applies to Bert Blyleven. I understand that. Two all-star teams in 23 years, right? Never won a Cy Young, finished in the top three only two times. Didn’t have a real good winning percentage compared to his teams. Those are the things that stopped me from voting for Bert Blyleven for a long time. I finally did come around to the point where I got nudged over the edge by people that I respect. But here’s the difference between Bert Blyleven and Nolan Ryan for the purposes of this book. You have a lot of people walking around who think Nolan Ryan’s the greatest pitcher who ever lived. If he were the greatest pitcher who ever lived, you have to think he’d have won one Cy Young Award, right? Or he would’ve finished in the top three more times than Dan Quisenberry, or his winning percentage would’ve been more than twenty-seven points higher than his team. And so I recognize how great Nolan Ryan was, I only jump off the train when people start calling him the greatest pitcher of modern times. But in Bert Blyleven’s case, you know, those 287 wins, if you look closely at them, could very easily have translated into well over three hundred. And the fact that he was thirty-seven games over .500, it very easily could’ve been a better record with better run support. Bill James has documented this exhaustively. So because of just a slight difference in the numbers, Bert Blyleven is not in the Hall of Fame. Even though if you look at that division play era, look at shutouts and strikeouts, it’s basically Nolan Ryan and Bert Blyleven. Their numbers are so similar, and yet one guy is regarded as the greatest pitcher of his time and the other guy’s not even in the Hall of Fame? That’s where the overrated/underrated disparity comes from.
BC:
This is hardly scientific, this whole process. One of the guys who violates all the rules of the overrated/underrated paradigm, I guess we can call it, is Derek Jeter.
JS:
Absolutely.
BC:
He’s the ultimate glamour boy, playing shortstop in New York for teams that have been winning, and yet you’ve got him on the underrated side of the coin. At the same time you could find dozens of guys who could talk for hours about how overrated he is. How is it possible that he could be seen in both lights?
JS:
(Laughing) Yeah, good question. Derek Jeter was the reason to write a book like this. When I first started researching the book, trying to come up with definitions and examples, I Googled “overrated” and “baseball”, and Derek Jeter came up right away. And then I Googled “underrated” and “baseball”, and Derek Jeter came up right away. And the more I thought about it, the more I talked to people, it really became clear he was the classic case because you’ve got people out there saying he’s so overrated he’s underrated, so underrated he’s overrated. It’s hilarious, because he’s that kind of figure. In some ways his numbers are spectacular. In other ways, there are people who just look at numbers who think he’s not that good. But the reason that I called him underrated was I just feel like there are certain players, in this sport and every sport, whose numbers can’t tell you what they are, and Derek Jeter is one of those players. The argument that drives me crazy is when people say if Derek Jeter was a Royal, you wouldn’t even know his name. That, to me, is the most irrelevant argument in the history of mankind. Because he’s not just a guy who happened to pass through the Yankees while they were winning rings. He wasn’t mopping up the clubhouse until they gave him a World Series ring just because he was hanging around. He was a major difference maker. He was the heart of the Yankees. You know, I’ve done a lot of appearances for this book in the New York area, and when I ask people how many rings they think those Yankees would have if Derek Jeter had never been a member of that team, they say, I don’t really know -- one? Nobody says all of them. This little section of the book was a response, basically, to all those people who think he’s overrated, who think he’s just a great player because he was a Yankee. For me, guys who love the moment, and have that feel for how to rise to the moment... You have to be a Yankee to get to that moment, I acknowledge that, but I don’t know how you can deny the fact that this guy loves the moment.
BC:
I agree. He’s been my favorite player, probably since the day he was drafted. I’ve followed him that long, so when I picked up the book, the first thing I did was turn to the shortstop section, and I expected to find him on the other side. I was already getting angry before I even found him...
JS:
Yeah, he was one of those people that a lot of people have asked me about. Originally he was gonna be the most underrated, but then last year it looked like he was gonna win the MVP award as I was working on that chapter, and thought I better not put him number one if he wins the MVP, so I couldn’t take that chance.
BC:
Well, you could’ve bumped him up as it turned out.
JS:
Easily.
BC:
I have some numbers for you. You have sixty overrated players, and twenty of them were Yankees. And then of your number ones, twelve number one overrated, and half of them -- six -- were Yankees. Can you explain yourself to me please?
JS:
(Laughter)
BC:
Is there an axe you have to grind?
JS:
No. I can’t remember which chapter it was that I went into this. It might’ve been the Graig Nettles chapter?
BC:
Yeah, it was.
JS:
When you’re looking for overrated, the Yankees just have more opportunities for overratedness than any other team! Think about all the different ways you can get to be overrated. One of the classic ways is one swing, one game, one week, one stretch in October can vastly inflate the national perception of what a guy is, right? That goes for any team, but the Yankees show up in October every year. And because of that, I think quite a lot of their players are just lucky. They get this opportunity to seize that moment and become far greater figures than they probably otherwise would be. Now I know I just used a similar argument to explain why Derek Jeter’s underrated, but being in the spotlight the way they are, it’s almost like the Yankees are in color and everybody else is in black and white. It just creates those unparalleled opportunities for overratedness. When everything was equal, it was often hard not to pick a Yankee.
BC:
I think I agree with you, I just thought I’d give you a chance to say it out loud.
JS:
I’m glad you did. But you know, the fact that Yogi Berra is probably the most well-known living ex-Yankee could be considered underrated. That tells you I don’t have any axe to grind. The fact that Derek Jeter is in there tells you that I don’t have any axe to grind. Certain players, just because they were Yankees, are regarded by the world as superstars, when that’s probably not what they were.
BC:
One guy I wanted to talk to you about also is Steve Garvey. I grew up out here in LA, and watched him as a player, you hear a lot out here about how great he was, and isn’t it a crime that he’s not in the Hall of Fame. What’s your response to that?
JS:
Well, the fact that he’s gone through fifteen years on the ballot, and the voters never saw it, he never got close, would tell me that the general public agrees with me. Look, Steve Garvey was a real good player, and just because he’s in this book as overrated doesn’t mean I don’t think he was a real good player. But the reason that he obtained this lofty status as most overrated first baseman is that somehow, and in great part because he was a Dodger, he really became the face of the sport. He was a guy who started the all-star game every year, he was the guy who was yucking it up on the Tonight Show every time you turned it on. He was the first player in history to attract four million all-star votes. Was he a good player? Yeah, he was. He was a real good player. Steve Garvey, in a lot of ways, was a reflection of his times. Back in the seventies, the early eighties, the stuff people looked at was batting average, home runs, RBIs, fielding percentage. Very basic kinds of stats. Nowadays we live in a much more sophisticated age where you look beyond those stats. And when you look beyond those stats, it’s clear that Steve Garvey wasn’t the player that people perceived him to be. If he was a feared slugger, he probably would’ve slugged .500 in a season once, right? Once. If he was really a complete offensive player, he would’ve averaged more than twenty-nine walks a year, right? Out of six 200-hit seasons, he would’ve scored a hundred runs once, right? He’s the only player in history to have more than two 200-hit seasons and not score a hundred runs in any of them. And the fielding percentage? Hey, it’s great that he won those Gold Gloves. It’s great that he owns that record for the longest errorless streak by a first baseman, but anybody from that era will tell you that the reason he never made an error is that he would not throw the ball. And so this is stuff that didn’t always show up on the stat sheet at the time. Now we can look back at it with more perspective and understand what the limitations of the player were. In this book, at times, I guess I play reality police. And again, it doesn’t mean I think Steve Garvey was some kind of bum who never should’ve played a day in the big leagues. He was a really good player, but the fact that he became the face of the sport, that’s where perception and reality, to me, diverge.
BC:
Who do you think needs to be in the Hall of Fame? I know this isn’t necessarily an overrated/underrated thing, but you mentioned in a few chapters some of the guys -- Blyleven and Gossage -- are there other guys on your radar?
JS:
I think Gossage is gonna get in. The guy I worry about is Ron Santo. I think of all the players who are not in the Hall of Fame, and who may never get in the Hall of Fame, he is the most deserving. I think that Ron Santo is not in the Hall of Fame basically for one reason. Because people say, well how can you have four Hall of Famers from a team like the Cubs that never won anything? I don’t know. There’s no quota, there’s no government quota on Hall of Famers from one team. I guess there’s quotas on pimento imports or something, but not on Hall of Famers from one team! And it’s not Ron Santo's fault that he happened to play with Ernie Banks and Billy Williams and Ferguson Jenkins. And the thing that’s revealing to me is, who was the guy who hit cleanup on those teams that had Banks and Williams on them? It wasn’t Banks, it wasn’t Williams, it was Ron Santo, year after year after year. That should tell us all something. And then if you really look at Ron Santo and compare him to his peers -- I don’t want to compare him to A-Rod or Mike Schmidt or Brooks Robinson -- compare him to his peers in that league. It’s obvious he was the greatest offensive and defensive third baseman in the National League in his time, without anybody really being close. So I guess I just don’t understand this. And Ron Santo has been through so much, personally. He went through so much as a baseball player. It just really pains me that this is a guy who should be in the Hall of Fame, and I would really love to see him get elected while he’s alive. All that he’s been through, if he ever gets to that podium, that’ll be a special moment. I’m not talking about a baseball moment, I’m talking about a human moment. That turned out to be a really emotional chapter. I didn’t think of myself as a guy who had a big emotional investment in Ron Santo, but I just think that’s a huge injustice that I don’t understand.
BC:
I did appreciate that chapter because he was not a guy that I really knew a lot about, except you would hear his name mentioned as a guy who should be in the Hall, so I appreciated that chapter. I guess the last thing I’ve got for you then is that as we sit here on August 17th, how do you see the rest of the year shaking out? Who are your playoff teams and who do you see winning the World Series?
JS:
Well, a lot has changed over the last couple of weeks, don’t you think?
BC:
Yeah, in both leagues.
JS:
Tim Kurkjian said the other night that it’s the first year in history where we got to the 15th of August and all six divisions and the wild card races were within five games. So it really is a free-for-all. I was among the group who thought the Yankees were done, and the Cardinals were done, and the Rockies were done, but they’re not so done. Right now, I think the Yankees are gonna make the playoffs. I don’t think they’re gonna unseat the Red Sox, but I think they are gonna be the wild card. I think the Cubs are gonna wind up winning the Central, but who the heck knows anymore? I think the Red Sox are gonna get to the World Series, but in the National League I’ve never been more confused. If you can tell me what Pedro’s gonna be like when he comes back... I’m very tempted to pick the Mets still, even though I don’t think they’ve had a great year compared to their talent level. I think that’s probably the most talented team in the league. I think they’re a team that was constructed unlike any other, to win the World Series. I don’t think they can do that unless Pedro can make an impact, but if I were gonna pick right now, I’d say Mets-Red Sox, and I guess I’d say Red Sox win.
BC:
Alright. That’d be something to see.
JS:
Bill Buckner better not watch his TV that week. He’s liable to show up in a film clip or two.
BC:
Yeah, talk about emotional investment right there...
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