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OT: How good was Yogi?


I apologize for bringing this here, but the McCoven are some of the best baseball minds I have access to.

So I was up really late/early the other night/morning and got distracted watching the Mike and Mike show while I should've been studying for finals. Its not a show I would normally watch or listen to, but because I'll do anything to procrastinate and there's not much else on besides Girls Gone Wild ads at 3:30 a.m. I got sucked into their discussion about whether the Yankees are the greatest franchise in sports history. Comparing teams or franchises across different sports seems more than a bit ridiculous but what caught my ear was when they said the Yankees had at least 7 or 8 guys who were "locks" as top 50 players of all time. They included Yogi Berra on their list.

Now I'm no baseball historian, but that seemed a bit odd to me. I know Yogi is widely regarded as being among the top handful of catchers of all time, but I never thought of him as being that elite. Again, because I'll do anything to procrastinate, I took a quick glance at some of Yogi's basic stats, confirmed my belief and fired an e-mail off to the show expressing my feelings on the subject. To my surprise, I got an e-mail back the next morning from ESPN's Bob Picozzi (apparently he does morning SC?) stating that Yogi is, indeed, a clear top 50 player of all time. Since then Picozzi and I have been firing back and forth.

His arguments for Berra so far are pretty much just "he's a 3 time MVP," "He was the second best player on a team that won 12 pennants in 14 years from 51-64" and "look at his post-season stats." I'm convinced that Yogi deserved the '55 and '56 MVPs less than Jeff Kent deserved the award in 2000. I'm not arguing that he wasn't great, and not even that he ISN'T among the top 50 of all time, simply that if he is, he's at the very, very bottom of that 50 and not a "shoe-in" or "lock." But, I'm really drawing all my judgements from baseballreference.com so I figured I'd hit up some people who know a whole lot more about baseball than me....what say you McCoven? Am I way off and not giving Yogi nearly enough credit, or is he really just another like-able guy slightly overrated by some east coast bias?

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