Tony Gwynn and Harmon Killebrew weren’t punished because their teams failed. Why should modern stars be?
Welcome to Snyder’s Soapbox! Here I pontificate about a matter related to Major League Baseball on a weekly basis. Some of the topics will be pressing matters, some might seem insignificant in the grand scheme of things and most will be somewhere in between. The good thing about this website is it’s free and you are allowed to click away. If you stay, you’ll get smarter, though, that’s a money-back guarantee. Let’s get to it.
This is a baseball-themed Soapbox and we’ll get there, but coming right on the heels of the NCAA basketball championships I feel compelled to attack something that has long been a pet peeve of mine: The judgment of individuals based upon team accomplishments.
No, Caitlin Clark’s Iowa team didn’t win the championship, nor did Zach Edey’s Purdue team. That doesn’t mean they failed as individual players and it’s total nonsense to act like you can’t bestow the “great player” title on either. This “she isn’t great until she’s won a title” crap started early in the season on Clark.
The application to Clark isn’t a new thing, but in terms of sports history, this type of individual athlete treatment is relatively young — a few decades or so.
It’s long bothered me as a Pacers fan that people will try to denigrate Reggie Miller with stuff like “he never won anything,” (no, he didn’t win an NBA championship, but the Pacers won their division four times, the East once and went to the Eastern Conference Finals five times in a seven-year span). We’ve heard plenty of it surrounding Dan Marino in the NFL and that might be where this utter madness started.
These are all team sports and you’re going to tell me that a player can’t possibly be great unless his or her teammates help them get over the finish line? Let’s use Marino as an illustration. Right through the middle of his prime, Marino played on Dolphins teams with awful defenses (ranked 19th, 23rd, 26th, 26th, 26th and 24th, respectively, out of 28 teams in Marino’s ages 23-28 seasons). Apparently, he should have suited up at free safety or something. For real, though, as good as he was, if he was given a good defense every year, he would’ve won multiple rings.
I really think the statistical greatness of Marino in the same era when Joe Montana’s 49ers won four titles is what broke people’s brains with this topic. The rise of sports talk radio and the era of 24-hour hot takes certainly took things to a new level — especially once social media was looped into the equation — but it is absolutely out of control with how much people want to tear down great individual players for the crime of having lesser teammates.
I also firmly believe there’s a disconnect here between the journey and destination. That is, obviously seeing your favorite team win a championship is the ultimate goal — and the 2016 Cubs will forever be my favorite team — but you can have a ton of fun during the journey, too. To act like, as a Pacers fan, Reggie’s career was nothing more than “he never won sh*t” (yes, I’ve had people say that to me) is outrageous. He and those Pacers teams gave me so many cherished memories and suggesting it was all for naught without a title is akin to saying he was a run-of-the-mill player. It’s just stupid.
As for Major League Baseball, let’s just start with Mike Trout. He’s won three MVPs, has finished second four times and has two other top-five finishes. He’s going to end up one of the greatest rate stat players in MLB history and we’ll see how far he can push the counting stats (he’s at 1,635 hits and 373 home runs right now at age 32).
The Angels, of course, haven’t been to the playoffs since 2014 and in that season they were swept in three games. Trout got the scoring started with a home run in Game 3, but otherwise was bad. Small sample, yes, but he was.
Nowadays, there’s a far-too-large segment of sports media and fandom that’ll run with the narrative that Trout just isn’t a winner. It’s a hilariously ignorant opinion, but it’s out there with maddening prevalence. In the same breath, those people will tear down a so-called “ring chaser” while also coming down on Trout for not demanding a trade from the Angels. I would ask what those people want, but it’s an obvious answer.
Some people just love to tear great players down. Many factors contribute to this, but jealousy is certainly a large part of it — jealousy that we weren’t good enough at sports to make so much money playing them, among other factors.
I think I can understand using team failures against individual players the most in basketball, where the best player can dominate the ball on both offense and defense (by guarding the best player), at least in theory. It’s still five players, though, and teammates matter. The argument collapses on itself in football where no players go both ways and it’s especially ridiculous in baseball where a position player can only bat once every nine times and is often relegated to watching the biggest at-bat of the game from the bench.
And yet, people will say it with alarming confidence. Sheer absurdity.
Circling back to my Marino/Montana/sports talk theory, we can go back further into baseball history and find lots of all-time great players who were largely spared the “just not a winner” talk. Maybe we could also remember to do a better job with current players and just enjoy the journey while we’re witnessing all-time great careers. It’s what Trout is presenting for us to this day. Keep him in mind as we move forward here with this list.
By no means is this even close to exhaustive (you could argue that I should include Hall of Famers like Robin Yount, Carl Yastrzemski, Frank Thomas, Nap Lajoie and a litany of others), but here are six players considered all-time greats who didn’t win the World Series.
Ty Cobb
A career .366 hitter (yes, it’s true) with 4,189 hits, 1,944 RBI and 2,245 runs, it could be argued Cobb was the first mega-star in baseball. He won 12 batting titles back when average was king. The Tigers played in three World Series and lost all of them. Cobb hit .262 with a .668 OPS in those World Series, losing over 100 points on his average and nearly 300 in OPS. Small sample not representative of how good he was? Bah, what a loser!
And, yes, you’ve heard plenty of negative things about Ty Cobb over the years. Was “he couldn’t win the big one” ever included on that list? Nope.
Ted Williams
You did hear the “not a winner” narrative with Williams sometimes, but it was never a major talking point several decades ago and I’m not sure you ever hear it these days (maybe the people saying it just aren’t aware of his career, which wouldn’t surprise me). Teddy Ballgame was a career .344 hitter with a .634 slugging and those were the lesser two of his three slashes. He is the all-time leader with a .482 on-base percentage. For real, nearly half the time he stepped to the plate, he ended up on base. He walked 2,021 times compared to 709 strikeouts and he did that while hitting 521 home runs despite missing three years in his prime to war service.
He made the World Series once and hit .200/.333/.200 in seven games with one RBI and two runs. If that happened these days, you’d see calls of how he failed his team at its biggest moment over social media, to the point that it would define his career for some people.
Ernie Banks
Mr. Cub hit 512 home runs and drove home 1,636 runs in his career. He won two MVPs. His infectious personality rightfully made him one of the most popular players in baseball. Plus, in the era of “load management,” how great would it be to hear a player saying “let’s play two!” these days? Banks led or tied for the league lead in games played six times. He never played for another team, either. It was just the 19 years for the Cubs. He also never played in the postseason.
Remember, some people bash Trout for not demanding a team change.
Granted, I grew up in Cubs country, but I certainly never heard a negative word about Banks. And that was how it should’ve been. His career merited no negativity. Remember, the journey matters.
Harmon Killebrew
An MVP and six-time home run champion, Killebrew ended his career with 573 bombs and is still considered among the best power hitters we’ve ever seen in the majors. He appeared in three playoff series (one World Series, two ALCS) and his team never won one. He hit .250, though he did get on base at a .444 clip and homered three times in 13 games.
You know where that leads these days, right? He should’ve done more! The argument ends with “and what did his team do? Lost, right?”
Rod Carew
An MVP and seven-time batting champ, Carew was one of the all-time great batsmiths. Few in the history of the game could handle the ol’ toothpick with such precision. Carew was on four different teams that made the playoffs and his record in playoff series was 0-4. He never made the World Series. He hit .220 in the playoffs.
I’m sure he shrunk when the moment was biggest, right?
The funny thing about Carew here is the same crowd that thinks so many of these all-time greats are losers without a ring are the same people who decry the “approach” of hitters here in the present. If only they’d be more like Rod Carew, the league batting average wouldn’t be so low, they’ll scream.
I wonder if they ever saw his playoff numbers. Probably not.
Anyway, this brings me to …
Tony Gwynn
In those arguments about approach, it’s always Carew and Gwynn. If more players would just be like those two, they’d hit for higher average! No matter that it totally glosses over the fact that those two had a talent with the bat that about 0.000000000000001% of humanity has ever been born with, sure, go with the argument that the only difference in Carew and Gwynn from today’s players was approach.
Gwynn hit .338 in his glorious career, nailing down eight batting titles. He made the World Series twice and hit .306 in his 27 career playoff games. His team also went 1-8 in World Series games.
So, again, I guess Gwynn just didn’t do enough to elevate his teammates, right? If he were a winner, he would have done so, I guess.
It’s just so simple, isn’t it?
If you don’t think of Cobb, Williams, Banks, Killebrew, Carew and Gwynn as losers, why should Trout or any other current player be any different?
Again, these are team sports. Individual greatness comes from individual players, not team greatness. Even the great Michael Jordan didn’t do it alone.
I’ll just straight up say it: If you think Marino, Clark, Edey, Miller or Trout aren’t “great” players and your evidence is team failures, you just don’t understand sports and how they work. If that statement offends you, do a better job defending your bad opinions.
As for the rest of us, we as sports fans could probably do a better job at making sure we enjoy the journey to the fullest extent while still always pining for the arrival at the ultimate destination. Personally, I’ve long enjoyed the journey of watching the all-time-great Mike Trout play baseball. Join me, won’t you?
