Ten Who Missed

OK, this is going to be some fun stuff exclusively for you here at JoeBlogs.

Ever since The Baseball 100 came out, I have had so many people ask for more. This is an incredible reaction considering The Baseball 100 is roughly 4,392,421 pages long.

But again and again, people have asked for The Baseball 200, The Baseball 500, The Baseball 738 and so on. So flattering. But as you probably know, I am going in a different direction now — I’m hard at work on my next book WHY WE LOVE BASEBALL, a countdown of the 50 greatest, most awesome and most legendary moments in baseball history.

Of course, it will be a little while until WHY WE LOVE BASEBALL comes out.

So I wanted to give Joe Blogs subscribers something really cool before then.

And here it is: Starting soon, I will be putting together a special series here at JoeBlogs called “Ten Who Missed” — which will feature 10 players who missed getting into The Baseball 100.

And here is the best part: You will choose who those 10 players will be.

Thanks to my friend Tom Tango, we are putting up a super cool Elo game for you to play where you choose between two great players who were not in The Baseball 100. It will look something like this:

In this particular case, you would be choosing between Jacob deGrom and Lou Whitaker. And when you hit “Submit” you will get two more player, and then two more players, and then two more players for as long as you want to play. And the more you play, the better an answer I will get for who the ten players should be.

Now, who you vote for is entirely up to you, obviously. You might want to simply vote for the player you think is best. If everybody does that, then the “Ten Who Missed” will look something like the ten best players who did not make the list.

BUT … you might want to vote for the player you would rather read about. Like in this case, you might think Whitaker is the better player but you would rather read about deGrom or vice versa. I have included some players in this game — and I’m sure you will see them — who are probably not quite Top 110 or Top 150 or maybe even Top 200 players. But they are certainly great, and they’re very interesting, and you might prefer reading about them instead of someone better.

Again, it’s totally up to you.*

*I will make an admission: I have already started a piece about Zack Greinke returning to the Royals. But I’ve decided to hold off on it because I’m pretty sure that you will vote for him as one of the Ten Who Missed. But who knows how this will play out? So exciting!

Tom is going to use some of his mathematical wizardry to handicap the results so that he takes out recency bias and gives great Negro Leagues and long-ago players a better chance of being in the ten. But that’s all behind the scenes. The main point here is that you will decide the ten … and I will do them in the order that you rank them in April.

Awesome right? So go ahead, play the Ten Who Missed game as much as you can. I think we’re going to keep this open for about a week. Have fun!