Forgetting Josh Gibson

It may not seem like it, but I do try to cut slack to the folks on Twitter/X who post seemingly uneducated remarks. It’s not all a gotcha exercise.

For instance, lots of folks produce top-10 lists. “Here are my top-10 starting pitchers ever,” or “I think the top-10 shortstops since World War II are…” Stuff like that. Well, those are opinions, and everyone is entitled to them. Unless they include something really egregious, along the lines of claiming that Bucky Dent was a top-10 all-time shortstop because he hit one big homer in his life, I let it slide. Likewise, I’ll pounce if they disparage a great player for no reason, but if they just omit them from some all-time list in favor of ten semi-reasonable options, no big deal. Usually.

Including a qualifier will usually get the person a reprieve, too. That’s where the “post-WWII” sort of exception matters, because it gives them a pass in skipping over Negro Leagues players. I don’t like it, but if they want to narrow their timeframe there’s really no point in arguing about it, especially because some folks may be doing it because they simply don’t know much about pre-War baseball generally or the Negro Leagues specifically and don’t think they can judge them accurately. That’s actually a pretty reasonable approach. Sometimes this takes the sneakier form of having a top-10 “MLB” list, which also omits the Negro Leagues on a technicality since, while they’ve now been recognized as “major leagues,” they were never part of “Major League Baseball,” the organization. That seems a little less reasonable.

And then there are the others. The folks who don’t qualify their comments, or limit the timeframe. The folks who just blast out a top-10 list looking for engagement of one sort or the other. Those are the folks who produce lists like this:

Oh Vik, what have you done?