Graham Womack of the Baseball Past and Present blog recently had readers vote on an All-Time Dream Team, and then asked a number of writers to do little pieces about the winners at each position. I was invited to contribute and I did Johnny Bench. The post with all the winners is up and live now and you can read it here.
A lot of good stuff, especially if you go to the bottom for the note about what to make of there being only one black player on the team. I always think that’s an interesting question, not because of the race issue as such, but because I think it speaks to how people view “all-time” anythings. We get locked in to older things first, and it’s that much harder for us to appreciate more recent greatness.
For example, I don’t think people pick Rogers Hornsby over Joe Morgan because they’re racist. I think they pick Rogers Hornsby over Joe Morgan because their father said he was the best and because the pictures of him are in black and white and, boy, if that ain’t history, I don’t know what is.
Anyway, the All-Time Dream Team is a nice little project, and it was developed in order to help fund a worthy charity too (see the post for more details), so go check it out.
