Beyond the Baseline Podcast: The Challenge of Choosing the Greatest Players
On the latest Beyond the Baseline podcast, host Jon Wertheim talks with former Sports Illustrated writer and current writer at The Athletic, Joe Posnanski. Although many know Posnanski for his baseball expertise, he's actually a self-proclaimed "hardcore tennis fan" who has spent a lot of time during this quarantine watching old tennis matches on YouTube. Wertheim and Posnanski discuss his fondness for Novak Djokovic; the criteria and process used to make inter-era comparisons in sports, specifically for tennis and baseball; how to determine the greatest players in the sport; Hall of Fame debates; and much more.
(Listen to the latest Beyond the Baseline podcast here. The following transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.)
Jon Wertheim: You just got done ranking 100 baseball players. So this this this exercise of inter-era comparisons and accounting for things like equipment and training is fresh on your mind. And I do not want to spoil it, but your No. 1 player was not someone the majority of your readers will have ever seen play.
Joe Posnanski: That's right.
JW: Baseball is not tennis. But how do you go about this exercise? What do you think is the value of this exercise? As we all get enticed by this GOAT conversation, which, of course, will never yield a satisfactory answer to anyone. Give us some tips, most fundamentally, on how to approach this.
JP: Well, it's funny because I have thought long and hard about doing a 100 greatest tennis players thing just because I love the sport so much. But to me, if I did it, I would have to put men and women together and it would just be a whole different kind of exercise. You'd almost be talking about the impact on the sport and that kind of thing, much more than in baseball, where for some reason in baseball people just want to believe that the game hasn't really changed and the players haven't really changed.
So you could take Cy Young or Walter Johnson out of dead ball and they could come in and pitch to Albert Pujols or Mike Trout. It's just different because I think specifically of tennis. And I think specifically of Bill Tilden or somebody of that era who was dominant. I mean, you can't be more dominant than Tilden was in his time. And yet nobody would really even try to think of of him facing Roger Federer. It just the sport has changed so much. So I think it's more of a challenge in tennis, not necessarily because the sport has changed more than baseball, because baseball has changed much, much, much more than people want to acknowledge. It's the fact that people have this sort of dream about baseball that it's that it's timeless, that it stays the same, while everybody in tennis knows that the equipment that Roger Federer was using at the beginning of his career is significantly different than the rackets and training and things that he is doing at the end of his career. And the game just changes that rapidly.
JW: What about the how much do you put into the physique of the player? When Tracy Austin won the U.S. Open, I think she was 89 pounds. How do we how do we account for that?
JP: Well, yeah, you have to. And it's really hard to account. I did go back and watch, I think was the Tracy Austin and Chris Everett U.S. Open final, I think. But I remember watching a U.S. Open final that that Chris Everett was broadcasting and they showed a little bit of that match.Like they just like said, oh, hey, Chrissy, let's go back and watch when you were playing. And they showed a little of the match and she said the funniest thing. She's like, wow, we really weren't hitting it very hard, were we? I mean, it was it was like watching pong. It was so slow. You can't take 89-pound Chris Evert or Tracy Austin. I mean that Chris was a little bit more physical, but you can't take those players out and then have them, you know, transform them and have them play Serena. It just wouldn't it wouldn't even it wouldn't even look, you know, like something that could happen. Obviously, if Tracy Austin was playing in today's game, her genius for the game doesn't change. So Tracy Austin plays today. She's a different player. She trains differently. She hits the ball way harder. She's using the equipment. So I think it's harder to do that. But you're right.
