You can read the left fielder report I posted today right here

5. Chick Stahl

If I’ve been guilty of one thing during my half of this exercise, it’s that I tend to err on the side of a popular player that would have had more name recognition, either because of his spot in Bostonian Sportslore, or he played within the memories of the people reading.

Chick Stahl is a minor blip in Red Sox history, if only because he played so long ago, and that blip centers around how he died (he drank carbonic acid, saying that the strain of managing the team drove him to it) more than his playing career. However, Stahl was a typical very good dead ball hitter, hitting 282/341/384 in an environment that decreased run scoring by 8% over AL historic average, and was the focal point of the Boston offense during the aughts. The man I thought would be on this list, Johnny Damon, isn’t because he doesn’t quite measure up to Stahl’s quality, or quantity (Stahl had about 700 more PA’s than Damon). That’s enough for me to put my nostalgia aside.

4. Reggie Smith

Reggie Smith is firmly entrenched on the list of players that either started or ended their career in Boston while finding their glory days elsewhere. That obfuscates the fact that he was pretty damn good while in Fenway. A converted infielder, Smith was a rookie in 1967, and was frequently the second or third best hitter on the team after Yaz.

Smith was a main character in Howard Bryant’s book on Bostonian athletic racial history, Shut Out, mostly because he experienced the racism that was the center of the book’s theme. He was never embraced by the fans, because he wasn’t a David Ortiz or Mo Vaughn type…he was a quiet, seemingly overly sensitive type that was called Carl Reggie Smith, according to Bryant, because he tried to be ‘white’ (Carl is also his birth name, and the name of Yaz of course). It’s tough for me to determine how much of Bryant’s book was based on the actuality of racism in Boston, or how much was just the perception that Boston was racist, so boom…everything is a slight of black players. Either way, Reggie Smith’s non-baseball career in Boston is a perfect symbol of the growing de-romanticization of the Yawkey era.

3. Dominic DiMaggio

Boston’s own Radar O’Reilly really did his best to give Ted Williams gaudy RBI totals. He was the prototype big-run era leadoff man, getting on base, causing general havoc and scoring boatloads of runs in front of the boppers.

Although Williams is generally cited as a player that lost a great deal of his career numbers to war service, DiMaggio and Johnny Pesky did also. DiMaggio lost his age 26-28 seasons to WWII, hitting .286/.364/.437 before he left, and .316/.393/.427 when he got back. There is really no way of even being able to estimate what exactly he lost to military service, but I think it’s safe to say that he would be a better known player in his own right, rather than just Joe DiMaggio’s brother that wore the glasses.

2. Fred Lynn

The younger, better half of the Gold Dust Twins, from the stories I hear, Fred Lynn was the most mimicked player of young Red Sox fans from the 70’s. Ichiro stole his one, singular place in history as the only player to win the double MVP/ROY, but Lynn was a better pick to win the MVP in 1975 than Ichiro was in 2001. As great as his 1975 was, he was even better in 1979, when he finished fourth in the MVP voting. He was primed to be one of the all-time greats…

Until the offseason of 1980-1981 came around and the Sox lost him and Carlton Fisk to rival American League clubs. It’s become a convention, among Red Sox fans anyway, that says that Lynn would have been in the Hall of Fame if he continued his career in Boston. There is no way of telling, but it’s not like he fell off the table when he went to California. He never had a season like his 75 or his 79, but he had a lot of seasons like his 76 or 78, and probably wouldn’t have been all that much better in Fenway. His numbers might have looked a little sexier, but it’s doubtful Lynn would have been enshrined if he played his whole career in Boston.

The one piece of baseball history that Lynn can hold on to is that he still is the only man to ever hit a grand slam in an All Star game, which he did in 1983 (sorry, Atlee).

1. Tris Speaker

The Grey Eagle was the best Red Sox that might have been in the KKK. If you read his comment in the Bill James’ latest Historical Baseball Abstract, he talks about the possibility of Speaker being a Klansman, along with future Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black. I don’t know if it’s true…nor do I care, it’s an interesting socio-political story. Anyway, Larry Doby said that Speaker was incredible to him while he was adjusting to life as a Cleveland big leaguer, so if Speaker was inherently racist, it mellowed by the time the 1950’s rolled around.

Speaker gets me thinking about legends. History is littered with them, but usually it’s for more important pursuits than baseball…there are very few Robert Oppenheimer’s or Napoleon Bonaparte’s in baseball that completely bend history, either for the negative or the positive. But because of the nature of sports, there is a mythic quality that is untouched by character flaws that our historical legends don’t have access too. Ty Cobb was a racist and a prick, but his on-the-field persona has held up his greatness, while there is some tarnish on men like Franklin Roosevelt for not being able to keep his pants on. I don’t know if it’s because it’s easier to connect to sports figures as people, or if it’s because our expectations are lower, so we are more able to give them a pass.