"The Most Exciting Baseball Player I've Ever Seen"

Voros starts to rip into Shaugnessy, but then has a lot more fun remembering Eric Davis:

If you only caught the tail end of his injury and illness played career, you wouldn’t know it, but Eric Davis was far and away the most exciting baseball player I’ve ever seen. There have been guys who can do it all: run, hit for power, hit for average, make spectacular fielding plays. But Davis was something different. Davis was a high wire act that you knew had a chance in ending in
disaster. Davis lacerated his kidney diving for a ball in the World Series, but with Davis that was the norm.

Voros and I are close to the same age, so it is understandable that I agree wholeheartedly with his assessment of Davis. Davis was the gold standard of ballplayers as far as my friends and I were concerned. No one looked like him. No one played like him. He was just a beast. I've always taken the Willie Mays/Andruw Jones thing with a grain of salt -- though he may have been Mays' defensive equal, Andruw has never looked the way I've heard people describe Mays -- but pre-injury Eric Davis felt like the real deal. If I had the power to alter anything in baseball over the past 20 years, seeing what a healthy Davis could have done is near the top of the list.

Not that he was the best player around. Even pre-steroids Bonds was a far more productive hitter. Ken Griffey had many seasons better than Eric the Red's best. Heck, year-in-year out guys like Dale Murphy, Darryl Strawberry, and Tim Raines brought more to the table than Davis. But he was more exciting to watch, partially for the speed/power mix, but mostly for the reckless abandon.

Which has me thinking about the other players I've enjoyed for aesthetic reasons as opposed to merely appreciated due to superior performance. Not thinking too deeply about it, below is my list. Obviously all of these guys aren't going to be the best at what they did -- as is the case with Andruw Jones, hyper-competence can actually be somewhat boring -- but the players whose play I've simply enjoyed. No pitchers -- I thought about them for a minute and realize that, while I tend to like good pitching more than good hitting, it's really more of a formal appreciation as opposed to a pure enjoyment. Maybe I'll deal with pitchers later. In the meantime:

C: Tony Pena. I loved the odd squat behind the plate and the way he'd fling the ball around.

1B: Will Clark. This is mostly for offense -- great swing -- but I loved the way he carried himself on the field. Just seemed like what a ballplayer was supposed to be like. As much as I admire Bonds' accomplishments on an intellectual level, the Giants ceased to be interesting to me when Clark stopped playing for them after 1993.

2B: Craig Biggio. He wasn't necessarily exciting in the way some of these other players were, but since I always thought of him as a catcher -- probably far longer than anyone else did -- I always gave him extra credit when I watched him snag something at second base and probably enjoyed his play more than I should have.

3B: George Brett. Another primarily offensive choice. I may have seen him play in person in Tiger Stadium three times between 1978 and 1984, but my memories of baseball in those years are of George Brett single-handedly beating the Tigers dozens -- no, hundreds of times. I don't know why, but he just looms so much larger in my consciousness than even a player of his considerable stature should. Maybe it was the pine tar game, maybe it was the chase for .400, but as he played, he seemed to be building an almost contemporaneous legend.

SS: Ozzie Smith. The exception to the notion of competence being boring. Of course, calling Smith merely "competent" is an insult on par with calling a normal player putrid. As many have noted, when shortstops dive for balls, it's often because they got a late break. When Smith dove for balls it was because Tommy Herr or Terry Pendelton did.

LF: Rickey Henderson, though I'll admit I never really thought of him as a Hall of Fame type player during his prime. Not because he wasn't -- he obviously was -- but because I didn't yet appreciate OBP or the uniqueness of his power from the leadoff position (Lou Whitaker hit homers for my Tigers, so I assumed all leadoff hitters did). So no, it wasn't quite appreciation for him as it was enjoyment of his speed and his showboating, and his interview skills. I'd watch a whole team of Rickeys even if he was a hacker.

CF: Davis, for reasons stated.

RF: A tie between Ichiro and Dave Parker. Radically different players, obviously, but both had great arms. What I liked about them the most, though, is not the arm strength itself, but the deception. You never expect a guy Ichiro's size to have a cannon like he does. Parker, on the other hand always seemed to lope around in a rather haphazard fashion, but once he got to the ball and let loose, the results were most impressive (almost as if he were striking; like some kind of snake; maybe someone ought to have given him a nickname in that vein . . )

OK, I suppose this list may have been a little best-ever heavy, but there you go.

Excited yet?

UPDATE: Neyer asks how I could put this list together and not include Bo Jackson. Good question, but I have a (sorta) defensible answer. Jackson saw his first real playing time in 1987, but didn't really become HOLY CRAP THIS IS BO JACKSON until 88 or 89. One thing you'll note about this list is that it's basically devoid of post-1985 AL players (I got hooked on Henderson in the early 80s). There's a reason for this, and that reason is that I lived in West Virginia from 1985 through 1991 and saw damn little American League ball during those years. Yes, I saw the Jackson highlights on SportsCenter, and yes, I saw his legendary All Star Game performance, but I really didn't see much of the guy and thus don't have the same level of appreciation for him as many do.

But even if I did -- I have to wonder whether I'd still not rather watch Rickey in left.