It is the 130th season of National League baseball in Pittsburgh. And, frankly, nothing has changed since the last time you checked any compilation of the 10 The Top 10 Pirates of all time.
On such lists, the names usually don’t, and particularly so for a franchise as old and storied as your Pittsburgh Pirates. If you’re lucky, “The Chosen” might change once a generation, and you can say you remember when (thus the luck).
Still, if you’re a fan, you will look it over. You won’t be able to help yourself. You will run your eyes over the names and the numbers as you might your fingers over the pages of a letter from a parent now gone or a yellowed photo of forgotten youth.
After a long offseason, they will be as welcome as old friends. Because this is baseball. Because they are your Pirates. Because they are names you were taught early and grew up with, have lived with, shared holidays and picnics with, celebrated and cried with, have known forever.
These are your Pirates. And the Pirates of your parents and grandparents and great-grandparents. And so it will always be, because as one learned fan wrote several years ago: “Baseball is a game dominated by vital ghosts; it’s a fraternity, like no other we have of the active and the no longer so, the living and the dead.”
To that there is only one thing to add: Welcome home.
Note on statistics: All player profiles list numbers earned while with the Pirates.
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10
Bill Mazeroski
Second Base
1956-72
Bats Right
5'11", 183 lbs
Few athletes have become as synonymous with a single moment as Maz with 3:36 p.m., Oct. 13, 1960 — the moment he hit the only home run to end a Game 7 in World Series history. But Maz was more. He was the definition of second baseman in the late 1950s and ’60s. He won eight Gold Gloves. He made seven All-Star teams. He took part in more double plays than any other player in history (1,706). Where hitters came out before games to watch the likes of Ruth and McGwire and Kiner take batting practice, Maz’s peers came out early to watch him take infield. “The finest hands of any second baseman I ever played with, against or watched,” said contemporary Glenn Beckert. “I learned how to make the double play through him,” said another, Cookie Rojas.
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Double Down
Statistics
All-Star
HOF (2001)
Wins Above Replacement Player
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9
Wilbur Cooper
Pitcher
1912-24
Throws Left
5'11", 175 lbs
On a franchise not known for great pitchers, Cooper, a 5-foot-11 left-hander with pinpoint control, stands out. In an era that included Christy Mathewson, Grover Cleveland Alexander and Walter Johnson, legendary sports writer Grantland Rice once proclaimed him “the greatest pitcher in organized baseball.” Four times he won 20 games, and by the time he was traded to the Chicago Cubs late in 1924, he’d won a club-record 202 games — a mark that 92 seasons later still stands. He also ranks in the top five in complete games (263, 1st), starts (368, 2nd) and innings pitched (3,201, 2nd). So valued was Cooper that New York Giants manager John McGraw offered the Pirates $75,000 for Cooper in 1919. For perspective: That offseason, the Yankees paid the Boston Red Sox $125,000 for a portly fellow named Babe Ruth.
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Run Stopper
Statistics
All-Star
HOF
Complete Games (263)
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8
Fred Clarke
Manager/LF
1900-15
Bats Left
5'10", 165 lbs
Some would argue that if any manager was to be included here, it should have been Danny Murtaugh. But for as good as Murtaugh was (1,115 wins, 2 World Series titles), he couldn’t claim that one argument-ending distinction that separates Clarke: He is the only man in franchise history to rank in its top 10 in wins (1,422, 1st) and hits (1,638, 10th). What’s more, he compiled the majority of both concurrently as a player/manager. Still not impressed? He presided over the greatest decade in team history (1901-10); a decade in which his teams won four NL pennants, played in two World Series, won one and went 945-545 (a .645 winning percentage) while charting the only two 100-win seasons in franchise history. And he racked up every one of these accomplishments by 1915 — the year he retired from the game at the ripe ol’ age of 42.
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Young Leader
Statistics
All-Star
HOF (1945)
Wins Above Replacement Player
Seasons with at least 100 games played
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7
Arky Vaughan
Shortstop
1932-41
Bats Left
5'10", 175 lbs
Had he played for any other franchise, it’s possible Vaughan would be more highly regarded in baseball history. But because he played in Pittsburgh and at the same position as the immortal Wagner, his is a sometimes forgotten name when talking all-timers. Such was his fate, he hit .324 in 10 seasons with the Pirates and .318 in 14 seasons overall. In both instances, those numbers are better than any shortstop to ever play but for one — Wagner. Yet for his era, Vaughan was without peer. He made nine consecutive All-Star teams (1934-42), twice finished in the top-three in MVP voting and won the NL batting title in 1935 (.385) while also leading the league in on-base percentage (.491) and slugging (.607) that season — a season baseball historian Bill James ranks as the greatest by any shortstop not named (you guessed it) Wagner.
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Can't Miss
Statistics
All-Star
HOF (1985)
Wins Above Replacement Player
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6
Pie Traynor
Third Base
1920-37
Bats Right
6'0", 170 lbs
Ten times he batted .300, including .366 in 1930. He knocked in 1,273 runs over his career and hit .346 to help the Pirates beat Walter Johnson and the Washington Senators in a seven-game World Series in 1925. Defensively, he was even better, “like looking over Da Vinci’s shoulder” wrote columnist Red Smith. But Traynor may have been best appreciated when seen through the light of three facts. He was the first third baseman elected to the Hall of Fame (and still one of only five to be voted in by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America). He was the third baseman on MLB’s all-time team announced in 1969 to coincide with the game’s centennial. And, finally, more than six decades after he retired and more than three decades after he died, enough was still thought of his skills that he was one of six third basemen on MLB’s all-century team ballot in 1999.
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Second to one
Statistics
All-Star
HOF (1948)
Wins Above Replacement Player
Seasons with at least 100 games played
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5
Paul Waner
Right Field
1926-40
Bats Left
5'8", 155 lbs
Famously known as “Big Poison” to younger brother Lloyd’s “Little Poison” through much of the 1920s and ’30s, he was the more “menacing” of the two. He sprayed line drives to all corners of Forbes Field, hit above .350 more times (5) than he hit under .300 (2), won three NL batting titles and, in one of the greatest single seasons in franchise history, won the NL MVP in 1927 by hitting .380 with 42 doubles, 18 triples, 9 Home Runs, 131 RBIs and 342 total bases. And he did it while standing all of 5 feet, 8 inches and 155 pounds. This man was Big Poison? According to a story written as part of the Society for American Baseball Research biography project, a scout for the New York Giants told Giants manager John McGraw of Waner: “That little punk don’t even know how to put on a uniform.” After the Giants and Pirates squared off for the first time in 1926 — Waner’s rookie season — McGraw is said to have told the scout, “That little punk don’t even know how to put on a uniform but he’s removed three of my pitchers with line drives this week. I’m glad you did not scout Christy Mathewson.”
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Pitcher Poison
Statistics
All-Star
HOF (1952)
Wins Above Replacement Player
Seasons with at least 100 games played
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4
Willie Stargell
LF/1B
1962-82
Bats Left
6'4", 225 lbs
His career was one of two acts, the first as raw slugger out of a Bernard Malamud novel, the second an elder statesman we remember as “Pops.” In both, he was larger than life, each every bit as large as the nearly half-dozen stadiums in which he at one time owned the longest Home Runs on record. At 6 feet, 4 inches and 225 pounds, “he didn’t just hit pitchers, he took away their dignity,” said Hall of Fame pitcher Don Sutton. His 475 Home Runs, 1,560 RBIs and 953 extra-base hits are all franchise records. At the peak of his career from 1970-73, he averaged 39 Home Runs and 110 RBIs a season while batting .288. But it is his last hurrah in 1979 that most remember, when at age 39 he led the Pirates to their fifth and most recent world championship. Led? More like carried. He went 12 for 30 with 3 HRs, 7 runs scored and 7 RBIs, an MVP performance that included a go-ahead two-run homer in the sixth inning of Game 7 against the Baltimore Orioles that wrote him from mere great and into franchise legend.
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Moon Shots
Statistics
All-Star
HOF (1988)
Wins Above Replacement Player
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3
Ralph Kiner
Left Field
1946-52
Bats Right
6'2", 195 lbs
No slugger ever so captivated Pittsburgh as did this right-handed swinger from California. How else does one explain the fact that from 1946-52 — Kiner’s seven full seasons in a Pirates uniform — a franchise that had never drawn more than 869,720 fans in any season four times topped 1.1 million; this despite finishing a combined 193 games under .500? The only logical answer: Kiner. He hit Home Runs over those seven seasons and part of 1953 at a pace unseen before or since: one every 13 at-bats. He led the NL in each of his seven seasons (still an MLB record), twice topped 50 and in 1949 set a Pirates record with 54. “Pittsburgh had never seen an athlete like Kiner,” wrote Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Bob Smizik. To wit: In the three full seasons after Kiner was traded to the Cubs in the middle of the 1953 season, the Pirates failed to draw more than 573,000 fans and only once in the 36 years that followed did they top the 1.517 million they drew for the Kiner-led Pirates of 1948.
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Long Ball
Statistics
All-Star
HOF (1975)
Wins Above Replacement Player
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2
Roberto Clemente
Right Field
1955-72
Bats Right
5'11", 175 lbs
Nearly 20,000 men have played professional baseball over the past century-plus. Few turned it into the living art form that Clemente did for 18 summers from right field at Forbes Field and then Three Rivers Stadium. He was power and style and grace and “[played] a kind of baseball that none of us had seen before, throwing and running and hitting at something close to the level of absolute perfection” wrote Hall of Fame baseball writer Roger Angell. He was a .317 career hitter and the only man to collect 3,000 hits in a Pirates uniform. He was a four-time NL batting champion, 1966 NL MVP and 12-time Gold Glove winner who “could field the ball in New York and throw out a guy in Pennsylvania,” as the legendary Vin Scully once said. He was at once a baseball god of a generation and, at the same time, a simple, proud man who ultimately gave his life for others. He was The Great One.
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Helping Hand
Statistics
All-Star
HOF (1973)
Wins Above Replacement Player
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1
Honus Wagner
Shortstop
1900-17
Bats Right
5'11", 200 lbs
None other than Babe Ruth called him the greatest right-handed hitter in baseball history. Nearly a century after his final game, Baseball-Reference.com still ranks him No. 10 all-time in Wins Above Replacement — a sabremetric fomula for measuring a player’s worth. But most fans don’t need such 21st century tools to understand his worth. From 1900-17, he helped the Pirates win four of their nine NL pennants and their first World Series championship. All the while, he led the league in batting eight times, RBIs five times, stolen bases five times and played such a beautiful shortstop that, despite a stocky frame and bowed legs, it was said you could roll anything through them except a ground ball.
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