THE 100 BEST RED SOX OF ALL TIME

Ted Williams is the greatest Red Sox player ever. As the old adage goes, stats don’t lie, and he’s got plenty of those. A .344 career batting average, 521 home runs, and 1839 runs batted in. Also, he was a pretty damn great American, taking a break from baseball twice during the prime of his career to serve our country in World War II and Korea. You already know all of this.

But because Sox fans are amongst the most opinionated in sports and this is a free Nation, you don’t have to agree with the Teddy Ballgame proclamation — and we’re here to provide a convenient platform for your voice. Say you were born after the year 1990, and you’re already convinced that Dustin Pedroia is the second coming of Bobby Doerr in men’s medium baseball pants. Or maybe you’re a steroid-era sympathizer and believe Manny Ramirez should be exonerated for his alleged use and asshole behavior. Or hell, maybe you’re a contrarian Yankee prick and want to re-invoke the curse by reminding us of that all-too-regretful 1919 lapse of judgment.

In order to celebrate the birth of a promising new season, and to take advantage of some neat technology, we’re looking to you, the reader, to help us craft a list of the 100 greatest Red Sox players of all time.

Here’s how it works: we’ve compiled a list of basically every player that’s ever mattered in the history of this storied franchise — hundreds and hundreds of names — and threw them into our aggregator. Its job is to randomly pull two players from our list and pit them in a head-to-head showdown. All you have to do is click on who you think is more worthy of making our list. The criteria you use to deem worth is up to you — stats, fan favoritism, how sexy the player looked with their shirt off on the cover of a 2001 issue of Sports Illustrated. All fair territory.

Some potential fantasy match-ups that have us more frenzied than late October baseball: Eck versus Pap. The Hit Dog versus Big Papi. Nomo versus Dice-K. Adrian Gonzalez versus Carl Crawford. (Okay, just kidding about that last one, but did we say that we’re excited for this season?)

You have the green light, now head over to URL TK and click away. It’s a long season, so remember to check back regularly, as we’ll be updating the results about as frequently as A-Gon will be mashing doubles off the Green Monster.

_Michael C. Walsh

Click on a player to vote