Sluggers: Twenty-Seven of Baseball's Greatest

The premise of "Sluggers: Twenty-Seven of Baseball's Greatest" is that a batch of homeruns over the course of a lifetime can lead a player to the Hall of Fame. Of the twenty-seven sluggers George Sullivan writes about twenty-two were already in Cooperstown when this book was written in 1991 and of the other five three of them made it as well: Reggie Jackson, Mike Schmidt, and George Brett. Only the last two, Jose Canseco and Bo Jackson are not in Cooperstown; Jackson's injury stopped him from ever having the great career many envisioned for him and Canseco admitted steroid use, his run ins with the law, and the fact that he let a ball bounce off of his head in the outfield for a home run, have problem precluded his chances for election to the Hall of Fame as well. So Sullivan's volume ends with a pair of cautionary tales on how careers can be derailed by injury and other things. It is also interesting to think that Barry Bonds, who came up the same time as Canseco and Jackson, was not considered an elite slugger back then and now he is zeroing in on the elite 700 homer run plateau.In his introduction Sullivan tells how the way baseball played changed with the coming of Babe Ruth and the advent of the lively ball. He then presents the twenty-seven sluggers in reverse chronological order, from Bo Jackson to Roger Connor. Of course looking at the list the obvious question is "Who is Roger Connor?", and the answer is that he is the man whose career home run record was broken by Babe Ruth. A two-page spread is devoted to each player, with a few notable exceptions: Hank Aaron, Mickey Mantle, Ted Williams, and Babe Ruth get four-pages. What you will find here are nice little summaries of these great players of the past whose accomplishments are being equaled and eclipsed by the great players of today. The book is illustrated with both color and black & white photography, depending on how far back we go in baseball history (when we get to Connor there is only one photograph, and a pair of etchings since we are talking about the home run king of the 1880s and 1890s). This book does consider slugging to be about more than home runs. An appendix in the back is devoted to All-Time Records and begins by explaining what a slugging average (Bonds has, of course, beaten the Babe's all-time single-season slugging mark of .847) and then having the top 25 for home runs, slugging percentage, triples, runs batted in, doubles, strikeouts, and walks. Young readers can go on line and see how much these lists have changed over the years. What is interesting is that for those first four categories there were no active players in the top 25 (and on the other lists the active players are George Brett, Dwight Evans, and Dale Murphy). This should make young readers appreciate that the current generation of baseball players is similar the stars I grew up following in the Sixties, when you had Willie McCovey, Aaron, Harmon Killebrew, Eddie Mathews, Mantle, and