Top Ten By Position - Intro

The Collector's Top Ten By Position series will kick off next week, and whenever a new series begins I like to warm up with a practice post or sampling of what to expect. 

I don't have a 'sample' post this time. The only thing I could think of was a list of centers that have nothing do with sports, but I ran out of ideas and half the list ended up being the names of sports arenas. 

Instead I'll quickly go over what the Top Ten By Position series is all about. 

I've made a list of each primary position in baseball, football, basketball, and hockey. Starting Monday I will count down the top ten modern players to play each position. There will be a couple honorable mentions and/or players who just missed the cut. 

If you've read my previous series, you know there will be a fair amount of research poured into every list. I'm not just going to copy/paste the leaders of a particular statistic and I'm not going to let personal opinions influence my rankings - though personal opinions will be sprinkled in throughout the series.

My goal will be to post these every Monday and Thursday. There should be a total of 36 posts even though there aren't quite 36 different positions. Some similar positions will be combined into one post (particularly in football) and some may get spread out across two posts (pitchers might even be spread out over three posts!)

These ranking will have a sports card aspect as well. I'll be posting scans of the best card in my collection of each player (if I get lazy or my scanner isn't cooperating I'll borrow from TCDB) and the lists will only include modern era players. This is partially to feature players whose playing-era cards are actually attainable, but primarily because of the difficulty in comparing today's athletes with early 20th century stars. 

We'll use established eras as our starting point. For football that means the Super Bowl Era, so players who starred before 1966 will not be included. The same goes for hockey, as the 'expansion era' began in 1967. Basketball's expansion era is less formal (unless I'm missing something) but since the NBA rounded into form with five new teams in the late 1960s, the 1966-67 season looks like a good starting point for hoops, too. 

Baseball's natural starting point is the 1947 season, when Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier and integrated the major leagues for good. Just so happens that the modern era of baseball cards started the very next year, with 1948 Leaf and Bowman, so this works well all around.

Again, we are only ranking players from 1947 (or 1967) to now. Don't yell at me when you don't see Ruth, Cobb, or Gehrig ranked! :p

There will be an unofficial minimum of eight full seasons required to qualify, though I may bend this rule in certain cases.
 

There is one more thing to discuss -- the order of each position post. I know I'm starting with a football position to kick off the series, but I'm open to jumping around from sport to sport or sticking with the same sport until it's complete. What would you prefer - all positions for one sport, then all positions for the next sport, and so on? Or a random surprise assortment?

Thanks for reading!

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