Actual poll data from the Cleveland Indians’ official site the other day, just after I voted for Tris Speaker:

For anyone who cares, these results are a bit like asking which doctor discovered penicillin, and seeing Alexander Fleming come in third to Patch Adams and Dr. Ruth, with the other nominees being maybe Phil McGraw, Julius Erving, and Johnny Fever.

Kenny Lofton is a six-time all-star, no question, with eight or nine outstanding seasons in his 17-year career. Grady Sizemore has become an elite player in his three-plus years, you betcha.

Tris Speaker, however, was dominant for 19 of his 22 years, with a lifetime On Base Percentage (OBP) 16 points higher than Lofton (whose strength is getting on base) managed in his best year, and a career On Base plus Slugging (OPS) 20 points better than anything Sizemore (who strength is his combination of leadoff and power skills) has ever achieved. And Speaker amassed those superior numbers while playing most of his career in the dead-ball era.

Speaker is also considered one of the best defensive center fielders of all time, the game’s classic play-shallow go-get-it guy. That Tris Speaker was possibly the finest position player in Cleveland history should be no more obscure than knowing that Babe Ruth was once pretty good for the Yankees.

A glance at the stats will show that Earl Averill is the second-best player on the list; he’s also the only one besides Speaker in the Hall of Fame. The inclusion of the popular Rick Manning is simply bizarre; he had exactly two good seasons before becoming an average-at-best player for the rest of his career. Meanwhile, seven-time all-star Larry Doby, who broke the color barrier in the American League and had eleven stellar seasons, belongs on this list more than Sizemore, Lofton, Butler, and certainly Manning.

I bother not because baseball matters — it doesn’t, of course — but because a supremely simple question has been asked of a public which (a) is actively interested and (b) has excellent, unfettered access to the basic facts, none of which are hard to understand. And almost everyone involved has whiffed spectacularly, including the Indians employee asking the question.

And now I imagine even attempting another discussion about Iraq, Iran, health care, or anything else where the basic facts aren’t quantified to the third decimal point.

Agh.

Maybe next year…