Top 200 Major League Baseball Players Ever - #167, 166 DICK BARTELL AND VLADIMIR GUERRERO

EDIT - YOU CAN FIND THE UPDATED RANKINGS UNDER THE LABEL BEST BASEBALL PLAYERS EVER.

#167 DICK BARTELL SS Pirates/Phillies/Giants

1927-46

OPS+ 96

BFW 28.2

WARP3 96.4

Another member of the all-glove team; support for Vizquel on the list should point to Bartell as a comparable. Better than more famous HOF SS like Rizutto and Reese.

#166 VLADIMIR GUERRERO RF Expos/Angels

1996-

OPS+ 150

BFW 38.1

WARP3 83.7

At an OPS+ of 150, Vlad's got the 2nd best bat thusfar on the list (Shoeless Joe); he's getting pushed up a little bit, his WARP3 doesn't stretch far enough to make this rating, but again, I'm trying to be realistic with the active players; not projecting them beyond this year specifically, but not keeping my head in the sand either. The numbers, as with all the active players, are their numbers at date of posting, but were any of the active players to stop playing the second I hit publish post, some level of downward reassessment would be necessary. If you're waiting for Jim Rice or Dale Murphy or Don Mattingly, incidentally, you're going to be disappointed.

Revelation 18 - The Best Basketball Player On the Planet is Headed to Brooklyn

Basketball statistical analysis is somewhere between baseball and football in terms of the degree to which it can be counted to provide truth; the best is provided by John Hollinger on espn.com; his PER rating correctly demonstrated that LeBron James (and not Kobe Bryant) had the best season in the NBA in '07-08. At 23 years of age (Lebron's mother, by the way, is 38, only a handful of months older than I am; nothing has ever made me feel older than the idea that the best basketball player alive could be my son) it's a reasonable deduction that he'll hold this value into 2010.

In 2010, LeBron James is a free agent; one of the most important (and slowest burning) stories on the sports landscape is the courtship of James by the minority owner of the New Jersey Nets, Jay-Z --

--who has 99 problems, but the 11 million bucks the Nets owed to Richard Jefferson in 2010 ain't one.

The Nets are on track to move to Brooklyn - and with today's trade of Jefferson to Milwaukee for Yi Jianlian and Bobby Simmons - they're on track to sign King James. Put LeBron with Devin Harris and you're onto something.

If Yi can emerge as a capable complimentary player, such that his name value can tap into the Chinese market; the confluence of factors:

Jay Z

Brooklyn.

Yi

LeBron James

Has the potential to make the Brooklyn Nets a cross-cultural global phenomenon; fusing the marketing bonanzas that are hip hop and a post-Olympics China. The degree to which James uses his position on the Olympic team this summer as an outreach platform to the Chinese fan may be a precursor to his move to Brooklyn in 2010.

Entertainment Weekly's Top 100 Movies - An Interim Post

I may not get back to the EW list for a couple of days, but I will finish it.

But while I have a second - the following films not on the EW list are burning a hole in my head:

American Beauty, Requiem for a Dream, Donnie Darko.

I don't think any of them would make my Top 100, but they'd be in the conversation.

Princess Bride makes it.

So do Heathers and Election.

3 more documentaries that I neglected to mention in yesterday's post - the two wrestling documentaries, Beyond the Mat and Wrestling With Shadows, neither of which would make it, but I have boundless affection for the latter -- and a doc that not only makes it but makes it inside the top 25, Murder on a Sunday Morning, which is ahead of The Thin Blue Line as the best legal doc. ever made. I think The Staircase probably just misses the list, and Sin City Law is sitting on my DVD player right now this very second. French dudes can make them a movie about the US criminal justice system, yo.