by B. B. James

Created on: October 28, 2008

Any discussion of the best player in Red Sox history begins with Babe Ruth. Ruth was the greatest player in the history of the game, and he launched his major league career with Boston (after becoming a professional in Baltimore as a teenager). Babe's prodigious talent was first recognized on the mound, where the left-hander was one of the best pitchers in the game. Ruth actually set World Series pitching records for the Red Sox in helping them win championships in 1914 and 1915, before he was traded to the Yankees a few years later. He' already made his move to the outfield in his last year in a Red Sox uniform (1919), as he had set a major league record for homers with 29 in that season. The Yankees had the sense to make him a full-time outfielder, and, well, the rest is history.

It's almost forgotten that Ruth's BoSox teammate was Tris Speaker, one of the half-dozen greatest centerfielders in the history of the game. Speaker played in the "dead ball" era, so he didn't hit a lot of home runs. But he hit well over .300 and with a huge number of extra-base hits for the Sox year after year, while being unquestionably the game's greatest-fielding outfielder in the first half of the century. Not until Joe DiMaggio made his mark was there any challenge to Speaker's supremacy. Alas, speaker was traded to Cleveland, where he racked up 10 more years of greatness while the Sox slid into oblivion in the 1920s.

Ted Williams would have to rank as the 2nd-best Red Sox player of all-time. One of the game's greatest hitters, the Splendid Splinter starred in four decades (1939-1960), and he homered more than 500 times, include his last at-bat. Williams is considered to have the finest "batting eye" of any player who ever played the game, and he retired with the all-time lead in walks, as well as his power-hitting stats. Despite his prowess, he was not a beloved player, and he was often booed by fans who thought that he could single-handedly take the team to the World Series.

Although the Sox sold Babe Ruth just as he was reaching the height of his powers, the team made up for it to some degree two decades later when they purchased Jimmy Foxx from Philadelphia prior to the 1936 season. Foxx was the game's premier power hitter after Babe Ruth, and there were some people who thought he would break either Ruth's single-season or career home run marks. Alas, it was not to be, as the muscled Foxx declined rapidly in his early 30s, but not before terrorizing pitchers with nearly 200 homers in his first 5 seasons in Boston.

In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, the Sox produced star players, but these players were not as high on the all-time list. Carl Yazstremski, Wade Boggs, and Carlton Fisk were all great players and worthy of Hall of Fame induction.

On the pitching side, Ruth heads the list chronologically, but Roger Clemens probably heads it in terms of performance while on the Sox. Clemens came up with Boston and left his mark with his first two Cy Young Awards (named, incidentally, after a player who put in his years on the Sox, too). Clemens dominated with his fastball and his aggressive personality, and he almost pitched the team to the 1986 World Series. The task of winning the Series was left to Pedro Martinez, another ace who gave the Sox a tremendous, but truncated career, just like Babe Ruth. And let's not forget Lefty Grove, the game's greatest lefty ever and arguably its best pitcher, period. He was bought by the Sox from Philadelphia at about the same time that Foxx joined the team, thus marking an early attempt by a team to "buy" a pennant with expensive imports (just in case you thought that type of thing was a modern phenomenon).

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