I was reading Joe Poz’s awesome piece on Bob Gibson today on the shitter and deeply wished I was around to watch him in his prime. From what I can gather, Gibson had some of the sickest stuff, the meanest disposition and the will to win…but it was this quote that stuck with me…
So Bob Gibson looked bigger than 6-foot-1. Yes, by the numbers he only hit 10 or so batters a year, but those 10 never ever forgot. He threw his 95-mph fastball and savage slider by unfolding into a wind-up that screamed ancient violence — Bill James would say that Gibson “sort of looks like he is attempting to fly.” This was a wind-up without guile, it was all business, David used this wind-up when smiting Goliath. Yes, Gibson didn’t look like he was trying to strike out batter. He looked like he was trying to smite them.
“That’s a whole lot of (expletive),” Gibson says. “I wasn’t trying to intimidate anybody, are you kidding me? I was just trying to survive, man.”
Bob Gibson was a gunslinger, not because of the aforementioned stuff, but because he dared people to beat him, and MUCH more often than not, they failed. It wasn’t that he was mean, it’s that he knew he was better and didn’t accept failure. It wasn’t that he was the best, it’s that he knew how to play the game. A gunslinger isn’t Brett fucking Favre, a dude who is careless and lucky, or Roger Clemens who’s aura is nothing more than beer muscles…it’s the display of supreme confidence, the visual affirmation of that oft-used quote, “he knew he was better, you knew he was better and he knew YOU knew he was better.”
In my opinion, the real gunslingers in sports are the guys who go out there and collect their scalps and move on with their business like it was a foregone conclusion. It’s not confidence manifesting itself in an egosplosion like LeBron or Tiger or a supremely talented guy throwing caution to the wind like Favre or Phil Mickelson, no…a gunslinger is a supremely confident individual that garners nothing but the utmost respect from their peers, is unaffected by that respect, and only goes out there to make their opponent feel pain.
In my opinion (and experience…as I can only recall the guys I’ve seen), the ultimate gunslinger was Michael Jordan. Forget all the commercials and shit, he was out there to win and carried himself as such. In football, it was John Elway. In baseball, Manny for hitting and Randy Johnson for pitching. Yes, these guys are all-time greats, but that’s important, if you ask me…if you want to be a true gunslinger, you have to be great for a long ass time.
After the jump…my list. Continue reading →
With only one month of regular season baseball left to go, I figured it was time to bore you all with some updated power rankings. It’s been two months since I last covered this, and in that time, MLB teams have played two months worth of baseball. I know, right? So without further ado, here’s a bunch of stupid comments about each baseball team.
