The Stark Truth The Most Overrated and Underrated Players in Baseball History

by Jayson Stark
ISBN: 978-1-57243-959-7
224 pages
6 x 9, Hardbound
pub date 04-2007
1-color; photos throughout

About This Book
Press Releases

Every baseball fan knows New York Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter is a great all-around player. But how about Alex Rodriguez, Jeter’s teammate, former American League MVP, and probable future Hall of Famer? Many would argue he’s even better than Jeter. And what about Jeter’s seemingly unassailable status as one of the greatest Yankees of all time? Such discussions highlight one of the great joys of being a baseball fan: arguing over who’s really great and who falls just short, who doesn’t get the respect he deserves and who gets too much. In other words, who’s overrated and who’s underrated.

Read an excerpt on ESPN.com from The Stark Truth

Read this Philadelphia Enquirer chat session Jayson had with fans talking The Stark Truth

The Stark Report

Nolan Ryan and Sandy Koufax were great pitchers. They’re also two of the most overrated pitchers of all time. How could they possibly be both? ESPN’s Jayson Stark explains exactly how in his new book, The Stark Truth: The Most Overrated and Underrated Players in Baseball History.

Since the first gameof baseball was played in the 1800s, fans have argued about the most over-hyped and underlooked players of all-time – from smoky bars to sports-talk radio to living rooms across the country.For the first time ever, ESPN’s Jayson Stark hassolved the age-old argument in The Stark Truth: The Most Overrated and Underrated Players in Baseball History.

Gone are team and/or player biases. No more hometown sympathies. It took a journalist with an unbiased bent, someone who used facts, did theresearch andsifted through thousands of statistics tosettle once and for all who has benefited from positive sympathies all these years and who has been forgotten even though he proved to be “biggest bargain since the 99-cent quesadilla.”

Feelings are going to be hurt.Egos will besullied. Decades of verbal history will be proven wrong. Stark is one of the best minds in baseball, someone whose reputation precedes him as knowingevery aspect of the game. So when he says Phil Rizzuto is the most overrated shortstop of all time hedoesn't just offer hisopinion, he proves it with stats.An entire constellation of baseball stars are going to have a little of the shine on their careers taken away. Some of the players Stark ranks as overrated or underrated are:

> Babe Ruth
>Derek Jeter
>Pete Rose
>Nolan Ryan
>Frank Robinson
>Yogi Berra
>Duke Snider
>Andruw Jones
>Sandy Koufax

Team loyalists will be also be intrigued to read Stark’s rankings of the most overrated and underrated players from each franchise. Fans will be stunned to see their beloved heroes such as Ernie Banks and Joe Carter labeled as overrated and the nicknames tagged on them by Stark. The Stark Truth finally brings closure to this classic debate.

About the author:
Jayson Stark covers baseball for ESPN and ESPN.com. Before he joined ESPN.co as senior writer in 2000, he worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer for 21 years, where he reported on the Phillies and served as a national baseball writer and columnist. He was also a columnist for Baseball America for more than two decades. This is his first book. However, his writing has appeared in Chicken Soup for the Baseball Soul, The Phillies Reader, and Worst to First: The Story of the 1993 Phillies. He lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife, Lisa, and three children, Steven, Jessica, and Hali.

The Stark Truth The Most Overrated and Underrated Players in Baseball History

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