Trietley: It’s time to give credit to baseball’s underrated players

You’ve probably never heard of Artie Wilson.

He’s one of those people that you don’t… You’ve probably never heard of Artie Wilson.

He’s one of those people that you don’t learn about until he passes away. I hadn’t heard of him until I read his obituary Tuesday afternoon. He died Sunday at the age of 90.

Wilson was the last baseball player to hit .400 in a professional league, hitting .402 in 1948 with the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro Leagues.

That year, he also mentored a 16-year-old Willie Mays. If it weren’t for baseball’s color line, Wilson, as his obituary stated, could have been an All-Star in the majors.

For every mythic baseball legend — did your middle school social studies textbook mention Babe Ruth like mine did? — there is an outstanding player like Wilson whom history overlooked. After reading up on a few of the past’s forgotten stars, it’s time to give credit where it is due and put together an all-underrated baseball team that would crush the Yankees and make the Giants look like amateurs.

Jim Devlin starts on the mound. The 1919 Black Sox Scandal led to “Shoeless” Joe Jackson’s banishment from baseball, a big hullaballoo and a Charlie Sheen movie. The 1877 Louisville Grays scandal, though, gets nothing.

According to Baseball Almanac, Devlin stands third all-time with a career 1.89 ERA. That’s pretty cool, but here’s where it turns into a Hollywood film. In 1877, the owner of the Grays received an anonymous telegram that said, simply, “Watch your men,” according to “The Louisville Grays Scandal of 1877” by William Cook.

After all sorts of twists — including reporter/son-of-team-president/second baseman John Haldeman accusing teammates of throwing games — Devlin confessed to just that. He and three other players received a lifetime ban.

The Grays folded, a ring of New York gamblers were exposed and Devlin died six years later of tuberculosis. At the time of his death, the scandal must have overshadowed what a great, albeit punctuated, career he had. He pitched 622 innings in 1876. He started — and finished — every day for his team.

Catching him is Josh Gibson, who brings a Pittsburgh flavor to the squad. Gibson, like Devlin, died young, and he, like Wilson, excelled in the Negro Leagues. His Baseball Hall of Fame plaque states he hit “almost 800” homers in a career that included stops in Homestead and the Hill District in the 1930s. It’s impossible to tally an exact number, but “almost 800” sounds good enough for my team.

At first base is Sadaharu Oh, who also bats cleanup. He holds the world record when he hit 868 career home runs in Japan. Once again, history forgets Oh because he played in a time before the majors were international.

Across the diamond at third base is Frank Baker. “Home Run” Baker led the American League in dingers for four straight years, from 1911 to 1914. Soon after, that mythic converted-pitcher Ruth stole the spotlight, and not too many folks wax poetic about Baker these days.

But enough of the power: Johnny Evers plays second base. Weighing 125 pounds, according to Baseball Almanac, Evers was the feisty 1900s version of Dustin Pedroia. He and Joe Tinker were the Cubs’ double-play duo for 10 years, but on my team he flips it to Wilson, who played shortstop when he hit .402 with the Black Barons.

Bob Johnson starts in left field. “Johnson never had one of those super seasons that make everyone sit up and whistle,” sports writer Bob Carroll once wrote. “While phenoms came, collected their MVP trophies, and faded, he just kept plodding along hitting .300, with a couple dozen homers and a hundred ribbies year after year … like a guy punching a time clock.”

He drove in 100 runs eight times, hit 20 or more homers nine straight times and hit .300 five times — and was a great fielder. He did most of it with the Philadelphia Athletics in the 1930s and 1940s, but now he’s on my team.

Bobby Bonds roams center field. People recognize him as the father of Barry Bonds, but he had a Hall of Fame-worthy career himself in the 1970s. With speed on the bases, power at the plate and three Gold Gloves, he defines “five-tool player.”

Filling out the roster is right fielder Sam Crawford. “Wahoo Sam” holds unbreakable records for career triples (309) and single-season inside-the-park homeruns (12), a vestige of the bygone small-ball era of baseball.

When Lawrence Ritter set out in 1964 to interview Crawford for what would become the book “The Glory of Their Times,” Crawford’s wife wouldn’t say where he lived beyond “somewhere between 175 and 225 miles” north of Los Angeles, as Ritter recalled in the preface of the book.

So he drove around, asking about Crawford until he ended up in a laundromat in Baywood Park, Calif., in order to get some laundry done. He sat down next to a “tall, elderly gentleman reading a frayed paperback” and asked him if he’d heard of that old tiger named Crawford.

“Well, I should certainly hope so,” the man said, “bein’ as I’m him.”

My players might be overlooked, and you might not recognize their faces, but, man, were they good.