The Yankees 1995 Top 10 Is One Of The Best Ever
Image credit: Jorge Posada (left), Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera (Photo by Rich Schultz/Getty Images)
One of the best — if not the best — top 10 prospect lists of all-time, was led by Ruben Rivera at No. 1.
Whoops!
Jokes aside, we took a trip into the Baseball America archive following the election Tuesday night of baseball’s newest Hall of Fame class — Mariano Rivera, Edgar Martinez, Roy Halladay and Mike Mussina. Rivera received 100 percent of the votes, becoming the first player to ever be unanimously voted into the hall by the Baseball Writers Association of America.
And yet the highest Rivera checked in on a top 10 list was No. 9 in 1995, trailing Derek Jeter (soon to be in the Hall of Fame), Andy Pettitte (who has an outside shot at one day gaining entry) and Jorge Posada (a member of the Core Four, but a player who fell off the ballot in 2017).
The list was loaded. Here’s the full top 10:
- Ruben Rivera, of
- Derek Jeter, ss
- Andy Pettitte, lhp
- Russ Davis, 3b
- Brien Taylor, lhp
- Matt Drews, rhp
- Jorge Posada, c
- Tate Seefried, 1b
- Mariano Rivera, rhp
- Brian Buchanan, of
Jeter, Pettitte, Posada and Mariano Rivera combined for 231.7 bWAR and won five championship.
It’s as competitive as any top 10 since we began ranking them. Only the 1988 and 89 Mariners Top 10, featuring Ken Griffey Jr., Edgar Martinez and Omar Vizquel, and the Dodgers 1992 and 93 top 10s featuring Pedro Martinez and Mike Piazza, are the other top 10s we’ve found so far with multiple Hall of Famers.
Surely, others will catch attention — the Dodgers in the early 1990s jump to mind — but it’s tough to top a list with multiple Hall of Famers on it. There were some near-misses, too: Mussina and Curt Schilling missed each other by one year (1990, 1991).
We encourage everyone to check out our full archive of top 10 lists from 1983 through 2010, which can be found here.
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