Thanks for saying so dahsdebater. While I might put Foxx a notch higher above Yaz or F.Robinson that you put him, I fully agree about the Thomes and Griffey - the latter was himself a great player. But as you say, the performance in the context of the 60s stands out.
Frank Robinson was MVP in both leagues and at a time when Mays, Aaron, Mantle and a whole of other all time greats played.
Yaz in 1967 did more to carry a whole team into the World Series than any other individual player I can think of.
Griffey was great, but I cannot imagine him doing that. And though health issues and injuries interfered with what else he might have done, he did play in both leagues and was not Frank Robinson.
jeff1964, I hear you. But when I was growing up, and maybe this is a problem with being a Yankees fan, where as someone has said, the real competition is not with other teams so much as with previous Yankees history, I had the impression that there were few contemporary players who could stand in the same league with Ruth, Cobb, Dimaggio, Hornsby etc. It was almost a "descent of man" approach, each generation seeming just a little weaker than the ones before.
This is not how I see things now of course, but that is what it looked like at the time. Only more recently do I see how good "modern" players have been, yet the trend toward seeing more recent players as superior (I have good friends, closer baseball watchers than I who think this) has taken a hit with the steroids issue, which has now brought the opposite idea of constant progress into question as well.
It is more fun to now have to really work it out without being able to either a) assume Ruth and the early players were automatically giants compared to current players or b) that Barry Bonds and company leave all the previous generations of players in their dust.
How good have the shortstops of the past 20 years been compared with the generation of the 1930s or 1940s?
Who is Griffey comparable to historically ?
What baseball critics of past decades made inane comments like those of boogerlips?
Much more interesting, no?