The case is not close, which is the first surprising thing about it. Mike Schmidt hit 548 home runs, won ten Gold Gloves at the hardest infield position, took three Most Valuable Player awards, and led the National League in home runs eight times — a figure matched by almost nobody. He spent all eighteen seasons with one club, won a World Series in 1980 and was its Most Valuable Player, and retired holding more or less every meaningful Phillies record. Ask historians to name the finest third baseman in the game's history and the argument usually finishes before it starts.
The second surprising thing is that Philadelphia booed him. Not occasionally — routinely, for years, at home. Part of it was the strikeouts, of which there were a great many; part of it was a swing that produced long dry spells between the home runs; and part of it was simply that he was undemonstrative in a city that reads calm as indifference. He was a cerebral, self-critical, slightly withdrawn man in a ballpark that wanted somebody to shout. He said later that he had never learned to enjoy the game while he was playing it, which is a sad sentence from a man who played it better than nearly anyone.
He was undemonstrative in a city that reads calm as indifference.
What the boos missed is that the glove was as remarkable as the bat. Third base is a reaction position — the ball arrives before you have finished deciding — and he played it with a first step that scouts still describe as the best they saw. Ten Gold Gloves at third is not a courtesy award; it is a decade of being demonstrably the finest defender at the position, at the same time as being one of the two or three most feared hitters in the league. Very few players have ever been the best in the sport at both halves of their job.
His 1973 Topps card places him on a three-player rookie card, the format Topps used for young players it had not yet decided about, and it is the reason the card is collected the way it is: one of the more attainable rookie cards of an inner-circle Hall of Famer, and one of the few from the early 1970s that turns up in high grade with any regularity. The 1973 set is not a difficult one by the standards of the decade, which keeps the card honest rather than scarce.
He retired abruptly in mid-season in 1989, in tears at the press conference, saying he could no longer play to the standard he expected of himself. Philadelphia, characteristically, adored him from that day forward. Most names in this index were loved while they played. His is here for a career that was easier to admire than to watch, and that reads better every decade.