There’s no doubt who the greatest Yankee was, because he was also our single greatest citizen and president. No matter how you cut it, Abraham Lincoln is at the top of the list of greatest Yankees ever, and the guy in second place is a distant second, even though he’s another man who can never be compared to any other.
Second on the list is George Washington, who doesn’t really deserve to have Washington DC named after him. George Washington got things done, important things, life and death things. DC is known for childishness and fear-mongering, 2 things George Washington would never be associated with. Want proof? Look at Valley Forge.
Thomas Jefferson is the 3rd greatest Yankee, and a complex choice at that. When in the course of human events comes from the same guy who owned slaves and then some. Jefferson gave us so much that it sometimes seems impossible for one man to have done what he did, said what he said, wrote what he wrote. But, far as we know, it was all him.
I wanted to put the number 4 greatest Yankee in a higher slot, but just couldn’t. Had he been president, Ben Franklin might have moved up a place or two, maybe. As it is, he’s number 4, and yes I think there’s a very good chance that he came back as Winston Churchill during the war years. He may have been the socially smartest guy who ever lived, both he and Churchill.
The 5th greatest Yankee was Teddy Roosevelt, just because.
Okay, his cousin is 6th. FDR was a toughie who dealt with Stalin and Hitler, and came out on top of both, sort of. What kind of man does it take to deal with 2 of the most evil psychopaths the world has ever seen? We can flip-flop Teddy and FDR, I guess, if you want to.
The 6th was Ike. He’s been wrongly overlooked by people for 70-some years, but without him we may not have won WWII and we may not have an interstate highway system. I don’t think he played baseball very much. There’s one tag.
Number 7 was Thurgood Marshall, who just barely qualifies as a Yankee, being born in Baltimore but what the hell. Sometimes you have to add a man to a list just for being a good man, and Mister Marshall surely was a good man who did a lot of things first.
JFK is number 8, just because he made America feel good about itself, just for a little while.
Number 9 is JD Salinger, who wrote “Catcher in the Rye” and was kind of a goof. Who cares?
Number 10. I guess it has to be Joe Mauer, the only catcher to win 3 batting championships and is going to win more if he can fix his health. Currently playing first base, and that takes care of all the tags I need.