The Major Leagues will not be generating any new baseball for some time, which makes an appropriate time to dip into Important Baseball Lore. The most indispensable baseball writing this offseason for me as been Joe Posnanski's Baseball 100, where he rates his top 100 baseball players of all time and writes essays about each one, and I thought I should shamefully rip that off. So here's the BYCTOM 100*, a series of essays not on the top 100 baseball players of all time, but of lesser heralded players that have floated through the ether of baseball, the players that David Roth refers to as Guys, the foundation of baseball itself that the giants of the sport can homer off them, get butt-slapped by them, and occasionally humiliated by them because baseball is a weird and cruel game.
BYCTOM 100*: Jose Valentin
