As we take our review of the past four decades in baseball into the 21st century, we compare the 2010s with the 2000s. That means taking in the good and the bad, from decadeslong droughts ending and a raft of young superstars emerging to scandals staining the game's integrity.
ESPN.com baseball gurus Sam Miller, Bradford Doolittle and David Schoenfield are here to sort it all out, weighing in on which decade was bigger, better -- and dirtier.
Which decade's coolest player was cooler?
Sam Miller: This is a little stacked against the 2000s, since young players are nearly always the coolest players, and we've now seen the coolest 2000s stars all grow into middle age. That said: The late 2010s were a golden age for cool stars, thanks in part to the trend of young players peaking earlier. Our biggest stars over the past few years were mostly in their early- to mid-20s, which made them more aesthetically pleasing (faster, more active) and cooler. Francisco Lindor and Javy Baez might be the two coolest superstars since Ken Griffey Jr., and Juan Soto is already transcending the game's culture. (For good measure, Adrian Beltre and Bartolo Colon aged into cool status in the 2010s, which is almost unprecedented.) I expect Dave's going to "Yeah, but ..." me with 2000s Ichiro, and that's fair. But in a ranking of the past two decades' most charismatic stars, nine of my first 10 picks might come from the 2010s.
Bradford Doolittle: This question of cool ... I hardly ever associate it with athletes. Some, sure. Bernard King was cool. Satchel Paige. Joe DiMaggio. Everyone who played in the ABA. But there is a mob mentality embedded in professional sports that perverts the notion of cool, meaning that yeah, you'll see athletes referred to in this way, but when you break it down, they are all cool in a very strict, conformist sense. There is a certain amount of fitting in that has to be in place, and the renegades who push back tend to be viewed more as attitude problems than purveyors of cool. Cool is Bob Dylan circa 1965. Cool is Marlon Brando in the years before he broke into movies. Cool is John Coltrane on a smoky San Francisco stage. Cool is the magnetism of Neal Cassady or the quiet brilliance of Joan Didion. So while I don't see a real winner in this category, I'll go with the 2010s because the coolest player is Sean Doolittle. I'm 76% sure I'd write that even if we didn't share a surname. He is good. He is smart. He is not afraid to speak his mind. He celebrated winning the World Series by breaking out a lightsaber. He is organically different, something you just don't get from many contemporary athletes.
David Schoenfield: I feel like there was a lot of anger in the 2000s. There was anger that Barry Bonds was too good. There was anger with the steroids fallout and that we had been conned on some level. There was anger from Red Sox fans toward Yankees fans, and then after 2004, from Yankees fans toward Red Sox fans. There was anger from the small-market teams and everyone was angry at the commissioner and then the Hall of Fame debates got ugly ... and, yes, Ichiro was a breath of coolness, but after his first few seasons he toiled for awful Mariners teams. So, Sam, I'm actually with you 100%. The second half of the 2010s has brought us a long list of charismatic stars and, more important, they've been allowed to be charismatic.
Which decade's best team was better?
Miller: The best single team of the 2000s -- the 116-win 2001 Mariners -- got bopped from the American League Championship Series and never made the playoffs again. The best team of the 2010s -- the 2017 Astros -- had to cheat constantly just to beat, like, the White Sox in basically meaningless regular-season games. So I'm not loving either pick, but will grudgingly admit that even knowing about the banging scheme I'd consider the 2017-19 Astros the most talented club of the past 20 years, probably of my lifetime, and arguably even since World War II. That's part of why it's so frustrating they polluted all the records by cheating constantly in basically meaningless regular-season games against, like, the White Sox.
Doolittle: Looking at the decades as a whole, I guess it has to be the Yankees of the 2000s, though that's not an entirely satisfactory response. The Yankees won the first and last World Series of that decade and four pennants. Only the Giants of the 2010s had more titles in either of the past two decades, and they were the only other franchise to win more than two pennants in one of the 10-year spans. But the Giants had four sub-.500 clubs in the 2010s, just four playoff appearances overall and an aggregate record barely over .500. The Yankees had a .597 winning percentage in the 2000s, were over .500 all 10 seasons and missed the playoffs just once. No one in the 2010s reached that level of consistent excellence, except the Dodgers -- and the lack of a World Series win has to work against them.
Schoenfield: The 2010-14 Giants always feel like a historical anomaly -- the three World Series teams get grouped together, but the 2010 team didn't really have much in common with the 2014 team. Tim Lincecum, for example, was the ace in 2010, but merely a spare part in 2012 and 2014. Plus, the 2012 team (94 wins, plus-69 run differential) and 2014 team (88 wins, plus-51 run differential) were good teams that played really well at the right time. So, for decadelong excellence, the nod goes to the 2000s Yankees. The best single-season team? Well, the 2001 Mariners (plus-300 run differential!) didn't win the World Series so will never be viewed with proper respect. So I'll go with the 2018 Red Sox, who won 108 games and then knocked out the 100-win Yankees, 103-win Astros and powerhouse Dodgers in the postseason.
Which all-decade team would you pick in a winner-take-all showdown?
Miller: If it's each all-decade player at his peak within the decade, I'd take the all-2000s team for a single game: Peak Bonds batting third and peak Pedro on the mound go a long, long way. If this is over the course of a series, then the gap grows: Pedro Martinez (2000), Randy Johnson (2002), Curt Schilling (2001) and Johan Santana (2004) should roll over the best 2010s seasons by Clayton Kershaw, Max Scherzer, Justin Verlander and Zack Greinke, great as they all were.
Doolittle: The 2000s. I put together two quick all-decade teams based on an average season score, including one starting pitcher, one closer and a designated hitter on each squad. So that's 11 spots. The 2000s won seven of the 11 with a comfortable overall edge in season score. The big advantages were at first base (Albert Pujols over Joey Votto), third base (Alex Rodriguez over Kris Bryant) and left field (Barry Bonds over Ryan Braun). The only big win for the 2010s was Mike Trout over Carlos Beltran in center field. While I'll go with the 2000s, I would prefer the starting pitcher for the 2010s: Clayton Kershaw. Whoever takes a lead into the late innings will be fine with either Mariano Rivera or Kenley Jansen closing it out.
Schoenfield: Sounds like the answer is the 2000s, but I know I'd love to see a best-of-29 series with Pedro, Johnson, Schilling, Santana and Roy Halladay squaring off against Kershaw, Scherzer, Verlander, Gerrit Cole and Jacob deGrom.
Best and worst ballparks that have opened since 2000?
Miller: The best is the first one that opened this century: The Giants' Pac Bell Park, now Oracle Park but always the Pacific Belle in my head. I don't have any real antagonism toward any of the new parks, but Marlins Park -- despite some charms -- feels like an antiquated shrine to the extremely fleeting optimism of spring 2012.
Doolittle: Best would be Pittsburgh's PNC Park. Stunning backdrop. Embedded in the heart of the city. Comfortable atmosphere. Has the life of the river beyond the right-field wall. The yellow bridge named after Roberto Clemente. Everything about it is pitch-perfect. I mostly like all of the ballparks that have opened since 2000 -- which accounts for half the facilities currently in use, not including the waiting-to-debut park the Rangers built. The park I like the least is SunTrust Park (now called Truist Park) in Cobb County, Georgia. The park itself is fine and it's cool that they built a kind of neighborhood around it to expand the diversity of revenues generated from the project. But calling the Battery a neighborhood is kind of a stretch. It's more like a baseball bubble. I spent a week there once while taking a ride share to and from the Atlanta airport. At no point did I feel like I was in any kind of geographically distinct place. I'm terrified that the apparent economic success of the Braves' ballpark will lead to a trend of building ballparks away from dense, walkable neighborhoods. Baseball has already made that mistake too often.
Schoenfield: Hard to beat Pac Bell/Oracle or PNC, and it's worth noting that they are two of the smaller parks, at least in terms of physical space (Oracle seats over 41,000 but feels more intimate). Least favorite? None of the new ones are bad, but after spending the National League Championship Series and World Series at Nationals Park, it kind of left me with a "meh" feeling (although to Brad's point, the neighborhood around it is getting built up, but based on the cost of living there, I'm not sure it will be a neighborhood of baseball fans). There is no character on the outside of the stadium and it's so big it's difficult to walk around. On the inside, there isn't really any signature element to the field (well, except when Max Scherzer or Stephen Strasburg is pitching, which would make any park great).
What was each decade's best moment -- and which one was better?
Miller: The Red Sox winning the World Series in 2004, against the Cubs winning the World Series in 2016? (Sorry, White Sox fans! That was great, too.) The Cubs' version was better, for two reasons. One is that the Red Sox's World Series sweep ended the drought so suddenly that there wasn't all that much of a gasp at what we were seeing. The Cubs, meanwhile, won an extra-inning Game 7; they could have lost the World Series on the very same pitch. It would have been an all-time moment even if it had been the Twins beating the Braves.
The other reason is this: The Red Sox finally winning was the resolution of a story that stretched back almost a century. The Cubs finally winning was the resolution of that century. Their drought was the final ongoing baseball storyline from the 1900s, the final front page that a baseball fan in 1950 would understand. Once the Cubs won, we had officially closed the book on 20th-century baseball.
Doolittle: Man, this one is tough. Personally, the best baseball moment of the past two decades was the last out of the 2015 World Series, when the Royals clinched their win over the Mets. But applying a wider lens to this, I'd point to Mike Piazza's go-ahead homer for the Mets at Shea Stadium against the Braves on Sept. 21, 2001, as the most goosebump-inducing moment of the past couple of decades. The final out of the Cubs' thrilling Game 7 win over the Indians in 2016 probably rates atop my list for the 2010s, but nothing could match the context of Piazza's shot.
Schoenfield: I have a confession to make. I didn't cover the 2016 World Series in person, so I was watching Game 7 at home. And as the game unfolded I found myself rooting for ... the Indians. Cleveland had its own tortured history since most recently winning it all in 1948, and frankly, had suffered much, much more than Cubs fans, who had mostly just watched lousy teams since 1950. In the end, this expectation that everyone outside of Chicago was also supposed to root for the Cubs was too much, so I absolutely loved it when Rajai Davis hit that home run. Alas, the Cubs took that punch to the gut and won the game and it was a great moment and I was happy for Cubs fans.
But that's my way of saying the Red Sox win in 2004 gets my nod. They had been bullied for decades by the Yankees, then beat the bully in the most improbable fashion and then ended the curse. Sure, the White Sox and Cubs also ended long droughts, but the Red Sox were the first of the three to do it. First is better. (Of course, with each passing year, as the Red Sox win more titles and have themselves become the bully, 2004 feels less special. But I've never felt happier for another team's fans than I did when the Red Sox finally won.)
Which decade's signature scandal -- steroids vs. sign stealing -- was, umm, juicier?
Miller: Hmm. Using steroids is really rotten, forcing your co-workers -- your fellow union members, your teammates -- to poison their bodies if they want to keep up with you. Stealing signs is underhanded and demands consequences, but what the Astros did is probably closer to a miscalibration -- they misread the sport's precedents, they blew past the limits -- than evil. The fact that the Astros players didn't have to keep their cheating secret from each other, but steroids users mostly did, captures the shame levels of each.
Doolittle: Neither. If only we could quantify moral relativism.
Schoenfield: At least you didn't ask about stats versus scouts.