Paul O’Neill cut his teeth in the majors with the Cincinnati Reds, breaking in the bigs in 1985. Playing mostly in Rightfield, O'Neill became a starter in 1988, and he was a member of the Reds shocking 1990 World Series championship and was an All-Star in 1991. Following the 1992 Season, O'Neill was traded to the New York Yankees, and it was in pinstripes that he achieved his greatest fame and success.
Dick Groat was one of the greatest college athletes ever at Duke University, where he was so good at both basketball and baseball that he is in both of those sports colligate Halls of Fame. Professionally, Groat opted to play baseball…well at first anyway.
Yes, we know that this is taking a while!
As many of you know, we here at Notinhalloffame.com are slowly generating the 50 of each major North American sports team. That being said, we have existing Top 50 lists out and we always consistently look to update them when we can and based on necessity. As such, we are very happy to present our pre-2021 revision of our top 50 San Francisco 49ers Team of all-time.
As for all of our top 50 players in football we look at the following:
1. Advanced Statistics.
2. Traditional statistics and how they finished in the NFL.
3. Playoff accomplishments.
4. Their overall impact on the team and other intangibles not reflected in a stat sheet.
We could have elected not to mention this at all, as no current 49ers made the Top 50, nor are there any current players on San Francisco who are in the Top 50. Nevertheless, we thought it worthwhile to mention that nothing has changed despite the conclusion of the 2020 season.
As always, we present the top five.
1. Jerry Rice
2. Joe Montana
3. Steve Young
4. Ronnie Lott
You can find the entire list here.
While they were no changes, stay tuned. We will have a lot of list revisions coming up that will!
We welcome your input and comments and as always, we thank you for your support.
You could argue that Al Orth took a workmanlike approach to the craft of Pitching as he made the most of his control and ability to change speeds effortlessly.