ESPN recently released its ranking of the 100 greatest baseball of all time, and there is one player who is distinct from the others on the list: Sandy Koufax. With the exception of the still-active Mike Trout and Bryce Harper, the others all enjoyed careers of both dominance and longevity. Koufax, however, packed almost all of his greatness into an extraordinary five-year run from 1962 to 1966, when he won 111 games, five ERA titles, three Cy Young Awards and two World Series. Just over 79% of his career value came in those five seasons, and even though he threw his last pitch 56 years ago, that peak was enough to rank Koufax No. 32 on our list and make him a first-ballot Hall of Famer.
With the recent Hall of Fame voting results in mind as well, I thought it would be fun to select what we'll call the All-Sandy Koufax Team: players who packed most of their career value into a five-year peak of excellence (and note that for five-year peak, we're considering a player's five best overall seasons via Baseball-Reference WAR, not necessarily five consecutive seasons). To make our team even more interesting, for each position we'll list one non-Hall of Famer and one similar Hall of Famer. The Hall of Fame generally rewards longevity over peak, but maybe some of these guys deserve stronger Hall of Fame consideration.
