#Shortstops: Dave Winfield still towers over the game

Fifteen years after his August 5, 2001 Hall of Fame induction in Cooperstown, Dave Winfield is still larger than life.

Even for a giant like Henry Aaron.

A recently digitized 2001 Hall of Fame interview with Aaron offers a unique perspective on the athletic ability of Winfield, who is the only player ever to be drafted by pro teams in baseball, football and basketball.

“For the first time we were taking something away from another sport, like basketball. I hate to say this, but basketball and football have been stealing our athletes for a little while. Now we were stealing somebody away from them. To have him come into baseball, somebody like Dave Winfield, and have the kind of career that he had, makes me feel great.” — Hank Aaron, 2001

Winfield stood a menacing 6-foot-6 and registered 230 pounds in the prime of his career. A baseball player in a power forward’s body, the former outfielder spent 22 MLB seasons with six different organizations, leaving behind a career that left him among the game’s all-time leaders in hits, runs batted in, extra-base hits, and defensive putouts. The 12-time All-Star is one of seven players in MLB history to reach 3,000 hits and 450 home runs. He earned Hall of Fame election in 2001 – becoming the first Hall of Famer to have a Padres logo on his plaque cap – along with Kirby Puckett, Bill Mazeroski, and Hilton Smith -- receiving 84.47 percent of the vote from the Baseball Writers Association of America.

Baseball fans everywhere remember Winfield as a superior all-around athlete who was a staple of consistency throughout his tenure in the big leagues. But since his retirement in 1995 and induction in ’01, the younger generation of baseball fans never got the chance to appreciate how versatile an athlete Winfield was. ESPN ranked him one spot ahead of Bo Jackson -- the football/baseball superstar known more for his elite athleticism than perhaps any athlete in modern sports history — in its 2004 Top 10 list of the best all-around athletes ever, placing him third behind Olympian/baseball player Jim Thorpe and Cleveland Browns great Jim Brown, who also earned All-America honors in lacrosse at Syracuse University.