Mantle or Mays? A-Rod or Jeter? Biggio or Morgan? Clemens, Maddux, and Randy Johnson -- or Pedro, Palmer, and Carlton? These are questions baseball fans can spend endless hours debating. Former All-Star pitcher and National League Manager of the Year Larr

Introduction Twenty-Five Good Men For many years, avid baseball fans engaged in what were called "hot-stove league" sessions. These meetings were nothing more than informal fan forums. Each fan would express an opinion on such topics as which players were the most valuable, which league was the best, which pitcher had the best fastball or curve, and anything else that might come up. Is Pedro Martinez as good as Bob Gibson was? These meetings still happen, but sometimes there is no meeting place except a website. SABR (The Society for American Baseball Research) meetings are sometimes held without a human voice. Each member (known as asabermetrician) participates on the web whenever it is convenient. It's a far cry from sitting around a hot stove during the winter. Sometimes, a group of friends or fans would start what is called a Rotisserie League under an agreed-upon set of rules for drafting players and allotting points for each player's accomplishments. This became popular and, as you might expect, a lot of folks started gambling on the outcome. Now, it isn't necessary to organize anything. You can sign up for a league and its website will put you on a team and keep score. The broadcasters and writers for almost every team form a league each year and put a bob or two on the outcome, so the badinage continues throughout the summer in the press box. When I was an eighteen-year-old rookie, I participated in what amounted to a traveling hot-stove league with the Astros. It was called a press caravan, but it was more like a medicine show. Several of us Astros players traveled through Texas and Louisiana in January to get the outer-market cities primed for the upcoming season. Our goal was to get a bunch of somnolent Lions Club members to come to a few ball games in Houston. So what if we were a last place team, an expansion team with no real chance to win a pennant? We still needed fans. One time, in Tyler, Texas, I spotted a guy snoozing through our speeches. I couldn't blame him. We were not the best players and we were even worse speakers. But even a middling, cellar-dwelling player was important to a few of the attendees. Real baseball fans are everywhere, even in the remote Piney Woods of East Texas. We always took questions from these folks at the end of our spiel. Oftentimes I was asked what it was like to face Willie McCovey or Pete Rose. Sometimes, we were asked to predict who would win the pennant or offer an opinion on who was the best hitter, Willie Mays or Hank Aaron. On the bus, between cities, we talked about these things ourselves. Each year there was another caravan, offering more hot-stove-type sessions. I loved them. About halfway through my thirteen-year pitching career, we stopped going on these PR trips. I was tired of them at that point anyway. When we cranked them up again in the 1980s, I was halfway through my broadcasting career. As a broadcaster I was the MC of these events, then became the featured speaker when I took over as manager in 1997. I managed the Astros from '97 to 2001 and we won our division in four of those five years, which made it a lot easier to promote the team. After a few years in the broadcast booth, I started writing a column for theHouston Chronicle. Many fans told me they enjoyed reading it, and a few asked when I was going to write a book. "When I retire," I said. Well, I retired in 2001 and wroteThis Ain't Brain Surgeryabout things I had done during my baseball career in Houston. Now, I am back in the booth, and have done just about everything you can do in professional baseball. I have pitched, sold tickets, broadcast, and managed. I have been involved in the building of the team, working with the general manager on free agent signing and trade opportunities. This was no hot-stove baloney. This was the real thing. So I got to thinking about my own all-time