Baseball's November Birthday Dream Team

Issue #489

Note: I’ll do the same as what follows for each month going forward, much closer to the end of each month—I fell behind on this one the past couple of weeks!

As readers of recent November editions of The Baseball Buffet saw, there were plenty of great players in the history of baseball who had November birthdays. Several years ago, I created an All-Time Dream Team for November birthdays (I did this for each of the 12 months). So I thought I’d provide an update of this for all of my new readers that came onboard in 2025.

Demographic oddities aside, on average you'd expect each all-time birthday month roster to be composed of about 1/12th of the top players from throughout baseball history. This means these rosters are going to be pretty loaded with talent! Because of this, I’m going to use a large, but strict, 40-man roster size for these all-time dream teams, similar to MLB’s roster size protecting players from Rule 5 drafts and the like.

Looking back at all of the Birthday Boys that I highlighted in The Baseball Buffet throughout November, here is the dream team that I’ve come up with:

As you will see over time as I update my monthly birthday dream teams, each is relatively stronger at some positions, and weaker at others. In the above depth chart, clearly the November roster is strong in CF: Ken Griffey Jr. and Joe DiMaggio? Yes please!

This roster interestingly also has arguably the greatest starting pitcher of all time in Walter Johnson and the greatest closer of all time in Mariano Rivera.

In fact, the rotation is pretty stacked with Seaver, Gibson, Feller, and your pick of several others for the fifth spot. And ditto for the bullpen after Rivera with Papelbon, Nathan, Nen, and the others listed above. And the rest of the battery is solid too with two catchers that I think would be in anyone’s all-time top-10 in Iván Rodríguez and Roy Campanella (or switch the order, if you prefer).

David Ortiz is of course one of the greatest designated hitters of all-time. And Stan the Man? He is an overall top-20 all-time player for me, and I slotted him at 1B here since the other candidates there were a bit weaker than the options I had for RF and LF.

On the other hand, besides Musial, the corner OF spots and rest of the infield isn’t as strong as you might expect for a birthday month All-Time Dream Team. Plenty of great players here of course, but 2B in particular would appear to be the weak link as I don’t consider Bid McPhee or Dick McAuliffe to be among the top-12 second basemen of all time.

Lastly, I mentioned Griffey Jr. and DiMaggio as the superstar CF on this roster, but I also want to give a hat tip to Negro Leagues star Cristóbal Torriente, who was born in Cuba and played all three outfield positions from 1920-28. The official data we have only adds up to 646 games, but he was outstanding with a slash line of .340/.427/.523 and a 158 OPS+. He led his league in BA once, OBP three times, SLG twice, and doubles twice. Playing mostly CF, and only for nine years with limited data, I can’t rank him over Griffey or DiMaggio—but I certainly think he deserves a spot on this dream team roster.

For some further fun, here are how starting lineups, against righties and lefties, could look:

Against RHP:

Against LHP:

I always like to look for platoon options for dream team lineups. But I also want to have the very best players in both lineups, so here that meant DiMaggio, Griffey, and Musial. As I noted earlier, with lots of RF and LF candidates, Musial is playing 1B, with Ryan Howard being a power bat on the bench. I couldn’t see Ortiz not being the DH at least against right-handers, so that meant shifting Griffey over to RF in that lineup.

The real challenges came at C, 3B, LF, and SS—as this roster has mostly right-handed batters at these positions. So I’ve listed two guys at each of those spots, with Gary Sheffield, Bob Johnson, and Bill Freehan also deserving some playing time. Sheffield’s intimidating bat is hard to keep out of the mix in LF or 3B, but he provides less defense than the other guys.

The hardest spot to choose a starter is perhaps LF. With Musial being used at 1B, there are three candidates, all of whom hit right-handed and had pretty even splits against RHP and LHP. You could make a case for any of these guys:

So almost identical WAR from an almost identical number of plate appearances. Pretty similar OPS+ with Johnson having a bit of an edge. He had the most power of the three, with Minoso having the most speed. For what its worth, they even have nearly identical defensive WAR totals for their careers. In terms of seasons, here is some further breakdown:

You could make a case for any of these three guys, but for the lineups above I gave the slightest of edges to Medwick and Miñoso, based on Medwick’s peak offensive seasons and Miñoso’s all-around combination of power and speed (and because segregation kept him out of the AL/NL for the first several years of his career, hurting his career numbers here a bit.)

As for the starting pitchers, the ace amongst aces here is arguably the greatest pitcher of all time, Walter Johnson. After him, I like Seaver second and Gibson third. Bob Feller of course lost most of four prime seasons to service in World War II. If that hadn’t happened, perhaps he’d rank ahead of Gibson and Seaver, but as it is he is an extremely strong fourth.

For the fifth spot in this rotation I went with Curt Schilling, but there are plenty of other good starting pitchers who’ve had November birthdays, so adding just a few more to this roster wasn’t an easy task. I went with Jim Kaat, Luis Tiant, Lefty Gomez, and Dwight Gooden, and you could make a case for any of them as the preferred guy for the fifth spot in the rotation over Schilling.

For relievers, this November Birthdays Dream Team is truly blessed. Not only was the greatest closer ever, Mariano Rivera, born in November, but many other great relievers have been as well. I ended up including eight to fill out the full 40-man roster, though after Rivera you could certainly debate how to best rank them (or include some others that I did not).

Below are all of the other Birthday Boys that I mentioned in the 30 editions of The Baseball Buffet during November (listed in alphabetical order by primary position.)

Do you think any of them should have made the 40-man dream team roster above? Keep in mind that the Dream Team above is based on career achievements—if you instead created one based on the best single-seasons for each player, it would look a bit different. For instance, Cal Raleigh’s outstanding 2025 campaign would vault him onto the roster for sure!

C

1B

2B

3B

SS

OF

SP

SP/RP

RP

Did you know? I wrote a 600+ page book with the same title as this newsletter/blog? Now Taking the Field: Baseball’s All-Time Dream Teams for All 30 Franchises was published in early 2019, by ACTA Sports. It is available at Amazon and most other major booksellers.

This newsletter was produced with beehiiv.