The best baseball players born on January 26

Who are the best players born on each day of the year? We have a list for every day on the calendar.

Here’s a subjective ranking of the top five for Jan. 26.

1) Johnny Frederick (1902)
Frederick was the National League’s best rookie in 1929, long before there was an award for such things. The 27-year-old led Major League Baseball with 52 doubles and led the Brooklyn Robins -- the Dodgers went by “Robins” from 1914-31 in honor of manager Wilbert Robinson -- with 24 home runs while slashing .328/.372/.545 in 682 plate appearances. He topped 200 hits in each of his first two seasons in the big leagues. More productive seasons followed, but Frederick never hit for the same power again and by 1934, under new Dodgers manager Casey Stengel, he slipped to a career-low 307 at-bats and was shipped to the Minors after that season, never to return to the big leagues. His 52 doubles in 1929 remained a Dodgers record through the 2022 season.

2) Bob Nieman (1927)
Born in Cincinnati, Nieman hit .295 with 125 home runs over parts of 12 seasons in the Major Leagues with six different teams, and through 2022 he remained the only player to homer in each of the first two at-bats of his big-league debut, according to the Society for American Baseball Research. Only once did he garner MVP votes (in 1956, when he hit .320 with a .436 on-base percentage for the White Sox and Orioles), but Nieman’s career OPS+ of 132 reflects that he was a more productive hitter than he was given credit for. After his playing career he worked as a scout for more than two decades before passing away from a heart attack on the eve of 1985 Spring Training.

3) George Blaeholder (1904)
Blaeholder never posted an ERA below 4.00 until the 10th of his 11 seasons in the Major Leagues, never had a winning record until year 11 and made only one Opening Day start during a career mostly spent with the cellar-dwelling St. Louis Browns. But he left his mark on baseball as the inventor of the slider -- according to some sources, at least. The Sporting News in 1952 and Baseball Digest in 1961 each named Blaeholder the pioneer of the pitch, according to the Society for American Baseball Research, which dedicated an article to Blaeholder’s life and career penned by Gregory H. Wolf.

4) Charlie Gelbert (1906)
Gelbert was the Cardinals’ starting shortstop for most of 1929-32 and starred in a pair of World Series before he was shot in the left leg during a hunting accident in ’32, when he slipped on a rock and his own shotgun went off. He underwent multiple surgeries and missed all of the 1933 season. While he played five more seasons after that, Gelbert was not the same. In 1941, rather than be assigned to the Minors he volunteered for the U.S. Navy.

5) Bob Uecker (1934)
Uecker was a -1.0 WAR player during six seasons with the Braves, Cardinals and Phillies, but that does nothing to explain his influence on baseball and pop culture. He was an accomplished pitcher growing up in Milwaukee but ultimately made a living as a backup catcher, hitting three of his 14 career home runs off Hall of Famers Ferguson Jenkins, Sandy Koufax and Gaylord Perry. For years, Uecker cracked that he worried that would keep those pitchers out of Cooperstown. After his playing career, Uecker briefly worked as a scout for his longtime friend Bud Selig, owner of the fledgling Milwaukee Brewers, but when a report arrived smeared with mashed potatoes and gravy, Selig moved Uecker to the radio booth in 1971, where he worked around stints on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, the popular sitcom _Mr. Belvedere_, an iconic series of Miller Lite television ads and the Major League series of films. Through it all, Uecker remained rooted in baseball. He celebrated his 50th anniversary on the mic for the Brewers in 2021.

Others of note:

Andres Torres (1978)
Torres played parts of nine big league seasons and won a World Series ring with the Giants in 2010, the year he set a career high with 16 homers.

Brian Doyle (1954)
Doyle never drew more than 81 regular-season plate appearances in four years with the Yankees and A’s and never posted a batting average north of the Mendoza Line. But when Yankees second baseman Willie Randolph was sidelined by a leg injury for the 1978 World Series, Doyle picked just the right time to get hot. He batted .438 in that Series, appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated and finished second in World Series MVP Balloting to Bucky Dent.

Want to see more baseball birthdays for Jan. 26? Find the complete list on Baseball Reference.