Ranking the 10 best players from those Jim Thome-era teams in Cleveland

Jim Thome sailed into the Hall of Fame Wednesday, garnering 89.8 percent of the vote to cap a magnificent career for one of the most prolific sluggers in baseball history.

Thome's peak years stretched from 1995 to 2002. During that eight-year span, he blasted 304 homers, knocked in 832 runs, scored 816, and batted a huge .293/.426/.588. Those numbers ranked him third among all American League hitters in park-adjusted offense, and second in Wins Above Replacement. Led by Thome, the perennially hapless Cleveland franchise snapped a 41-year playoff drought, bagging five straight postseason berths from 1995-1999, and six during Thome's eight-year peak (six in seven years, if you exclude Cleveland's fall below .500 in 2002).

Thome was just one of many pivotal players on those great teams who helped turn Cleveland baseball from the subject of dark comedy to the home of sold-out crowds and transcendent on-field action. What's more, two of those teams' biggest stars also appeared on this year's Hall of Fame ballot, only to fall short.

To honor Thome and one of the greatest collections of talent to ever fall short of World Series glory, let's roll out our top 10 players from Cleveland's magical run of 1995-2001.

10. Dave Burba

Burba spent just four and a half seasons in Cleveland, and never posted an ERA lower than 4.11 during that time. Of course, context is everything: In his three best seasons in town, he delivered ERAs that were 16, 17 and 10 percent better than league average during the home-run hootenanny that was the late 90s and early 00s, while averaging more than 200 innings pitched during that three-year stretch. Burba never came close to winning a major award, and he never made an All-Star team. But there's still glory and valor in being a really good number-three starter for one of the most entertaining teams of the late 20th century.

9. Dave Justice

One of the odd little nuggets of these Cleveland teams was that management traded away turbo-charged leadoff man Kenny Lofton when he was in his prime. The good news is that Lofton returned to Cleveland a year after the trade thanks to free agency. Also good news: Justice came over in the Lofton deal with Atlanta, bringing additional left-handed juice to an already stacked lineup, smashing 96 homers in three and a half seasons, including an obscene .329/.418/.596 effort in 1997, his first year in Cleveland and the best season of his excellent career.

Considering how great even the secondary players were on these ubertalented Cleveland clubs, you're going to find yourself asking yourself, "How the hell didn't they win one?!" more than once as we stroll through this list. (That, or just shake a fist in the direction of Yankee Stadium.)

8. Charles Nagy

He might not be Feller or Lemon, but Nagy quietly ranks among the greatest pitchers in team history. He made 297 starts across 13 seasons in a Cleveland uniform, topped 200 innings pitched every year from 1996 through 1999, and if we still cared about such things in baseball's stats-savvy modern era, we might marvel at his five straight seasons with 15 or more wins too. When you're backed by the likes of Thome, Ramirez, Belle, Alomar, and company, simply taking the ball and providing bulk innings every fifth day (and into October) counts for a lot. Nagy was a workhorse who also mixed in flashes of brilliance, including a '96 campaign in which he logged 222 innings with an ERA 43 percent better than league average.

7. Bartolo Colon

Long before he became the GIF king of baseball, Colon was a nasty (and svelte!) ace, establishing himself as one of the best right-handers in the league in 1998, his first full season in the bigs.

Some short-sighted observers might similarly dismiss Colon as the player the Expos royally overpaid to acquire during the contraction-threatened 2002 season. But it's worth remembering that Colon carried a microscopic 2.55 ERA at the time of the momentous deal that netted future All-Stars Brandon Phillips, Cliff Lee, and Grady Sizemore. And that he was still battling major league hitters at age 44 last season, having outlasted two of the three prospect pups who went the other way in that deal 16 years ago.

6. Albert Belle

Another player who'd already put up huge numbers before Cleveland's big run began, Belle only got to sample two years of playoff baseball by the lake before seeking bigger dollars in Chicago. But oh, were those 1995 and 1996 seasons majestic. In those two years, the hulking slugger combined to crush 98 home runs, knock in 274(!) runs, and score 245. Belle finished second in MVP voting in '95 and third in '96, and performed better than the players who actually won the award in each of those years (granted, other stars outshone Belle by Wins Above Replacement in each of those years too).

Belle never got a sniff in his own quest for baseball immortality, fetching just 7.7 percent of Hall of Fame votes in his first year on the ballot before falling off entirely the second time. Still, Belle had a little Dick Allen in him, posting peak numbers that were Nintendo-esque, only to get overlooked due to an abrupt and premature end to his career. Belle's ornery on-field demeanor similarly chafed some writers in a way that evoked the backlash against Allen's give-no-F's mentality. But with apologies to Fernando Vina, Belle should be remembered as a terror at the plate and a vital cog in a dominant lineup, above all else.

5. Omar Vizquel

Only on teams as loaded as Cleveland's could a player with 11 Gold Gloves and more games played at shortstop than anyone in MLB history be so overshadowed. The enduring images for these great clubs was probably Kenny Lofton dancing off first, followed by Thome, Belle, or Manny Ramirez launching a ball into orbit. But Cleveland boasted several stellar defenders during the team's mid-90s to early-00s heyday, none better than Vizquel.

He may have lacked the offensive credentials to warrant serious Hall of Fame consideration. He may have been one of the greatest subtle punchlines in the history of the greatest TV comedy of all time. But Vizquel played a huge role in making Cleveland a run-prevention powerhouse, even as the club gained greater acclaim for its thunder at the plate. That's still a hell of a legacy to leave behind.

4. Roberto Alomar

Robbie joined his All-Star catcher brother in Cleveland for the 1999 season, and instantly gave the team an enormous lift, clocking three straight All-Star appearances (the 10th, 11th, and 12th of his career) and two top-four MVP finishes. Cleveland was the fourth stop in Alomar's Hall of Fame career, and he'd end up wearing three more uniforms before hanging up his spikes.

You won't find many Hall of Famers who played for seven different teams over the course of their careers. But rather than attribute those many stops to anything negative, better to think of Alomar as a linchpin player for some of the greatest teams of his era, with the '99-'01 Cleveland teams topped only by the back-to-back '92-'93 champs in Toronto that launched his career into orbit.

3. Kenny Lofton

If any player's reputation got dinged by the eye-popping power surge that dominated the PED era, it was Lofton. Even after adjusting for the high offensive standards of his career timeline, Lofton's .299/.372/.423 batting line, his 622 stolen bases and near 80 percent SB success rate, and the killer range in center field that made him a four-time Gold Glove winner should have warranted serious Hall of Fame consideration; Lofton falling off the ballot after his first try remains one of the strongest indictments against Hall of Fame voters' collective awareness of history, and context.

Listen to Lofton talk about his career in this podcast we recorded during the 2016 playoffs, and you'll instantly become a front-of-the-line cheerleader for his Hall candidacy.

2. Manny Ramirez

The great Cleveland teams of this era fell short due to bad luck and happenstance, but also due to lousy timing. The '94 club was already starting to come into its own and would've been a terrifying wild-card entrant in that year's playoffs, if not for the greed of MLB owners leading to the only cancelled postseason of the past century. Those same petty owners did finally agree to a plan that would eventually bring meaningful revenue sharing to the sport. Still, that change happened gradually, and lacked the additional push that massive TV deals and Internet revenue would later deliver.

The end result is that superstars like Ramirez eventually signed with richer teams, breaking apart one of the greatest collections of homegrown talent in franchise history. You can trace both the end of Cleveland's incredible run and the end of Boston's 86-year curse back, in large part, to Ramirez using free agency as a springboard to gigantic sums of money with the Red Sox. Good for Manny for getting paid, bad for Cleveland fans that the cash and momentum generated by a new ballpark and years of winning weren't enough to keep him in town.

1. JI- ………...JIM THOME

Forget being one of the greatest sluggers of all time. Thome -- or at least his alter ego WordUpThome -- just might be the greatest character in the history of the Internet.