Speaker was the best of the lot, with Lajoie a close second, but both had their best years elsewhere.  I went with Lou Boudreau.

Funny how the best in Cleveland spent good parts of their peak elsewhere. Jackson, Lajoie, Speaker, Wynn.

I came down to Lajoie and Speaker and went with Lajoie due to his being a 2B vs CF but it was a coin toss.

No shock that Cleveland, while having some great players, doesn't really have the inner-circle HOF guys for more than a few years (Speaker and Lajoie have both been viewed that way at various times, although I don't think either are anymore) despite being around for over a century. Funny that their best of the best were around pre-Ruth though.

Funny that their best of the best were around pre-Ruth though.

Well, yeah, but look at their "next tier" of guys all from the 1990s or slightly earlier -- Vizquel, Lofton, Thome, Belle, Ramirez, Thornton, Jones -- in 10 years, Grady Sizemore will belong at least on that "next tier" list, too. They had a little four- or five-decade dry spell, but they've come out of it just fine.

I tend to think of Speaker as a great Boston Red Sox, even though he played longer in Cleveland. While 1912 is probably his best season, his first year in Cleveland (1916) is almost as impressive.

And they actually named the team after Lajoie for a while...

But I'm going with Feller, recognizing that I'm cutting him quite a bit of slack for the war. But it did cost him almost four full seasons right out of the heart of his career - he went 25-13 with 260 Ks the year before he went away, and 26-15 with 348 Ks the year he got back. Therefore it doesn't take much to imagine him finishing up with 350 wins and more career Ks than Walter Johnson. In which case, this would be a pretty easy choice.

But he did go off to the war...

This is the 18th or 19th poll in this series, something like that, and I think this is the first time that every single one of the nine final candidates received at least one vote. And as I write this, the top three candidates all have between 25 and 32 percent, so it's a close three-way race at the top.

I cast the first vote in this poll, but it was for Boudreau -- Mike G's reasoning in a comment above is exactly what my thought process was, too -- but he's a distant tied-for-fifth right now. Ah, well!

I picked Speaker...not only was he a great player, but a fine manager as well...a record of 617-520, and the 1920 World Series Championship; with the memory of Ray Chapman still fresh in their minds.

I just noticed that the Tribe's last 2 World Series victories occurred with player-managers, Boudreau in 1948 and Speaker in 1920.  I guess Cleveland's next win will be in a few years after they name Grady Sizemore their manager.