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 Sept. 5.

1) Nap Lajoie (1874)
Hall of Famer Napoleon Lajoie set – and still holds – one of baseball’s most unbreakable records by hitting .426 in 1901, the highest mark by any AL or NL player since the birth of the American League that same year. That came with the Philadelphia A’s, but he’d end up with Cleveland in 1902, soon add “manager” to his title, and remain there until 1914, by which time the team had been named after him (as the Cleveland Naps) for a decade. To say he’d made an impact might be underselling it somewhat; to this day, he has the third-highest WAR of any second baseman in history.

2) Bill Mazeroski (1936)
Mazeroski is a baseball immortal because he did just about the coolest thing a pro baseball player can do, which is to hit a walk-off home run in Game 7 of the World Series, as he did in 1960. (Nevermind that it wasn’t even necessarily the most valuable Pirates play of the final two innings of the game, much less all time; legends have no time for facts.) Mazeroski stuck around for parts of 17 seasons in Pittsburgh, adding a second ring in 1971, and made 10 All-Star games while gaining a reputation as one of the best-fielding second basemen ever.

3) Max Bishop (1899)
In baseball history, there are only three players to take at least 5,000 career plate appearances and draw a walk in at least 19.5% (or, as we’d round up to, 20%) of them. You know Barry Bonds. You know Ted Williams. You don’t know the third, “Camera Eye” Bishop, who won a pair of World Series titles playing second base for the late-1920s Philadelphia A’s. He’d go on to spend a quarter-century as Navy’s head baseball coach, and today their field carries his name.

4) Chris Young (1983)
That’s the outfielder Chris Young, not the former pitcher and current Rangers GM Chris Young. This Young rose to prominence manning center field for some occasionally good Arizona teams from 2006 through 2012, before seeing time with five other clubs. A 2010 All-Star, Young hit double-digit home runs in nine consecutive seasons; through 2022, he was the only D-back with three different 20/20 years.

5) Jeff Brantley (1963)
A 14-year veteran of the Majors, Brantley came up with the Giants and made his only All-Star team with San Francisco, but he is best remembered in Cincinnati, where he holds the Reds’ all-time single-season saves record (through 2021) with 44 in 1996, then, following his retirement, ended up joining the Reds broadcast team.

Others of note:
Ron Rightnowar (1964)
“Ron Rightnowar” is an objectively cool name, though he managed only 36 2/3 innings in his playing career. Much later, he became a loan officer at a Toledo-area bank, which is a considerably less cool job than Major Leaguer.

Candy Maldonado (1960)
If you’re a Giants fan, you might remember Maldonado mostly due to his crushing defensive mistake that helped the Cardinals score the only run they’d need on their way to a 1-0 victory in Game 6 of the 1987 NLCS, but it would be unfair for that miscue to overshadow the highlights he had across 15 years in the Majors, especially after a relatively unmemorable first five years with the Dodgers. Maldonado was something of a playoffs magnet, appearing in October six times, including hitting a walk-off single in Game 3 of the 1992 World Series, the first one ever played outside of the United States.

Al Orth (1872)
Orth -- who spent parts of 15 seasons in the Majors around the turn of the 20th century pitching for the Phillies, Senators and Highlanders (today’s Yankees) -- had a fantastically interesting nickname: “The Curveless Wonder.” Of course, Orth ended up picking up an even better weapon upon arriving in New York halfway through his career, the spitball, reportedly taught to him by Jack Chesboro. Orth was also one of the better-hitting pitchers of his time, hitting 12 home runs in what was still very much a dead ball era. After retiring, he spent six seasons as an umpire in the National League.

Want to see more baseball birthdays for Sept. 5? Find the complete list on Baseball Reference.