The Baseball Thread

OOPS! I jinxed his streak by listening to his last at bat while driving home. Good thing the Marlins dumped him.

I actually like Zambrano, even though he acts like a colossal jerk a lot of the time. He's always tough on the Cardinals, which drives their fans insane, so that erases a good deal of his sin as far as I'm concerned. But I can't help thinking his days are numbered in Chicago. The last guy who walked out on the team in the middle of a game was Sammy Sosa, and he kept on walking all the way to Baltimore, so there's precedent here.

The media have just been merciless in their criticism of Big Z ("The Cubs can't thank him enough for leaving"), while the fans are just hoping that the Cubs get to use the remainder of his salary to buy a big name free agent in the off-season (Albert P., are you still there?) -- I'm sure there's a bunch of people who'd be even happier if Alfonso Soriano would also suffer a meltdown and quit the team.

congrats jim thome on #600...

I think Jim Thome might be the guy who breaks the rule that anybody with 600 or more homers (and who didn't take steroids) gets to go into the Hall of Fame. It used to be that all a guy had to do was hit 500 homers to get into the Hall, but then stiffs like Rafael Palmeiro did it and it suddenly stopped looking so impressive. But 600 is still mighty impressive. Ken Griffey Jr. won't be eligible until 2015, but he'll probably get in. Thome, however, is another matter entirely. He's had a long career and a fairly good average over that span (.277 lifetime), but he strikes out A LOT and he's basically been nothing but a DH since 2004. In other words, he's a guy who is paid to hit home runs and who, not surprisingly, has hit a bunch of home runs. I'm not sure that's enough to get a plaque in the Hall.

disagree -- i think 600 gets him in on the first ballot, no questions asked.
reggie struck out more times, and he's in with 563 dingers.

thome's career .961 OPS is impressive as well...

Like I said, that was back in the day when 500 HR was an automatic ticket to induction. It ain't that way anymore. I'm not sure if a guy with Reggie Jackson's numbers could get into the Hall now.


That's an overrated stat. Larry Walker has a better career OPS, and he had a better overall career than Thome has had so far. This year was Walker's first year of eligibility for the HoF -- he got 20.3% of the votes.

Nuff ced.

Thome's high .OPS speaks to his walks total (1,700), which should be considered in the strikeouts argument.

Nobody walks into the Hall of Fame. Just ask Eddie Yost.

Right, but we have to consider whether a high k-rate is a relevant critique for a guy who can also take pitches.

A-Rod should have both Reggie and Thome beat eventually.

500 is still an accomplishment -- only 25 players have done it in MLB history.

#26 will most likely be pujols -- none of the other active players appear capable of getting there...

A strikeout is a strikeout. It is considered on its own merits. Somebody who strikes out a lot doesn't make fewer outs because he also walks a lot. And those walks would be a lot more valuable if Thome had any speed, but he doesn't, and he never has.


Rodriguez's numbers are several orders of magnitude better than Thome's. And, like I said, if Reggie Jackson played in the 2000s rather than the 1970s, I doubt he'd get into the Hall of Fame with his numbers. His .262 career batting average is just embarrassing. Ozzie Smith had a .262 career batting average, fer chrissake!

No doubt. I'm still waiting to hit my first major league homer, so I have to give credit to anyone who can hit 500. But then getting inducted into the Hall of Fame is an accomplishment too. You're not suggesting that anyone who hits 500 homers should be inducted into the HoF, based solely on that criterion, are you?

no, but anyone who hits 600 should be a shoe-in...

(cheaters bonds & sosa being the dubious exceptions...)

Untrue. A relatively large portion of the outs he does make are strikeouts, but he absolutely makes fewer outs because he walks.

In fact, doesn't OBP essentially measure a player's ability to not make an out? Thome's career OBP is .403, 130 points higher than his career batting average.

Hall-of-famer Andre Dawson had about 1,000 fewer strikeouts than Thome in as many seasons, but his OBP was only .323. Dawson was substantially more likely to make an out than Jim Thome. Does it matter that his outs were pop-ups or dribblers? Should a player's value be impacted at all by the types of outs he makes?

contact advances base runners.

whiffs don't.

I must have phrased that wrong. Thome makes as many outs as he makes. If he strikes out twice in a game and walks once, that doesn't mean he made one out in total. And I recognize that a walk isn't an out. I umped little league for a number of years -- that's one of the first things they taught us.


Well, OBP measures a player's ability to get on base, so I suppose it's two sides of the same coin. And I'm not surprised that Thome's OBP is higher than his batting average. After all, it can't be lower.


As much as I personally like Andre Dawson, I'm not convinced that he should be in the Hall of Fame either. I don't see much difference between Dawson and Fred McGriff, except that Dawson won an MVP award in a big city with a popular ball club, while McGriff labored in near-anonymity in places like Atlanta and Tampa Bay. Yet Dawson is in the Hall and McGriff isn't. Go figure.


As Rockhead points out, there are productive outs and non-productive outs. A strikeout is almost always a non-productive out.

But even more productive is to not make an out at all, which is why walks and OPS are relevant stats. While OPS in a single season can be deceiving, over the length of a 21-year career it is a reasonably reliable measure of a player's ability to produce runs, which should be the chief measure of his offensive value. Though obviously there should be a benchmark for slugging percentage, as a player who can hit the **** out of the ball is more valuable than one whose high OPS is largely the result of walks.

And only good contact tends to advance baserunners. We use batting average, traditionally, to measure contact. Thome's has been established--not amazing, but not so bad as to draw the criticism he's getting for striking out. Anyway, it goes without saying that OPS is indicative of a player's ability to advance baserunners, so in the context of Thome Rock's point is moot.

Personally, being a long-time baseball fan, I feel that the high amount of strikeouts a player has had is but one issue or drawback to Cooperstown status - but it's no THE issue. (After all, Babe was a high strike-out hitter, but for sure it doesn't disqualify him or many of the other great HOF players who struck out a lot .)

But, couple his strikeout totals and his less-than-stellar productive years in his declining years, he has a weight on his Cooperstown vote. You can't penalize him ytoo much for his later years that he is a DH, but it doesn't earn him a lot of positive votes either. It's all dependent on his competition with respect to the group that is up for votes at time of his eligibility.

As for Fred McGriff eligibility: may he NEVER enter Cooperstown. He's tainted big time with steroids.

My concern is mainly the following: What was his value to his team? I know from looking at Thome's record, that he's had 12 walk-off home runs. Whether or not any or all of these HRs won the game or not I have no idea. that does matter a bit. How many game winning hits has he produced for his team.

So that brings to my mind this (unanswerable) question and one answerable one:

How many team MVPs has Thome won? Off-hand, I know of no MLB MVP awards he has won?

Silver Slugger awards do count, too, in order to determine his worthiness of entering the hallowed Cooperstown. Part of the sniff test for his being voted in is: has he ever been considered the best hitter of his most productive era. an in his 'off years', how consistant was he?

My thought off thye top of my head is that he's never been good enough to be considered more than one of the Top 5 hitters of his best most productive years. And when he was that productive, for how long was in the elite category?

I'm going to look at a cross-reference of stats as to what years that he was most productive and compare that relative to the most elite hitters of those years.

Any of this make sense?

he's a product of the designated hitter rule.

and a bad base runner.