Hall Of Fame...

#51
#51
Maddux was great throwing good pitches where they needed to be. Pedro had the best stuff since the Hebrew for the Dodgers. Both are anomolies for their era. (Petey and Maddux)
 
#52
#52
JTrainDavis said:
Maddux was great throwing good pitches where they needed to be. Pedro had the best stuff since the Hebrew for the Dodgers. Both are anomolies for their era. (Petey and Maddux)
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Maddux was my hero. Dude done things with a baseball that was just not natural. And to be such a goofy looking bastage, was athletic as all get out.
 
#54
#54
NYYVol said:
Lee done it across the span of an entire career and was dominant for a period.

If Blyleven got in, so should Smith.
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If we're going to decide that 70-inning-a-year pitchers are HOF-worthy because someone invented the "save" and therefore the "closer," then I don't see how Smith isn't one of the first ones in. He basically defined that role.
 
#55
#55
Vercingetorix said:
If we're going to decide that 70-inning-a-year pitchers are HOF-worthy because someone invented the "save" and therefore the "closer," then I don't see how Smith isn't one of the first ones in. He basically defined that role.
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Theres the guy i wanted to show up for this thread.:hi:
 
#57
#57
JTrainDavis said:
Theres the guy i wanted to show up for this thread.:hi:
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Thanks. I like all the same guys you guys like, pretty much. I tend to heavily favor players with stretches of real greatness; I don't care too much what their career totals end up being. To me, a guy is either a HOF-quality player or not; the numbers he compiles in his late 30s don't mean much. A HOF case should be made or not in a players prime, not his decline.

Example: Everybody in the media at this point seems to consider Chipper Jones a lock. MVP, one of the two or three best switch-hitters in history, etc. etc. Well, I've watched at least of some of the vast majority of the games he's played in his career, and I'd vote no. Jones has been a very, very good player for a long time, but I don't know that he's ever risen to the level of being a great player. I'd vote for Dale Murphy over Chipper Jones.

Counterexample: Fernando Valenzuela should be in. I don't care that he was great for only five years and then mediocre for another 12. Those five years were a hell of a lot greater than anything Bert Blyleven ever had.
 
#58
#58
Chipper Jones? haha. I had to walk that one off, I see your point.

Compiling stats and the "magic #" are the bane of the HoF. I'm like you, best 6 seasons, in a row, and i'll consider it.

As a Sox Fan, i throw out Lynn and Evans, neither are HoF caliber, but their peaks and career + stats are better than lots of fan favorites. I think it's a 5-8 year period of owning your position, not counting 1b or DH
 
#59
#59
I'm serious about Chipper. Believe me, I watch all the games, and a couple of years ago the attitude of national announcers turned from "will Chipper make the HOF?" to "of course Chipper Jones should make the HOF." His batting title a couple of years ago seemed to push everyone over the edge. I'll be shocked if he doesn't make it.

And honestly, when you stack his numbers up to the guys who are already in there, he probably "ought" to go in. Career batting average over .300. Career OBP over .400. If he plays this year, he'll probably end up with 450 HRs. Career OPS of .941, which is actually pretty amazing. If you go by career stats, Chipper's a cinch HOFer. If your standard is "was the guy ever a truly great player?" then no, not really. I never quite saw it.

But of course if that's the standard then you'd have to kick a whole lot of guys out. Which is why HOF arguments are so frustrating and unsatisfying. Phil Rizzuto's going to be in there forever, and literally everybody whose name comes up in in the HOF conversation today is light-years better than he was.
 
#60
#60
Rizzuto and Mazeroski....As i hear Tim Kurkjain right now telling me how Albert Pujols is a better player than Gehrig. If Lou leaned over the plate with an elbow up like Albert he'd have lost an ear.

Baseball historians like us make points like these, but we're screwed, man.
 
#61
#61
I honestly don't know how you can even pretend to compare two players from such vastly different games as Pujols and Gehrig. Gehrig never had to hit at night, but then he did have to swing at incredibly scuffed-up baseballs by today's standards. Gehrig never played against black players or Latino players, but since there were only 16 major league teams at the time and everybody used way fewer pitchers, talent was far less diluted, even if the pool was smaller. If Gehrig played today, he'd be a lot bigger and stronger thanks to modern workout techniques [1], but so would the pitchers he faced. It's really just an impossible comparison. It's like trying to figure out whether Helen of Troy or Scarlett Johansson was prettier.


[1] (so to speak)
 
#64
#64
And as far as leaning over the plate with an elbow up goes, I always thought the single biggest factor in the magical resurgence of Barry Bonds was the body armor that baseball inexplicably let him get away with wearing rather than the steroids. He stood right on top of home plate with that shiat on, and as a pitcher you had no choice but to hit him, walk him, or throw it in his wheelhouse. There was literally nowhere left to go with the ball where you could get him out. I don't know why A) NL pitchers didn't at some point decide to throw at him every single time he came to the plate until he took it off, and B) why every single major-league batter didn't immediately follow suit when it became obvious that there weren't going to be any repercussions. Why does anybody hit without body armor on now? Why are you standing way over there in the batter's box when you could be fearlessly right up on the plate like Barry? The whole thing was inexplicable.
 
#65
#65
my mom got me a few sets of cards that were taken my Charles Conlon, of all the old time players. for some reason Cochrane made me like him.
 
#66
#66
Agree, the elbow pad should be abolished, or the zone should be moved in more...the zone was fine for over 100 years, you want to crowd the plate, prepare to get blasted.

Bonds, Walter Johnson would aim for his ear with his stance
 
#67
#67
JTrainDavis said:
Best Catcher ever= Mickey Cochrane, prove me wrong
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Great player, apparently. I just don't know how in the hell you compare him to a guy like Johnny Bench. It's like speculating on how Gale Sayers would do if you dropped him into the NFL right now. You can have wildly varying opinions, but you can never really be "right."
 
#70
#70
JTrainDavis said:
Agree, the elbow pad should be abolished, or the zone should be moved in more...the zone was fine for over 100 years, you want to crowd the plate, prepare to get blasted.

Bonds, Walter Johnson would aim for his ear with his stance
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I remember pausing one of his at-bats on Tivo back in his 73-homer year and leaving him frozen on-screen for probably five or six minutes while my buddies and I talked about how there was no way to pitch to him anymore. His toes were perhaps an inch off the plate; his elbows reached halfway across it. There was nothing left to throw at.

Serious questions: why didn't anybody ever throw at him? Why didn't every other hitter immediately follow suit with the elbow pad? Why didn't anybody in baseball talk about this at the time? I never got it.
 
#72
#72
JTrainDavis said:
I'm a sucker for the pre war age, i guess
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The sneaky thing about baseball is that since it's fundamentally a game of hand-eye coordination, it's entirely possible that a great hitter from a hundred years ago would still be a great hitter today. It's not like football, where if you took the Four Horsemen from Notre Dame and put them on a football field today, they'd be in a hospital. Ty Cobb and Honus Wagner would be great hitters today. It's just impossible to know how great.
 
#73
#73
NYYVol said:
I've spent a few years around Minor League Baseball and sadly you couldn't tell who was juicing or not. The thing about it is, the guys with the astronomical numbers were going to be HOF without the juice. Guys that you wouldn't expect by the eyeball test were just as guilty.

That's why I have a hard time punishing guys like Bonds, McGwire and hell even Sosa. They were damn good without them. They just done the status quo of baseball around this time frame.
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Until they have an official list of EVERYBODY that was juicing (never going to happen) you have to put these guys in.
 
#75
#75
Hound said:
Don Mattingly. Compare their stats and explain how Kirby Puckett is in the Hall and Donnie Baseball is not.
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First Yankee game I went to back in 1995, Mattingly hit 2 or 3 HRs.....I was 11...one of my favorite Yankees of all time
 
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