OK, it's been a while, but here we go about Rafael Palmeiro, who just hit his 500th homerun. A lot of other people have been talking about this, many who know more than me, and here is a good one from ESPN.

This is a big number, and only 18 other players in the history of the game have done this. But, is this enough? Well, obviously not, because there is other stuff that matters. If you hit 500 and batted a career .220, you wouldn't be in. But as for Palmeiro, I don't think he belongs in Cooperstown. If he did the equivalent stuff in basketball or football, he'd belong in their hall of fame, but not for baseball. He belongs in that second tier hall of fame, for the great players, but not the ones you will tell your grandkids about. I can't imagine tell my grandkids that I saw that guy who hawked Viagra play a good first base, and klunk his way along to 500 homeruns at a solid, and very respectable 35 homeruns a season for 8 straight seasons (I think). (On a sidenote its freezing in the room where we have my computer at home and my fingers are numb and typing is going slow) OK, so the Viagra mention is kinda a low blow, but 'eh, its funny. OK, it's really cold, so I'm gonna cut to the chase. Baseball-reference.com says he's most comparable to Fred McGriff, and while I think this is a fair comparision, I don't think Fred belongs there either.

What we need to do is wait about 5 years, and re-evaluate this era to decide what good numbers really are, becuase these guys have stayed healthy, played consistently good, but not great, and just chugged along. Their numbers are good, but I really don't think they're good enough. While they compare favorably to guys from the past, that's because it wasn't common to hit 35 HR a year. I think in the '41 range, the average player hit 7 HR a year and in the last five years the average guy hit 27. That's an amazing amount of inflation. The rate at which 1B's hit HR compared to their AB's has almost doubled from '41 to '02. (I use '41 becuase of my possible research next semester, which is looking less and less likely with each passing day.)

But in a crappy conclusion (since I didn't give enough facts to make this any good), while his career numbers are impressive, Palemeiro is NOT worthy of the Hall of Fame becuase he's not "tell your grandkids good." Also, to put how good he is in his own era into perspective, he has only been an All-Star 4 times in his career. This has to tell us something.
- posted by LT @ 5/13/2003 10:21:00 AM