Tuesday, November 28, 2006

When did I become the reasonable one?

Wherein I'm much comfortable being the contratrian

Should Mark McGwire be in the Hall of Fame? I say no and a few people at Throwing Things agree with me.

Thing is, it has nothing to do with possible use of performance enhancers—that's a distraction. He was a good player, just not Hall of Fame material.

Maybe this will get me back to more familiar unreasonable territory.

Ken Griffey, Jr. might be another good, but not good enough player. Much more of a borderline call than McGwire, but he's definately on the bubble. I think he had a HOF career during his 10 years at Seattle and if he'd had a career ending injury before joining Cincinnati he'd be in. However, his time with the Reds has been injury-plagued and unremarkable. His greatest numbers occurred during a time when all hitting and power numbers were inflated. As such, I don't think we can look at anyone hitting over the last 15-20 years and say, for example, 500 home runs get you in. Looks nice on paper, but Cincinnati killed his Hall of Fame plaque.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home