Hall of Fame Debate: McGriff and Palmeiro

***This story originally ran last year on September 1, 2004. The current version of the story has been updated to include all statistical information through the 2004 season.***


People throw around the “old standards”, totals such as 500 HR, 300 Wins etc., to quantify whether or not someone should be allowed to enter the HOF. However with the way the game has changed I feel that these golden markers of excellence might have to be changed (as an example see my story on 300 game winners). However the debate might have to begin a new when a certain first basemen, who recently became only the 4th man ever to have 500 HR and 3,000 hits (Hank Aaron, Willie Mays and Eddie Murray are the others), is eligible for the Hall. And that man is at the heart of this piece.


THE MAN and HIS STATS

Here are the man’s stats…can you guess who he is? (Stats are through the end of the 2004 season).

AVG	HR	RBI	RUNS	SB
.285		1543	1342	72

Now we purposely left out the HR total, but we are pretty sure you can guess who he is. Yeah, your right, he’s a left-handed firstbasemen who has played since 1986 and he was one of the most consistent hitters of the 1990’s. His name is Rafael… FRED McGRIFF!

That’s right those stats belong to McGriff NOT Rafael Palmeiro. Let’s compare the two side by side.

You might be thinking to yourself that there is no contest right, I mean Palmeiro leads McGriff in all five categories. Well let’s look a little deeper into the stats to see if this original idea of Palmeiro’s dominance holds up to empirical study. Here is another set of career totals for the two men.

So out of the 9 categories listed, Palmeiro leads in 8 of them (only falling behind in OBP). Case closed for Palmeiro? Hardly. It must be remembered that Palmeiro has 1418 MORE at bats than McGriff at the completion of the 2004 season, thereby skewing their career numbers a bit. In fact, when we look at these two men based on their at-bat basis and not the raw career totals, here is how their totals break down.

In this at bat comparison, McGriff is shown to be more proficient in hitting home runs and virtually identical in producing RBI (while falling only slightly behind in the runs category). Surprising how close they are ain’t it?

THE DECADE OF 1990’s

Both men began their careers in 1986, so the comparisons we are making in this article are about as close an historical look as you will ever get between two players of the same era who play the same position. Let’s take a look at each players stats during the decade of the 1990’s when they were at the height of their talents.

Again Palmeiro is ahead, but not by the tremendous amount that you might expect.

THE ACCOLADES

With the raw stats being very similar, why don’t we take a look at how our two 1B performed in comparison to other players in their league. The following table will list the number of times that each player finished in the top 10 in his league in each category. This means that the 5 listed in the BA category for Palmeiro represents a top 10 finish in the league in batting average race on five separate occasions.

Again Palmeiro leads in the majority of the categories, which makes the following statement even more surprising:

Despite the fact that Palmeiro nudges ahead of McGriff in the majority of the categories, it can be argued that Fred McGriff was more respected by his peers than Rafael Palmeiro.

How the hell can I say this you ask? Well, let’s take a look at two important categories which allow us to judge, beyond the raw numbers, what players, coaches and fans thought of each player.


ALL STAR APPEARANCES:
McGriff- Five
Palmiero- Four

You can make all the arguments you want about Palmeiro being behind other great 1B (Frank Thomas, Mark McGwire, Jason Giambi) but the fact is there were a pretty fair amount of great 1B that McGriff was behind too (Will Clark, Mark Grace, Jeff Bagwell and Andres Galarraga to name a few). Therefore despite Palmiero’s lead in overall numbers, McGriff stacks up quite well in the all-star respect factor.


TOP 10 in MVP VOTING
McGriff- Six
Palmiero- Three

WOW! Fred McGriff has twice as many top 10 MVP finishes as Palmeiro. This last statement, despite whatever the raw data tells you, should make you question the wisdom of believing that Palmeiro was a vastly better player than McGriff.


In the end if Rafael Palmeiro is “guaranteed” to make the HOF merely because he hit 500 HR and accumulated 3,000 hits I believe that this would be a huge mistake. I would confidently postulate that if Palmeiro goes into the Hall, than McGriff must also be inducted, even though Palmeiro will finish his career with more HR, RBI and Runs. Based on the totality of their playing records it appears rather obvious that the Viagra taking, sweet swinging 1B of the Orioles has been rather fortunate to capture the fans attention in a way that his contemporary, Freed McGriff, never did. In retrospect it is even money as to who the better player was whether you read the raw data, or the more subjective information (i.e. all-star and MVP voting). Looks like it’s time for us to begin the “Crime Dog” for the HOF drive…anyone care to throw us a bone?

Ray Flowers can be reached with comments/questions or suggestions at: ray@athomeplate.com. You can also visit Rays’ blog at www.wildpitch.blogspot.com for a full review of all of his recent articles an other interesting stuff.