Hurt So Good (reprise)

SPORTING GOODS

With Frank Thomas just hitting his 500th home run, I thought I'd rerun this post from April 2006:

I didn’t get as much sleep as I wanted to last night, and it’s all Michael Kay’s fault.

With my wife out late, I left on the YES network as I drifted off to sleep, only to be jolted awake by the following statement that I’m paraphrasing from Kay:

“You know, back in the ‘90s Frank Thomas looked like a sure-fire first-ballot hall of famer, but at this point you’d have to say he’d be hard-pressed to get in.”

He used the phrase “hard-pressed” and then as Ken Singleton (to his credit) vigorously defended Thomas, Kay somehow found a way to compare Thomas’s hall of fame credentials to Dale Murphy (“but he won 2 MVPs”) and then Don Mattingly (“he was great for nearly a decade before injuries slowed him down”).

So obviously, this jolted me awake as I started yelling at the tv, but now that I’ve had 12 hours to sleep on it…it’s still just about the dumbest thing I’ve heard an announcer say. So Joe Morgan, congrats, you just moved down the list a bit.

I seem to recall reading in about 2000 or so, that Frank Thomas was high in the top 10 in all time OPS+, which takes your OBP + SLG and adjusts it for era and ballparks. This is generally a good measure of comparing offensive firepower, as everyone at this point seems to accept slugging and on-base as probably the most important stats. Thomas was basically surrounded by Ted Williams, Babe Ruth, and a few other absolute hitting legends on this list. He’s now “only” 14th, surrounded by guys like Jimmie Foxx and Stan Musial.

And it’s not like people weren’t noticing - Thomas finished in the top 3 in AL MVP voting five times over a ten year period. And nobody was more feared by opposing pitchers and teams during the 90s, no matter how bad he was with the glove.

Quite simply, when you think of offense and the 1990s (and you can’t think of one without the other), you think of Griffey, Bonds, and then Thomas. I can imagine a 17 year old who only remembers 1997 and on questioning Thomas’s hall of fame credentials, but not a baseball “expert” who has been around the game for years.

In looking up Thomas’s numbers, I stumbled across this Hardball Times article that lays out the defense in much more detail than I can. But by every offensive measure, Thomas is a first-ballot hall of famer. Read the article if you want to remember just how good his career has been, but when analyzing Thomas, the comparisons are more Ted Williams, Frank Robinson, Rickey Henderson, Eddie Collins, not Dale Murphy and Don Mattingly.

The problem with guys like Kay, is they can only focus on a limited number of career counting stats. How many all-star games? How many home runs? Oh yeah, well this guy has more, and he’s not in! Thomas has a career .427 on-base percentage – only six guys in history are .01 better. And not to spoil the Hardball Times article, but Thomas is the only guy with seven straight years of hitting .300, 20 HRs, 100 RBI, 100 Runs, and 100 Walks. Only guy to do it six straight? Ted Williams.

Frank Thomas is no Ted Williams. But he sure as hell ain’t Dale Murphy.

I promise not to rant this much at every stupid Michael Kay comment, as it would lead to my job firing me, my wife leaving me, and me forgetting to bathe, as it will become a 24-hour a day hobby. But I thought it worth a reminder just how great the Big Hurt’s career was. And even Kay admits, it is widely believed that he did it all without steroids.