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Message: [QUOTE="SWC75, post: 1810939, member: 289"] EDDIE MURRAY and FRED MCGRIFF are not exact contemporaries but their names came up in a discussion I had on Bud and the Manchild last year that illustrated a point about the way we look at statistics. Murray played from 1977-1997. He hit .287 lifetime with 504 home runs. McGriff played from 1986 to 2004. He hit .284 lifetime with 493 home runs. Murray was elected to the Hall of fame in 2003. McGriff is not in the Hall of Fame. The highest percentage of the vote he received is 23.9%. You need 75%. Why is Murray in the Hall when McGriff hasn’t come close? Here are their numbers per 162 games: EM 174H 71W 81S 30D 2T 27HR 6SB 103RBI 87RS 366 bases 163 runs FM 164H 86W 124S 29D 2T 32HR 5SB 102RBI 89RS 384 bases 159 runs. McGriff walked more but struck out a lot more. He had a bit more power. Speed was about equal. RBI and runs scored are basically identical. McGriff produced more bases because of his walks but fewer runs because he hit more home runs. Murray was the better fielder: he had three Gold Gloves. McGriff never won one. Both players have a World Series ring: Murray with the Orioles in 1983, McGriff with the Braves in 1995. Murray played in 8 All-stars game to 5 for McGriff but Fred was the All Star MVP in 1994. I think Murray was the slightly better player but we all know why he made the Hall and McGriff didn’t: Eddie made it to 500 home runs, Freddie didn’t. When McGriff retired, the most similar players, by the “similarity scores” method, (used on Baseball Reference.com), to Fred McGriff were two Willies: McCovey and Stargell, both of whom are in the Hall of fame. (David Ortiz has since moved past them.) The most similar players to Eddie Murray were Rafael Palmiero and Dave Winfield. Were Stargell and McCovey worse that Palmiero and Winfield? Timing may have bene a factor. Murray’s prime was over by the time the juiced ball era began in 1994. I think he tended to be judged by the standards of the previous generation. Fred was just 8 years into his career at that point and he was judged against men who were hitting 50-60-70 home runs. But they were men the voters now refuse to elect to the Hall of Fame because they were using steroids. The new era didn’t impact McGriff, who like Murray just seemed to have the same season over and over: he hit between 27-37 home runs 14 times but never more than that. Murray hit between 25-33 home runs 12 times. Consistency meant more in Murray’s time, unprecedented achievement in McGriff’s time. McGriff was a member of the 1986 Syracuse chiefs along with CECIL FIELDER. When the team held a home run derby as part of a promotion, everybody wondered who would win it. The answer was Mike Sharperson, our second baseman who hit 4 home runs that year and 10 in 557 major league games. McGriff and Fielder did a bit better. Cecil never really made it with the Blue Jays, playing only 220 games and htit5ing 31 homers in 4 years. He jumped to Japan where he clubbed 38 homers for the Hanshun Tigers. That got him a shot with another set of Tigers- Detroit, where in 1990 he amazed baseball by hammering 51 home runs- the highest total since George Foster’s 52 back in 1977. And this was before the ball was Juiced so it may have been as good or better a season than the ones McGwire, Sosa and Bonds had later in the decade. Unfortunately, “Big Daddy” was not built for the long haul. Bill James: “Fielder acknowledges a weight of 261, leaving unanswered the question of what he might weigh if he put his other foot on the scale.” Fielder deflated slowly like a balloon after his big year. He hit 44 dingers in 1991, then 35 then 30, then 28. He rallied for 39 with two different teams in 1996. But after that he was a part-time player and hit 47 home runs in his last 4 seasons, winding up with 319. He was not yet 35 when he was done. That was pretty much his whole game, as he hit .255 with 145 strike outs per 162 games, (with a high of 182 in his 51 home run year) and was acknowledged as the slowest player in the league. He gave the game a son, Prince, who is a similar player. One thing I’ll always remember about Cecil. When he was in Syracuse he hit the longest home run our play-by-play man, Dan Hoard, had ever seen. Dan looked at it as it disappeared in the distance and said “That one had a crew of four and meal.” [/QUOTE]

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