Chipper Jones vs. Jim Rice
In this week's Score Atlanta http://www.scoreatl.com/ there was an article about how great Chipper Jones is and how he has been one of the "finest hitters the game has ever seen". Please spare me the over the top accolades.
Don't get me wrong, Chipper has been a tremendous player and a big part of the sustained success of the local Braves since arriving in 1995 (post knee blowout). Calling Chipper one of the finest hitters of all time (how I read the quote above) is ridiculous. This is how baseball has fallen in my opinion. Guys like Chipper that are one of the best hitters on a team for a long time get immortalized too easily.
I will now compare two players, Chipper Jones and Jim Rice. Rice is not (yet) in the Hall of Fame and may not ever get in.
The stats shown above show their career stats year by year thanks to www.baseballreference.com . Sorry about the double pictures, could not get it to easily fit on the screen. Here is a link to pull the picture in its entirety http://www.blmeanie.net/blmeanieblog/pics/chiprice2.jpg
I added three different comparisons at the bottom of each players stats, per game, per At Bat and first 10 full seasons. For Jim Rice I threw out 1981 which was a strike shortened season.
Lots of debate circles around whether Jim Rice is a hall of famer or not. I have sat on the side that says he is. Locally there is generally acceptance of the thought that Chipper will be a hall of famer, which is shown by the author's quote I started with at the top. Amazingly, I picked Rice to compare Chipper to and their stats are very similar and both have reasons to think they should be in the hall and reasons why they should not be.
Rice had "greater" seasons but Chipper has been very consistent. Look at the RBI numbers, Rice 4 times exceeded 120 and Chipper has never. 120 to me is a threashold of a monster productive year. Teammates etc. all play into RBI numbers so I conceed no single stat determines a player's value.
I think the first 10 years comparision is the most valid as that has their primes in it and does not include Rice's decline years that Chipper hasn't experienced yet. Looking at those stats summerized below (average of first 10 full years):
Rice : .303 avg, 31.3 HR , 110.4 RBI, 94.9 runs, .358 OBP , .529 slg, 316.8 Total bases
Chip : .303 avg, 31.0 HR , 103.9 RBI, 103.3 runs, .404 OBP , .536 slg, 301.1 Total bases
These numbers differ mostly in the on base percentage with Chipper getting many more walks and less strikeouts than Rice. Hitting wise you could almost say they have been twins.
Awards etc. for their careers:
Rice : 1 MVP , 5 other times in top 5 MVP voting, 8 time all-star
Chip : 1 MVP , 1 other time in top 5 MVP voting, 5 time all-star
Here is the punch-line : Rice was a more impactful player...(ducking)
The MVP voting and all-star appearances show that the similar stats between the two means that times have changed and Jim Rice was a more dominant player for his era he played in. The HR hitting era that started after the 1994 lockout has many players' stats inflated across the league, Chipper's comparisons against his peers, while good, are not dominant.
The debate then should switch to what defines a hall of fame career? Is it stats, stats and relation to era, or some other criteria altogether?
If I had a vote today - neither get in and I would remove quite a few that have already been put in. The hall is too watered down and comparisions of stats is letting more very good but not great players in every year.
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