Quote:
Originally Posted by packs
I don't have a problem with Kirby getting in, but it says a lot that he got in on his first ballot. Mattingly slips every year. For a guy who had such a similar career (50.8 career WAR for Puckett compared to 42.2 for Mattingly) it seems like he should be getting more votes.
Especially since Puckett had more healthy years, but amounted only slightly higher stats than Mattingly, who was on the decline by age 29.
That says a lot about who Mattingly was when he was at his peak.
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It does, but still - he had 3 or 4 outstanding years, and then he was pretty average. Over his first 2 and final 6 years - totaling over half his career - he was a .285/15 homers/65 RBI guy with a SA just barely above .400. You can pull Puckett's 12 seasons apart in any direction, and he was consistently excellent from the first to the last.
Kirby started 6 AS games; Mattingly 1. Kirby led the Twins to 2 world championships; in 14 seasons with Mattingly, the Yanks finished 1st only once, and Mattingly only made it to the post season once (and just the 1st round). Mattingly won the MVP, but Kirby was in the top 10 in voting nearly twice as often and had more career MVP shares.
And for an 1800-game career, a 20% difference in WAR is, IMO, huge. It's the difference between 177th all-time and 276th.
Mattingly won 2 more Gold Gloves than Kirby, but I think fans and writers place more value on center-fielding than playing first base (which might be a mistake, but Kirby climbing the wall to pull back a home run is a lot more glamorous than saving runs by scooping balls out of the dirt).
I can see why Kirby's in and Mattingly's not. That said, I wouldn't have voted Kirby in either - he owes a lot of his offensive stats to the Metrodome, where he hit 50 points higher than he did on the road, and he won some of those Gold Gloves because he played a really deep center, scaled the wall a lot and made a lot of long throws. Good highlight reel stuff, but he probably let a zillion singles fall in front of him.
If we're going to vote guys in on short careers plus what they might have done, I would have voted Tony Oliva in ahead of either Puckett or Mattingly. From the time he was ROY in 1964 until 1971, his last season before injury, he was an AS all 8 years; a 3-time batting champ who finished in the top three in hitting 7 times and top 8 all 8 seasons; a 5-time hits leader; 4-time doubles leader; and helped Minnesota to the post season 3 times (in an era where only 2 to 4 teams could qualify). And his WAR was higher than Mattingly's in 12% fewer plate appearances. As I always say, if Tony had gotten run over by a bus after his 1971 season - instead of playing on a bum leg for several more years and ruining all of his career stats - he would have been in the HOF the following year. Maybe the same would have been true for Mattingly after 1989.