Ya, a lot of people don't know Molly is 9th all time in hits with 3,319. Imagine if he'd played those 500 games he missed due to injury. That's 3 full seasons in his prime. To age 30, he averaged 193 hits per 162 games played. That's 579 more hits, which would give him 3,898. Now, he's knocking on 4,000 hits.
There's no guarantee he would have played as long if he'd not been hurt early, but I watched him in his first few years in the majors, and even when he was playing, a lot of the time he was dinged up. When he was healthy, he was one of the most dynamic players in the game.
Molitor also had the 7th longest hitting streak in MLB history at 39 games (5th longest since 1900). He was a 7 time All Star (Brewer players didn't get voted in to the All Star game a lot back then. Hell, his Brewer teammate Robin Yount, also a Hall of Famer, was only voted to the All Star game three times, if you can believe that. He wasn't even voted to the game in 1989, when he was the American League MVP!
Yount and Molitor had 4,736 hits as teammates. I don't know where that ranks them all-time as a duo, but they're up there.
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