Quote:
Originally Posted by packs
I could not disagree more. You're talking about years when Travis was 19 to 22 years old. Those are years a lot of people are still in the minor leagues.
From age 23 to 27, his career peak, he hit 332 and his OPS+ rose every year with the exception of his age 25 season. He also began to receive MVP votes in 4 of those 5 seasons, finishing 6th the year before he entered the service.
You have to make a decision when it comes to Travis and what his war injury meant to his career. It either derailed a HOF career or it didn't. It doesn't make much sense to debate what he did while he was 19 to 22 years old.
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You would have a point if I did focus on his age 19-22 seasons. However, that is clearly false if you read what I wrote. I included all of his career and broke them into groups based on OPS+, a pretty normal standard to evaluate contextual offensive production, as Travis was not an elite defender and his hall of fame case is based on a theory that his ONLY hall of fame season is the player he truly was.
You say his OPS+ rose every year from age 23 to 27, except age 25. This is true, but only one of them was a hall of fame season. He posted OPS+'s of 113, 116, 95, 120, 154. 113-120 is pretty good, but it is not a hall of fame level season, or really close to it. He had one elite level season at age 27.
To get Travis to the hall you have to make 2 assumptions, 1) a player can be a hall of Famer for things that did not actually happen in the real world and 2) His 1941 season defines his theoretical career, and all of his other 11 years in Major League Baseball do not. I do not think the first is a logical one to make, for the reasons stated earlier, and the second does not seem to me to be a very good one either, as it relies on ignoring quite a bit of reality to create an alternate career in which only his best exists.