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Posted By: jay behrens

Gilbert, to give you an idea of how inflated numbers were during McGraw's era, the league batting average during his career (I omitted his last 4 years since it totals about 20 games) is .283 and the OBA .340. During Bonds' career the league avg is .260 and OBA is .323. Those are some pretty huge spreads.

And the only players with as few top 10 appearances as McGraw in the top 25 for career BA are Stenzel and O'Doul who had very brief major league careers, and Rigg Stephenson, who like McGraw, benefited from playing during an era with a very high BA. All of these players has 3 or 4 appearances, the next lowest after that is Dave Orr with 7. Cobb was in the top 10 all but 2 years of his career and that was at the tail end.

McGraw was a very good player for his day, but not a HOFer.

Jay

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