Joe Jackson and Pete Rose Should Be HOFers Because...

[Tabe]

Originally Posted by BobC

It's basically what I just got through saying. If you're disparaging Rose's all-time hits record because he batted more than anyone else, you basically have to say the same thing about Aaron. Ruth had his 715 home runs in 8,399 official plate appearances. It took Aaron 12,364 official plate appearances to get to 755 home runs. Rose had 14,053 plate appearances to get 4,256 hits lifetime, whereas Cobb had 11,440 plate appearances to get 4,189 hits. Aaron needed 3,363 more plate appearances to out homer Ruth by 40 dingers, and Rose needed 2,613 more plate appearances to get 67 more hits than Cobb.

The difference is that Aaron was still great in 1973 and very good in 1974. He already owned Tyr record when he stopped being good and was just average. Rose stopped being good in 1981, playing 3 full seasons as a not good or even terrible player before playing another half season as a basically average player before finally breaking the record. And you could probably make the case he only got in the lineup because he was the one writing out the card. There's hanging around for a long time (Aaron) and the there's hanging on. Pete definitely hung on, to the detriment of his teams (.602 OPS at 1B in 1983? Yikes. Maybe Philly actually wins the title if they had an actual major league 1B that year.)

Originally Posted by BobC

I'll leave you with this to think about. I remember hearing the story about how reporters and others used to bug Cobb about all the home runs being hit by Ruth and others, and how much better that was than all the singles that Cobb hit over his career, and so why didn't he hit more homers. So supposedly Cobb told some reporter one day he could hit homers if he wanted to, so watch him. And over the next two games he played on May 5th and May 6th of 1925, he preceded to hit a total of 5 home runs in those two games.

They tell similar stories about Ichiro. Seems odd that a player would intentionally choose to be less successful. In other words, the story is nonsense.