Hack Wilson -vs- Ted Kluszewski HOF?

[Rickyy]

Yep I think the 191 rbi was the clincher.... add the prev 3 yrs and you got nearly 150 rbi's per and then the lifetime 300 plus avg... I agree about Klu he doesn't get the recognition but he had some big big numbers in his day...

[ls7plus]

I agree too about the 190 or 191 RBI's. Ted was derailed from a potential HOF vote by sciatic nerve/disc problems arising during the '56 season (during which he still hit 35 homeruns), and probably related chronic hip and back problems thereafter. I just thought I'd throw this one out there since the downturn in big Klu's career certainly borders on being tragic. In each of his three consecutive 40-HR seasons, he had less strikeouts than homeruns. It would have been really interesting to see what he would have done had health factors not intervened and had he been able to have had a more normal decline.

Additional thoughts welcome.

Larry

[fkw]

Teds biggest accomplishment IMO has not been mentioned yet... (edited I see Larry did )

Ted his more HRs than SO in 5 straight season.... only 2 players have done it once in last 40 years (Bonds, Brett)...

with an incredible 14 more HRs than SO in 1954 (49 HRs, 35 SOs)


PS the RBI record is 191 not 190

[BlueDevil89]

Agreed --- If you have one of those remarkable achievements (ie - 191 RBI season), it goes a long way to help push you over the top to make it into the HOF.

[scooter729]

From Baseball Reference, the players with the most comparable career stats to Klu include Kent Hrbek, Mo Vaughn and Eric Karros. So, I have to think that Klu is best left out of Cooperstown.

FWIW, Hack's comparable batters aren't exactly a group of HOFers (Wally Berger, even - yikes - JD Drew!), but as said above, the 1930 season is probably what did the trick.

[novakjr]

I think if a serious attempt were made for Ted, that a lot of other players would come up in discussion and jump right ahead of him...Basically, Ted's a stepping stone to noticing other "more" deserving players.. When I looked at Ted's stats, the first thing that came to my mind was, "Albert Belle blows this guy out of the water". Colavito, Howard and Cash also seem to immediately jump ahead of him.. If we were to think about it alot more, we could probably come up with a list of at least a dozen somewhat similar players that would be more deserving than Ted.