Jim Gentile is a good choice for this category. He was the Orioles’ 1st baseman in the early 60’s, and hit 46 homers in 1961, but no one noticed because Maris hit 61 and Mantle hit 54.
Gentile got stuck in the Dodgers’ deep farm system in the 50’s, spending 8 years in the minors in spite of leading 3 leagues in homers. He only had 40 total plate appearances with the Dodgers. I believe before getting traded to the Orioles before the 1960 season. Gentile finished 2nd in the 1960 ROY voting. In 1961, Gentile had a 1.069 OPS.
I think Gentile’s swing was so hard, it brought on severe back problems before he was 30. He ended up with just under 3,500 Plate Appearances over parts of 9 seasons. His career OPS+ was 136, in spite of just 4 healthy MLB seasons.
I’m not sure Bo would ever have been a baseball Hall of Famer (football, yes), but he does fit better with the OP’s concept than others who’ve been mentioned.
Honest, RickJay, I don’t mean to harp on Wes Parker! Still, my point is partly that Wes Parker’s problem with HOF voters isn’t that his career was too short, merely that the career he had just wasn’t that great.
I THINK the OP was looking for guys who started off like gangbusters, who LOOKED for a few years like future greats, but who either burned out or got hurt early, and never had long, stellar careers. There are lots of guys like that in pro football (Terrell Davis?), but not so many in baseball.
Herb Score and Tony Conigliaro certainly seem to meet that standard. Maybe Bo Jackson, too.
Who else… Bob Grim?
As a kid, I thought Steve Busby had the makings of a great pitcher, but he had rotator cuff problems back when that was an automatic career killer.
He wasn’t good enough. Short career and he was something to watch, but he was not nearly as good a ballplayer as most of the guys we’ve been discussing.
Most of the ballplayers discussed here were Hall of Fame quality but just not for long enough, or were at least really good.
To use Bellhorm’s example of Lyman Bostock, Bostock in 1977 was just a flatly excellent player, hitting .326 with some power, solid D, and good baserunning. If he hadn’t been murdered, he would have had a hell of a career - he was a terrific contact hitter, healthy, and really had no weaknesses in his game. I don’t think he would have been a Hall of Famer but we’d remember him the way we remember, say, John Olerud, as a guy who was really darned good. He was by all accounts a fine gentleman and a hard worker so his career should have lasted a long time.
Bo Jackson was never as good as Lyman Bostock, and was never going to be. As strong and fast as he was, he just didn’t know a ball from a strike.
One thing to consider about some of these players is that, as they matured, they might have developed additional skills. Bostock might have developed more power (a little) and Jackson might have become more disciplined at the plate, if he’d concentrated just on baseball (although I doubt it.) Herb Score probably would have acquired more command of his pitches, ala Randy Johnson and Koufax. For the purposes of this exercise, I tend to be very generous in giving them the benefit of the doubt. If Yastrzemski’s career had been ended by a beaning in 1966, he might get a passing mention, but no one could have anticipated his transformation in to power hitter in 1967.
One player I forgot was Pete Reiser, the old Brooklyn Dodger’s outfielder who put up incredible numbers in 1941 and 1942, but played the OF so recklessly that he couldn’t stay off the DL. He lost 3 years to WWII, although that probably helped him heal. Good couple of years in '46 and '47, until injuries took him down again. He did technically play parts of 10 seasons, although just over an average of 300 PA’s per year. He was one of MLBTV’s Prime 9 players in this shoulda, coulda, woulda category, btw.
Munch, we’re both Royals fans, but let’s be real - in 4 full seasons, he hit over 30 home runs only once, and never batted as high as .280. He would have needed considerable improvement to have gotten any Hall of Fame votes when he retired.
I wonder how it would have turned out if Bo Jackson never played football, and instead of college spent a few years in the minors. He might have been a great one.
In the case of Bo Jackson, it’s more of an argument of what kind of player he would have become if he just concentrated on baseball. Football injuries aside, would he have learned to be a more selective hitter with more instruction and dedication to one sport.
Too big a leap to be included in this category, but fun to dream.
I don’t think Jackson would ever have been much better than he was. He was not unusually young for a ballplayer; he was 23 at his debut and 24 when he became a full time player, so had he spent a few more years in the minors, you;d be taking away his age 24-26 seasons, which are years a top flight ballplayer should be winning major league games.
Bo’s K-W ratio up to and including his age 26 year was about 5-to-1. That’s how good a hitter he was. If anyone, ever, in the history of baseball has so clearly established a K-W ratio that bad and then suddenly become a disciplined hitter, I cannot think of him. The only person who comes close is Sammy Sosa, and his ratio wasn’t quite that bad (overall, he had some bad years) and he got to the big leagues much younger than Bo.
I’m not down on Bo or anything, and if I’m putting together a 25-man roster of would-have-been he’d make a good bench player and pinch hitter against lefties. My corner outfielders are both terrible glove men so Bo could help me out there.
Chris Davis had around a 5-1 K/BB ratio before last year. But in 2013, he improved that ratio to 2.6/1 and became a pretty good hitter… and at the age of 27. Still a work in progress, so we’ll see.
Bo only had 50 games at AA. Never had time for instructional league ball. All he was expected to do was show up and whack the crap out of the ball and then run like hell. Speed and Power are pretty good tools to work with. Maybe he was too early for the kind of instructional tools/methods they have to today. I still see Bo as a raw diamond with more tools than a Dave Kingman.
In his last full season, Bo showed some improvement at the plate. He was clearly taking a bit more disciplined approach, realizing that he couldn’t completely depend on his raw talent. I think we missed a real opportunity to see what his actual potential was, even going into his 30s.