Well, they kinda had another decent SS coming up. And let’s not forget what happened to Cal.
Well, if John Valentin started his career at age 21, finished it at age 40, and maintained the level of production he achieved from 1993-98 without losing time to injury for those twenty seasons, and did it playing shortstop for the majority of them, then yes, I would say he’s got a pretty good claim to being in the HOF.
Of course, that’s not taking into effect the fact that Fenway Park, where Valentin played during his prime, is an above average hitter’s park, and that Ripken played a significant portion of his career in the (by comparison) offensively-deflated 1980s.
Admittedly, I don’t know if Memorial Stadium (where Ripken played before the Orioles moved to Camden Yards) was a hitters’ park or not. But I don’t know if the Ripken-Valentin comparison is necessarily legit.
Yes, Cal “even Wonder Bread has more personality than me” Ripken will be a first time Hall-of-Famer.
Even without the pointless streak that hurt his team more than it helped it. Vanity in itself is not a reward, nor should it be. And that is all the streak was, vanity.
The “streak” is not a baseball feat.
If there were only four shortstops in the major leagues you’d have an interesting point.
However, you will have some difficulty convincing me that guys like Chris Woodward, Jimmy Rollins, Christian Guzman, etc. just stopped existing. Even most of the good hitters, like Edgar Renteria, are 14-18 homer guys, hardly a lot of homers these days. I don’t see many shortstops who are better home run men, in context, than Pee Wee Reese.
This is a classic error in baseball history, to say that a player who was the first example of a trend was the guy who STARTED a trend. Maury Wills is often claimed to have re-introduced stolen bases into the game; Babe Ruth is credited with inventing the home run. Neither, IMHO, is even remotely true. The home run would have come into baseball in the 1920s and the stolen base in the 1960s because the way the game was played, the conditions that were changing, dictated that these things should happen. Cal Ripken’s emergence did not make power hitting shortstops popular, he was just the first in a glut of power hitting shortstops who emerged as a natural response to the game’s changing nature.
Then Flymaster says:
Okay, how to say this?
No, he did not.
Valentin had a better OPS only if you completely ignore the fact that he played his career in, on average, a higher offense league (since Ripken played many years prior to the 1994 offensive explosion) than Cal Ripken AND played in a phone booth, while Ripken spent his career in mediocre hitters’ parks. Adjusted for park and era, Ripken did in fact have a slightly better OPS+, 112 to Valentin’s 109.
Added to that the fact that Valentin maintained his production over 1105 games to Ripken’s 3001, and Ripken was a better defensive player, and Ripken had better peak years, I’ll be the first to say that comparing the two is preposterous. Even if Ripken’s streak was broken by a few missed games, there is still a pretty huge difference between a guy with a 112 OPS in 2900-3000 games and a guy with a short little career like John Valentin. I feel bad that Valentin got hurt, but so did Dickie Thon, so what? Staying healthy is a basic part of value.
If you don’t consider career length part of the equation, that makes John Paciorek the greatest hitter of all time. Career length MUST be a consideration for Hall of Fame enshrinement, because it’s a basic measure of contribution and quality. If you help a team by X amount for 1105 games, that is obviously not as impressive as helping them to the same extent for 3001 games. Would you rather give a season MVP Award to a guy with a 1.050 OPS in 150 games, or a guy with the same OPS in 45 games? The player who played 150 games clearly did more to help his team win ball games. It helps, too, that Ripken had a higher peak than Valentin, which certainly counts for something in my book.
IF John Valentin had played that well for 3000 games, well, of course he’d be a no-brainer Hall of Famer. First ballot.
You guys do know that the playing field (dimension-wise) at Oriole Park at Camden Yards was modeled after the Metrodome which was where Cal had his best days hitting.
Does that make what Cal did any less of an achievement? Hell no. The short right field porch at Yankee Stadium was expressly designed that way to allow more of Babe Ruth’s fly balls to become home runs.
Muldoon, I’m looking at the dimensions for the two parks right now and I see absolutely no similarity at all. The dimensions are different in every way, and their shapes differ quite a bit; the Metrodome is deep to left and shallow to right, while Camden Yards is a bit more shallow to left than it is to right. Camden Yards also has very different foul territory.
**This is a classic error in baseball history, to say that a player who was the first example of a trend was the guy who STARTED a trend. Maury Wills is often claimed to have re-introduced stolen bases into the game; Babe Ruth is credited with inventing the home run. Neither, IMHO, is even remotely true. The home run would have come into baseball in the 1920s and the stolen base in the 1960s because the way the game was played, the conditions that were changing, dictated that these things should happen. Cal Ripken’s emergence did not make power hitting shortstops popular, he was just the first in a glut of power hitting shortstops who emerged as a natural response to the game’s changing nature.
**
So how was the home run explosion of the 1920s going to get started if not for Ruth? Was someone else of equal offensive capabilities just going to wander on to the scene?
Ruth, unlike Ripken, was a quantum leap above the talent of anyone else in baseball at the time.
Ruth was certainly a better player than Lou Gehrig, Rogers Hornsby, etc, but those men were going to start hitting home runs whether or not Ruth was around. All players saw some increase in their home run output; it was clearly going to happen no matter what. Look at the National League home run totals through those years:
1919: 207
1920: 260
1921: 460
1922: 530
1923: 538
That’s a 150% increase in homers WITHOUT Babe Ruth being in that league. The A.L. saw a similar increase in taters even if you take Ruth out of the equation. Guys who weren’t home run hitters who had been around for years were hitting more homers. Tris Speaker, who averaged 6 homers a year, hit 17 in 1923 at the age of 35. Ty Cobb hit double digits in homers for the first time in 1921, age 34. All kinds of players besides Ruth saw their homer totals just leap forward in 1919-1921. Look at the numbers for Tilly Walker, Rogers Hornsby, or Jack Fournier. You don’t REALLY think the onyl reason they started hitting home runs was that the sight of Ruth doing it just inspired them?
So, Rick, is there any particular explanation for the increase in home runs during this period? Did the equipment change? Were the guys working out more, or getting bigger? Or was it technique?
He’s a first year HOF no doubt whatsoever. He put up the numbers for many years. Good numbers over many years gets you in, great numbers over a short span do not. Just ask the Maris family.
The streak does not help him in my book. There were many times where I believe a rest of a day or two would have helped him and the team, to keep it going in spite of the harm that it did to the team was a flaw in an otherwise great career.
If he was in any way a marginal candidate, his personality helps him. Kirby Puckett was much more marginal than Cal, but got in due to his being such a good person.
About Ruth, remember the “dead-ball era”? Does anyone disagree that somewhere in the close proximity of 1920, MLB went from a dead ball to a much livelier ball?
Ruth hit 29 HRs in 1919, and as I understand it, that was with the dead ball. The interest his HRs aroused just might have had something to do with the switch to the lively ball. So there’s a real argument that Ruth created the HR era of the 1920s and 30s.
HRs in AL went 240-369-477 in 1919-20-21, fwiw.
As people who’ve been with me in other baseball threads know, I’m not the biggest Ripken booster in the world, and I strongly agree that The Streak was an exercise in vanity that did more to hurt his team than to help it. But I think he belongs in the HOF, despite the streak rather than because of it.
His offensive numbers are pretty much on a par with those of Robin Yount, another SS who played in pretty much the same era, and who is already in the HOF. His defensive numbers (and I’m looking at range factor and DPs, rather than fielding %, which I don’t think has much value) are up in the same range (lower range, lots more DPs turned). And there really are only a handful of better shortstops who’ve already hung up their spikes. Plus there’s the 3000-hit business: I don’t think 3000 hits should get one into the HOF automatically, any more than 500 homers should. But in either case, you’ve got to have a good reason why they shouldn’t be there.
I think the John Valentin comparison is spurious: we only have part of a career for him. We don’t think of him in HOF terms as a result, and we don’t get to know whether he would have sustained HOF-level numbers for long enough to be mentioned as a possible HOF guy. So saying, “Cal Ripken equals John Valentin, and Valentin equals a non-HOFer” is defining Valentin in different ways in the two equations, and treating them as the same. He’s the “no cat has two tails” in the argument that a typical cat has three tails.
mhendo, it was largely a product of equipment and rules changes. Remember that they started making a concerted effort to keep clean balls in play after Ray Chapman’s death, plus you had the banning of the spitball, plus you have the fact that the ball was definitely a bit livelier after 1918.
Note that home runs weren’t the only thing going up. Batting averages rose significantly at the same time. From 1919 to 1920, the AL batting average jumped 16 points, the NL by 12 points… a huge, huge difference. Doubles increased by 25% in both leagues from 1919 to 1920. Triples increased by 20%. Walks went up about 12%. Stolen bases went DOWN. It is very, very clear that hitting got significantly easier in 1920, for all players - not just in hitting homers, but just in driving the ball hard. I have no doubt that this is what drove up home runs - with the ball easier to drive, uppercutting and hitting homers became easier. Ruth’s success was certainly inspirational, but the change was going to happen, Ruth or no Ruth.
I arrived in Baltimore (and the US) just in time to catch Ripken’s last season and a half, but i have a question for those who were around during the streak:
When did it become clear to you that Ripken was playing every game simply to break the streak? Or, perhaps more reasonably, when did it become clear that the Orioles were not resting Ripken when they should have just so he could break the streak?
Was it after 500 games? 1000? 1500? 2000? When did people really start to think that the iron-man record might be broken?
The OP asks a very fair question. Except that the assumption that he would’ve finished with the same offensive totals even without the streak is not realistic. He would’ve been benched or cut years earlier if it weren’t for the streak.
All of Ripken’s offensive achievements are due to the length of time that he played. But that .276 career batting average doesn’t lie (Take a look at the career averages for Jeter, Garciaparra and Rodriguez). And he was slow. You have to give him credit for 2 MVP seasons, and his excellent fielding. But without the streak, he would’ve been benched years before he retired and wouldn’t have compiled nearly the same offensive totals.
Ripken was quite the politician. Good looks and a nice smile with a classic personality made it impossible for Oriole management to ever release him, or even ask him to sit out a game or 2. So in the end, I think that his fan support gets him into the Hall.
Thanks for the info, Rick.
I had to Google Ray Chapman to find out who he was–quite a sad story. I also felt pretty sorry the pitcher, Mays, who hit Chapman. The story i read made it sound like the incident was accidental, but many people treated Mays as if he’d done it on purpose.
RickJay
I still have problem with your contention that baseball progresses entirely because of natural evolution and not because of any one player.
So there are no innovators in baseball? No does anything new. They just happen to be the first one during a natural progression of the game.
Many others would argue that hitting did not get easier in 1920, but rather that the style of hitting changed. The emphasis on “small ball” techniques like bunting and stealing declined and players tried to hit the ball harder.
Before Ruth, just who were the big power hitters: Cravath, Baker? Guys who were hitting 10-15 home runs a year. Then Ruth hit 29 in 1919 and 54 in 1920.
I understand your point, but I’m wondering why players who are on the forefront of a change in the game are given little or no credit for it. Somebody has to be first at doing something.
The Chapman-Mays incident was indeed very sad, and what a shame the way the fans treated Mays. But what about Juan Marichal taking a bat to John Roseboro’s head? That WAS on purpose, yet it seems to have had no effect on Marichal’s election.
Actually Marichal wasn’t chosen for a few years after being eligible. It was only after Roseboro made a public act of forgiveness that Marichal was chosen.
true, LaSorda called Roseboro the nicest man ever to wear Dodger blue and Marichal credits Roseboro’s forgiveness as the reason he got in.