Lasorda thought Roseboro was a really nice guy. I don’t even think Roseboro would have thought that about himself. Roseboro was a tough guy.
But then again, people do say nice things about people who have recently passed away. And I think Roseboro mellowed a lot after he retired from baseball (both as player and coach) and became more settled in his personal life.
Mike Schmidt hit .267. Harmon Killebrew hit .257. A .276 batting average is pretty damned good for a first-rate defensive shortstop with power who played for twenty years.
That’s a step removed from the OP’s question, and it’s speculation anyway. And actually, I suspect it’s quite false - I think Ripken stays in the lineup, streak or no streak. He was still interspersing good years in between the mediocre ones in the latter half of his career; he won the MVP in 1991, drove in 90 runs in 1993, hit .315 in 1994 with 75 RBI in the shortened season, and then hit 26 homers and drove in 102 RBI in 1996 and was still a good defensive shortstop. Hey, if you don’t want a good defensive SS with 26 homers, you can send him my way. Two years later he hit .332 - the year the streak ended, IIRC. He never had a BAD year, never hit .231 with 7 homers or something. Even had Baltimore dumped him - a very unlikely scenario, given their love of old, broken down players under Peter Angelos - someone else would have picked him up, and he would have ended up playing a lot of games.
I’m not a big fan of Cal Ripken myself, but I think the thing you need to keep in mind is that, like RickJay says, a .276 batting average over 20 years is actually fairly impressive for anyone, let alone a shortstop. It’s unreasonable to expect a player to be as productive in his 21st year as he was in his sixth or seventh, and so the players with exceptionally long careers, almost to a man, suffer from deceptively low averages. If Derek Jeter were to play another 15 years, that .317 career average couldn’t help but fall eventually.
That said, Ripken had a run of 14 out of 16 seasons where he drove in 80+, and played a stellar SS throughout the streak. At Ripken’s page at Baseball-Reference.com, you can look at the list of players to whom Ripken’s career compares most closely: Winfield, Yount, Kaline, Murray, and Yastrzemski are the top five. All Hall of Famers, and all were .300 hitters for at least a few seasons in their prime, yet none finished with a career average over .300. It seems to me that you can get into the Hall with a shorter, more spectacular career and gaudy averages (ala DiMaggio or maybe Hank Greenberg), or you can be productive for a longer period of time and have higher totals but a less-impressive “average season.”
I distinctly recall having read about it in 2 books, one was about the building of Oriole Park and hearing it during a Tv special about the new stadium.
This Baltimore Sun columnist says “no”.
http://www.sunspot.net/sports/baseball/ripken/bal-sp.eisenberg10oct10.column
Saying that Ruth didn’t revolutionize the game WRT the home run is ridiculous. In 1920 the man hit 54 home runs. Out of the 16 teams in the league, only 2 teams hit more than 54 homers, his Yankees and the Phillies, behind Cy Williams’ 15 and Irish Meusel’s 14. That record was more than double the prior record for home runs. That wouldn’t be possible if it were just the natural progression of the game.
On Ruth changing the game:
I don’t have a cite to back it up (and couldn’t really find a good one on Google) but I remember reading something where Ty Cobb said he could hit as many homeruns as Ruth if he wanted to, but he didn’t like to play the game that way. To prove his point, he allegedly hit three homeruns in a game to show he could do it if he wanted.
This could mean that the advent of Ruth and the power hitters could be more like when the Run and Shoot was introduced in football. Traditionalists hated it. In football, the traditionalists ended up being correct. In baseball, they were incorrect. Homeruns became a viable way to play the game. If the Run and Shoot had been viable in pro football, all the teams would be using it now.
Um, did we read the same article?
Emphasis added by me.
It seems to me that Eisenberg is arguing that Ripken would get into the HOF without the streak, but that the streak has elevated him from regular old Hall of Famer to legendary status.
If you can find anywhere in that article where he says, or even suggests, that Ripken would not make the HOF without the iron-man title, i’d appreciate you pointing it out to me.
Ruth it 29 home runs in 1919 for Boston, and he was a starting pitcher for half of the year. He was starting pitcher.
And just to show he still had the pitching touch, he ended his career with four straight victories spot starting in the 1920’s and 30’s, in between his forays in the outfield.
Ruth popped home runs as a pitcher. Can these beefy outfielders today say that?