On Jimmers and 600 Taters

By Bill

A few thoughts on everyone's favorite half-giant, Jim Thome, while I ponder the fact that since the last time I wrote here (just a little more than two weeks ago, before the big move and starting a new job and so forth), Dan Uggla's OPS has gone up about a hundred points:

• Thome's been a Hall of Famer for like five years now. He hit his 500th home run way back in 2007. His 70.8 rWAR is fourth among active players (behind A-Rod, Pujols, and Chipper, and ahead of Jeter), and tenth all-time among first basemen (using a 40% cutoff; Thome didn't quite play half of his career games at first). If you hear anyone speak of his 600th home run as though it makes or even just significantly strengthens his Hall of Fame case, you have my permission to slap them.* Hard.* Case made, quite a while ago. Big round numbers are fun, but not necessary.
   
• That said, is anyone actually doing or saying those things? I feel like a lot more people are complaining about his being underrated than are actually underrating him at this point. Yeah, over the course of his career, he's been unfairly overlooked. Now, though, I think almost everyone realizes how great he's been (more or less), and I don't get the sense that many more Hall of Fame voters would pick him today than would have yesterday morning (there are a few that wouldn't in either case, but they're morons beyond hope and aren't worth discussing). I could be wrong.
  
  
• Speaking of being overlooked during his time, though, Thome has started just two All-Star Games and made just five All-Star teams. The game wasn't even instituted until Babe Ruth's second-to-last full season, and he started two ASGs. No one else in the top eleven in homers started fewer than five or been named to fewer than seven.
   
• Thome was drafted as a shortstop, played 40 games there in the minors, and then played exclusively third base until his age-26 season. As a rookie, he looked like this, then quickly got huge. He hit with modest power in the minors, then averaged just 34 homers per season from age 24 to 29, then 46 per season in his five healthy seasons between ages 30 and 35. I'd never accuse anybody of taking anything -- I have no evidence, and if I did, I wouldn't care -- and least of all Thome, possibly my favorite active player. But it just illustrates to me how insane the whole PED witch hunt is. It seems to me that there's exactly as much evidence of PED use in Thome's career as in Jeff Bagwell's (that is to say, no evidence), but that one is assumed to be "clean" and one "dirty" for no reason I can figure other than that Thome apparently enjoys the hell out of a cheeseburger, fries and a beer every now and again.
  
  
• Or maybe I'm wrong, and maybe people do suspect Thome. Or will come to sometime in the next six or seven years. That's even more ridiculous, so much so that I don't even think I can talk about it.
  
  
• As Craig Calcaterra pointed out on Twitter, Thome hit his first home run when "I Adore Mi Amor" by Color Me Badd was the #1 song in the country. Also worth noting: Thome was drafted in 1989, before Mike Stanton, Jason Heyward, and Starlin Castro were born. When he made his MLB debut a bit over two years later, on September 4, 1991, the youngest player of the 2011 season to date, Mike Trout, turned four weeks old. The pitcher off of whom he hit that first home run, Steve Farr -- and it was a ninth-inning two run homer that turned a 2-1 loss to the Yankees into a 3-2 Cleveland win -- is now 54 years old. Thome went 0-for-4 with a walk and two K's against Nolan Ryan, now 64.

Anyway, a hearty congratulations to Jim Thome on a really tremendous accomplishment. I've never met Thome and I don't really know anything about him as a person, but he sure seems like one of the real, genuine good guys, and is possibly the only player I've ever actively rooted for while he was wearing a White Sox uniform. Last night was just one of those good nights for baseball.

* My permission has no legal effect. Don't slap people.

The End of the Road and the End of Innocence

So, not much happened around the league yesterday, right? Right. The Common Man is sure you want to talk about Yovanni Gallardo’s homerun yesterday as much as he does, but instead, The Common Man wants to talk about one of the little news stories you may have missed yesterday, as excited as you were about the return of Matt Tolbert.

Yesterday afternoon, Ken Griffey Jr. announced his retirement from baseball, ending his career with 630 homeruns (5th all time) and a 135 OPS+. For a while, Griffey was the best player in the American League, but his dominance effectively ended after 2000. In 2001, he fell victim to the first in a string of leg injuries that culminated in completely rupturing his hamstring in 2004. While he bounced back in 2005, he was unable to sustain that level of performance and became no better than an average offensive player, but below average for a corner outfielder. TCM has talked about the end of Griffey’s career extensively before, and doesn’t want to rehash everything here, but BaseballReference.com lists Griffey as having a -1.4 WAR from 2008-2010, which would tie him with Ernie Banks at #149 for worst career endings.

Yesterday and today, Griffey is being celebrated for the excitement he brought to the game in the 1990s, as well as for being the best player not “touched” by the steroid scandal. Ken Rosenthal says, “He is a first ballot Hall of Famer, not simply because he hit 630 home runs, but because he is the few players from this era who is not tainted by allegations of performance enhancing drugs….This will not be a problem for Griffey unless some bombshell emerges…and no one expects that to happen.” Rosenthal goes on, saying “We’ll never know if Griffey could have avoided some of his many injuries — or, on the flip side, if his injuries would have occurred with even greater frequency….We will always remember him clean.” Rosenthal’s doe-eyed optimism and faith is kind of touching, actually. Of course, we have no proof that Ken Griffey used PEDs. Nor have we heard anything about him using. But had anyone accused ARod of using PEDs before the positive tests in 2003 came to light? Didn’t everyone (The Common Man included) assume Rodriguez hadn’t used them because he didn’t need them? Did anyone actually think Andy Pettitte had used PEDs before his usage became public knowledge?

And, in Griffey’s case, there may have been a need there. Indeed, one of the recurring themes from PED users who have admitted their transgressions has been a desire to recover from injury faster. Has there ever been a more frustrating rash of injuries than those suffered by Ken Griffey from 2001-2004? Was he ever approached about using PEDs? Did he make any discreet inquiries about whether they would help him get back on the field? Did he succumb to temptation? It's entirely possible to construct a narrative in which Griffey was disappointed in himself and his body enough to look into, and perhaps use them. And using the Bonds criteria (his body was bigger than when he was a rookie, and so was his head!), it's possible to build a circumstantial case, if you were inclined.


But obviously there’s no way to answer these questions without, as Rosenthal says, some kind of bombshell. Griffey surely won’t talk about it, nor should he (at the risk of incriminating himself and tainting his legacy). And anyway, The Common Man chooses to assume that Griffey was clean, because TCM always liked Junior. But don’t pretend that Griffey was above performance enhancing drug use. Plenty of great players have used PEDs, including those who probably didn’t need it and who you would not normally have suspected. Ken Griffey was a terrific ballplayer, and a first-ballot hall of famer, but he wasn’t a saint. Griffey probably didn't use steroids, HGH, or any other kind of performance enhancers. But if he did, in this day and age, we really shouldn't be surprised.

Best to just leave it out of the analysis all together and be content that Griffey was a terrific player for a long time, and one of the game's most popular.

Much Ado Begets Nothing

The Common Man has inadvertently turned the comments section of Shysterball into his own private soapbox for the day, and rather than continue to take up valuable space, bytes, and whatever else over there, he thought that perhaps he could move his part of the discussion to his own personal fiefdom. Speaking about Roger Clemens, Shyster argues,

"I’d probably boo him if he were pitching again. What I’m talking about is treating him like a social leper. Disinviting him from stuff. Taking his name off of things he donated money to make possible. It’s just so sanctimonious and cowardly.... Clemens isn’t evil. Once he figures out how dumb he’s been for the last year he’s going to go back to being a big rich bullheaded Texan that could probably do a lot of good in the right situation (charity work; informal coaching, etc.)."

As usual, he is right. Baseball gains nothing tangible by shutting players like Roger Clemens and Mark McGwire and Rafael Palmeiro out of the game. Instead, they get what they've always been seeking, cover meant to dissuade Congress, media, and fans from looking closer at the game and those who play it. It keeps the heat off while baseball struggles to catch up to dopers and dope-producers who remain (and almost certainly will remain) a step ahead. Baseball has and will continue to use these men as scapegoats for the steroid era, and declare itself largely free and clear of the steroid era.

This, of course, was the purpose of the famous Mitchell Report, a document eagerly anticipated because it promised a) to name names (creating the scapegoats that baseball needed) and b) to be the beginning of the end of the steroid era. And it was incredibly effective in doing so, in shutting down or blunting the most pointed of critics in Congress, and in shifting the perception of MLB to that of a sinner trying to attone.

And The Common Man believes that Bud Selig and the MLB were and are, in fact, honest in their desire to clean up the game. But in their desire for damage and spin control, they missed the best long-term opportunity to clean up the game. By using the Mitchell Report and Congressional hearings into steroid abuse to shift the onus onto the players and the player association, MLB has created a generation of pariahs whose ostracization makes them virtually useless to any further efforts to clean up the sport.

But think for a moment how powerful these former giants of baseball could be if they were invited back. Here is the vision that The Common Man wrote in Shyster's comments (with pronouns changed to respect this forum, in which The Common Man is all-powerful), "Do not keep the McGwires from the game. Invite them back and ask them to talk about what they did, why they did it, and what effects taking supplements and/or steroids have had on their body, mind, and life. The Common Man thinks everyone will all be better for it if they allow themselves to become better educated." Indeed, think about these men, whose alleged-PED use brought them to the pinnacle of the sport, making them national heroes who graced the cover of Time, and appeared on The Simpsons. What if they were to tell the players who are coming up today, high schoolers, and college players, and minor leaguers, about how it ultimately was not worth it to juice? What if they could tell the kids about the shame they caused their families, their mothers and wives (hello, Roger) and their kids? What a tool to cut down interest in taking steroids from its source! Indeed, without demand, the supply will dwindle as producers find other, more profitable fields to go into.

Sure, Americans can continue to be angry and bitter over steroid use, but what good is that? Just because Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds allegedly took PEDs, does that mean that you had less fun watching them in 1998 and 2001? So why are vocal critics of steroids so angry? Anger isn't productive. Let baseball aggressively test for steroids, let it fairly punish those who are caught using, and give those who have sinned a chance for redemption. Invite them back, tell them why you want their help, and ask them to save baseball again, just like they did in 1998.