John Olerud: Hall of Famer?

He's not so far different a case from Keith Hernandez.

Olerud had almost identical home/road splits, demonstrating the consistency for which he was known.

And was a super nice guy.

 

Nice player. He had two great seasons and a bunch or good ones. A very good fielder. He played on a couple very good teams.

HOF? God no...

 

True. Very consistent. Consistently very good, not great.

Incredibly nice guy.

 

For Dick, who should look in a dictionary.

CONTRIVED: having an unnatural or false appearance or quality.

Saying a walk is worth about .6-.7 singles is contrived.

 

Maybe here's a better question, Mizzou: Didn't he deserve more than four votes?

 

No, it's not.

And I don't mean any individual walk. Sometimes, a walk isn't worth anywhere close to a single. Sometimes, they are 1:1. But over the course of a huge number of plate appearances, walks are worth about .6-.7 the value of singles.

 

More than this, I'd question your baseball judgement if you think Olerud should be in the Hall.

 

He was good enough that you could vote for him without being ridiculed.

 

There is a post above in which I explain some other factors I'd be forced to explore before I'd put him in.

I do think that this strengthens his case, however, in a surprising and fascinating way.

 

The idea that walks equal hits is, in my opinion, the major flaw that held the A's back. They would beat the crap out of bad pitchers throughout the regular season, and then in the postseason -- when teams didn't hand out walks as readily and nobody was using a fifth starter or a long reliever -- they couldn't score. Chavez and Tejada wouldn't even swing the freakin' bat, they were so convinced they were going to mosey on over to first base.

 

Good way of putting it.

And, more than anything, I was intrigued by the piece because it gets to something we were discussing on the Stanton ballot thread. Someone said that if a voter votes for someone and is the only voter to do so, they should get their ballot taken away. I argued that there have been cases of guys in history who received one vote and eventually made it in (albeit from the Veterans' Committee, but not all of them were joke selections). I said that we might learn more about the game at a later date that shows us that a guy was more valuable, thus viable, than we may have realized at the time. The Olerud situation embodies that a little bit, I think.

Damn, I love this game. Three more weeks, right?

 

Yeah, it was nice when we would debate a player who actually merits a debate. Olerud does not.

But this thread will get to two pages just with people telling Dick how stupid he is.