is todd helton a hall of famer?

[onejayhawk]

Pretty decent rundown of Helton's HoF credentials --- some stat nerd stuff, some other stuff as well.

http://www.bloguin.com/theoutsidecorner/2013-articles/september/the-hall-of-fame-case-of-todd-helton.html

Can we dispense with the MVP nonsense, though? A guy like Helton, who was on pretty much terrible Rockies teams his entire career save 2007, gets disproportionately hurt by that bullshit award and how it's handed out.

I dunno. He makes a very solid cse against enshrinement.

J

[chancellor]

plus the AL in Allen's MVP year was awful, iirc - ironically, the last remnants of a racist league where virtually all of the best African-Americans were in the NL for 20+ years. Yankees and Red Sox had NO such players of any quality at all until 8 to 12 years after Jackie.

AL was still pitching dominant in '72, but the whole racist comment, while true, makes no sense at all. Dick Allen won his MVP 25 years after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier, and there were a huge number of excellent black players across the AL. But the dominance of pitching in the AL that year only underscores how great Dick Allen was in 1972. He led the league by 65 points in SLG. Had a .420 OBP to lead the league. Led both leagues in OPS. Had an OPS+ of an amazing 199. Led the league by significant margins in HR and RBI. 4th in runs. And on top of all that, stole 19 bases.

In '66, a year he could have won the MVP, he had a .396 OBP and .632 SLG (again leading the league by an amazing margin), led the league in OPS, scored 112, had 40 HR and 110 RBI. Gosh, but he only had 10 SB in '66. Oh, yeah - and that was against pitchers throwing off a 15" high mound, not a 10" high mound.

Damn, no modern 1B eligible right now should go in before Dick Allen, much less a fraud made by the park in Colorado. Allen was an absolute feared beast in a heavily pitcher-weighted era; the only modern hitter feared more in this era would have been Barry Bonds in his steroid-fueled prime.

[Don Quixote]

AL was still pitching dominant in '72, but the whole racist comment, while true, makes no sense at all. Dick Allen won his MVP 25 years after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier, and there were a huge number of excellent black players across the AL. But the dominance of pitching in the AL that year only underscores how great Dick Allen was in 1972. He led the league by 65 points in SLG. Had a .420 OBP to lead the league. Led both leagues in OPS. Had an OPS+ of an amazing 199. Led the league by significant margins in HR and RBI. 4th in runs. And on top of all that, stole 19 bases.

In '66, a year he could have won the MVP, he had a .396 OBP and .632 SLG (again leading the league by an amazing margin), led the league in OPS, scored 112, had 40 HR and 110 RBI. Gosh, but he only had 10 SB in '66. Oh, yeah - and that was against pitchers throwing off a 15" high mound, not a 10" high mound.

Damn, no modern 1B eligible right now should go in before Dick Allen, much less a fraud made by the park in Colorado. Allen was an absolute feared beast in a heavily pitcher-weighted era; the only modern hitter feared more in this era would have been Barry Bonds in his steroid-fueled prime.

As much as I loved watching Allen hit, it's not as if he was the Bonds of his era. Among the great hitters of his time (which was my childhood and adolescence) were such names as Killebrew, Mays, Aaron, Clemente, Stargell, Howard, McCovey, Cepeda, and Yastrzemski, to name a few. Allen deserved to be mentioned when those guys were discussed, but often wasn't, due to his attitude and his terrible-at-many-positions defense--and possibly a little racism at some of his stops.

A classic Allen story--I think he was playing for the Dodgers, and the game was against the Reds at Crosley Field. Ninth inning, down a run, he hits a huge fly to the opposite (right) field. A no-doubter to tie the game. Suddenly, the ball seemingly stops, then drops almost straight down to the waiting right fielder (I think it was Pete Rose) for an out. Turns out that the ball hit a passing pigeon, as was discovered by the cleaning crew a couple of hours after the game, when the deceased pigeon was found in the box seats way down the 1B line. In a way, it was emblematic of Allen's career.