The Big Hurt

Sorry, Zoolander2219, but it may have been the other way around. - kag2

Sorry, kag2, but be sure to look at all the stats on each player's page.

Jeff Bagwell:

http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/b/bagweje01.shtml

Frank Thomas:

http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/t/thomafr04.shtml

Neither was a great base runner or glove man

Wrong. Look at Bagwell's baserunning stats. He ranks 20th all-time among first basemen in stolen bases with 202, and he is the only first-sacker since World War Two to steal more than 200 bags. Baggy is the only first baseman to hit at least 400 home runs and steal more than 200 bases, and he is the only first baseman to be a member of the 30-30 club--he did it twice, in 1997 with 43 HR and 31 SB, and in 1999 with 42 HR and 30 SB.

Frank Thomas stole 32 bases in his entire career.

Defensively, no first basemen looks good against modern defensive metrics. Bagwell pulled a lifetime -7.9 defensive wins above replacement (WAR; baseball-reference.com version), but considering that baseball-reference.com sets the 1B baseline at -10.0 before calculating an individual first baseman's dWAR, Bagwell looks okay. His career Total Zone Total Fielding Runs Above Average is 31, and his Total Zone Defensive Runs Saved is 12, both meaning that compared to an average first baseman, he is that many runs better in each category. Bagwell also won a Gold Glove at first in 1994, the same year as his MVP award. However, I'm not always convinced that the Gold Glove is strictly for fielding; as the old joke goes, sometimes a guy doesn't hit well enough to earn a GG.

Thomas was an atrocious defensive first baseman, which is why he was a designated hitter for half his career. dWAR: -23.4. TZ Total Fielding Runs Above Average: -64. TZ DRS: 0.

So overall Bagwell may have been the equal of the Big Hurt.

No. Overall, Bagwell was better than Thomas because he had more tools.

Jay Jaffe's JAWS (Jaffe WAR Score system) ranking on baseball-reference.com lists Bagwell as the sixth-best first baseman ever (79.6 WAR), and Thomas as the ninth-best (73.7 WAR). Note that Bagwell was worth almost six wins more to his teams than Thomas was to his. And fangraphs.com, which uses a different method to compute WAR, is even more bullish on Bagwell: Bagwell pulls 80.2 WAR versus Thomas's 72.4 WAR.

Thomas was a hitting monster, and apart from his getting to those nice plateaus we like so much, such as a .300 batting average (.301) and 500 home runs (521 HR), Thomas was the better hitter by a very modest margin.

But if I'm putting together a team, and I have to pick between Baggy or the Big Hurt as my first baseman, I'm picking Baggy every time. He's got so much more dimension.

Now, Hall of Fame. Thomas is a no-doubter, and I have no objection whatsoever to his getting in on his first ballot. But Bagwell is a first-ballot guy too, and he's still waiting.

It's the PEDs (performance-enhancing drugs) perception. Somehow the rumors started--and to this point they are only that: rumors--that Bagwell used PEDs. Meanwhile, Thomas has been outspoken about his opposition to PEDs--he was the only then-active player willing to be named in the Mitchell Report, and it was for advocating more stringent testing--and he made a point to note that he played his career "the right way." That's why he got in on his first try. Again, I have no problem with that, but let's be honest that he was rewarded by the current political climate as much as for his elite batting record while Bagwell suffers under unproven innuendo.

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History is hard to know, because of all the hired bull$hit. - Hunter S. Thompson

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