01-09-2007, 02:27 PM
I remember when Bill Simmons wrote this article in 2002.
I forget the stat, but it was either VORP or WARP3 or one of those sabermetric stats, but I saw something once that when looking at that, Ripken was one of the top 25 players of all time because it factored his offense and defense against other shortstops (who all sucked at the time). I tried to do a search to validate it, but I can't find anything so maybe I'm all wet.
So even discounting the streak, if he was that head and shoulders above every other professional shortstop for a decade (in terms of offense and defense), then he probably deserves to be in.
But certainly, the last 5+ years of his career he sucked because of the streak. He was hurting his team just to get some retarded milestone.
I forget the stat, but it was either VORP or WARP3 or one of those sabermetric stats, but I saw something once that when looking at that, Ripken was one of the top 25 players of all time because it factored his offense and defense against other shortstops (who all sucked at the time). I tried to do a search to validate it, but I can't find anything so maybe I'm all wet.
So even discounting the streak, if he was that head and shoulders above every other professional shortstop for a decade (in terms of offense and defense), then he probably deserves to be in.
But certainly, the last 5+ years of his career he sucked because of the streak. He was hurting his team just to get some retarded milestone.