You Are Here > Baseball-Reference.com > Blog >

SITE NEWS: We are moving all of our site and company news into a single blog for Sports-Reference.com. We'll tag all B-R content, so you can quickly and easily find the content you want.

Also, our existing B-R blog rss feed will be redirected to the new site's feed.

Baseball-Reference.com » Sports Reference

For more from Andy and the gang, check out their new site High Heat Stats.

Killebrew vs. Thome

Posted by Chris J. on August 28, 2007

Tim Marchman wrote a column saying that (in some many words) Thome doesn't pass the smell test for HoFer because he didn't stand out from his peers enough, even though he'll likely end up with 500.  To test this, let's compare him to a similar player from a previous generation - Killebrew.

Both were third basemen turned into defensivly challenged first basemen.  Neither is at the tips of anyone's tongues when you think of HoFers.  Neither had superlative averages but both had plenty of walks and homers.

Since Thome's career isn't over, let's compare him with what Killer did threw age 36, Thome's current season.  Here's how Killebrew ranked with his peers through age 36.  Not too shabby.  Behind only Aaron and Mays, and ahead of some guy named Frank Robinson

Here's Thome so far in his career.  He's seventh, barely ahead of eighth. Sure there's expansion, but that doesn't explain why he's over twice as far back.

Marchman's got a point.

Related posts:

    Jim Thome ties Harmon Killebrew with 573 career home runs
    POLL: Jim Thome and the Hall of Fame
    Thome tags two to reach 600 HRs
    120 BBs & 120 Ks – The Jim Thome Award
    Harmon Killebrew 1936-2011

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 28th, 2007 at 11:09 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Comments are closed.