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09/15/2004: Jedmonds for Cooperstown, revisited....
Rob at STLOutsider covers this ground in a post from yesterday. He takes the tack of looking at Edmonds's career Win Shares, and concludes:
That's 239 Win Shares as of this writing, so Edmonds will finish 2004 in the 240-245 neighborhood. Unless Edmonds is going Bonds on us, he just won't compare to the Big Five among center fielders (Mays, Mantle, Cobb, Speaker, DiMaggio), so what about #6? That would be Duke Snider, who has something like 352 Win Shares (I say "something like" since Bill James has at least two different numbers for Snider in his New Historical Abstract). The Duke's a legit Hall of Famer, unlike Hack Wilson or maybe Kirby Puckett, so career value similar to his should do the trick.Off the top of my head, I'll say that's doable (probably there's some "fungus" occupying a space in the Hall that Jedmonds beats handily by this criterion). Hopefully, Jedmonds won't be hurt in the quest for Cooperstown by playing for the Birdinals instead of some more media saturated market....
Edmonds's roadmap to Cooperstown is two or three seasons at his Cardinal level (25-30 WS), then two or three Steve Finley-like seasons (15-20 WS) and maybe a tail-dragger or two. That's a lot to ask, but it's certainly plausible. Just as a reference point, the same Bill James Handbook gave Edmonds a 13% chance of hitting 500 home runs and presumably that's headed up. So I'll give him about a 30% shot at the Hall right now.
Len on 09.15.04 @ 07:21 AM CST
