Wednesday, September 09, 2009
All hail . . . . Ed Kranepool?
Posted by Chris JaffeIn honor of Derek Jeter's imminent breaking of Lou Gehrig's franchise record for most hits, LoHud Yankee blog presented a list of each franchise career hit leader. In a thread on it over at BTF, poster AG#1Fan noted the Mets had a comically low career leader for a franchise that had been around for nearly a half-century: 1,418 by Ed Kranepool.
So I wonder, what is the hit leader for each franchise since 1962, and how does Kranepool stack up?
Here they are in order from most-to-least, broken up into fives to make it easier to read. I'll include post-1962 expansion franchises, but put them in italics:
BOX 3,419 Carl Yastrzmski
CIN 3,358 Pete Rose
BAL 3,184 Cal Ripken Jr.
KCR 3,154 George Brett
MIL 3,142 Robin Yount
SDP 3,141 Tony Gwynn
HOU 3,060 Craig Biggio
NYY 2,718 Derek Jeter
STL 2,713 Lou Brock
ATL 2,390 Chipper Jones
CHC 2,385 Ryne Sandberg
DET 2,369 Lou Whitaker
LAA 2,368 Garret Anderson
MIN 2,304 Kirby Puckett
SEA 2,247 Edgar Martinez
PHI 2,234 Mike Schmidt
PIT 2,232 Willie Stargell
CWS 2,136 Frank Thomas
COL 2,110 Todd Helton
LAD 1,977 Willie Davis
SFG 1,951 Barry Bonds
OAK 1,882 Bert Campaneris
TEX 1,734 Ivan Rodriquez
DCN 1,694 Tim Wallach
CLE 1,616 Omar Vizquel
TOR 1,583 Tony Fernandez
NYM 1,418 Ed Kranepool
ARI 1,337 Luis Gonzalez
FLA 1,273 Luis Castillo
TBR 1,270 Carl Crawford
So yeah, the Mets career leader is as bad as it looks and isn't just some era bias issue.
I never would've guessed Omar Vizquel would score so high. He's actually Cleveland's hit leader since 1941. (Push it back to 1940 and Lou Boudreau pulls ahead).
History instructor by day, statnerd by night, Chris Jaffe leads one of the most exciting double lives imaginable; with the exception of every other double life possible to imagine. Despite his lack of comic-book-hero-worthiness, Chris enjoys farting around with this stuff. His new book, Evaluating Baseball's Managers is available for order. Chris welcomes responses to his articles via e-mail. Oh, and now he's on twitter.
If the Nationals get credit for Tim Wallach, then surely the Twins should get credit for Sam Rice (2,889 hits).