Powerless Hammer

[Edgy MD]

Nate Silver does some number crunching and suggests that Hank Aaron would be a Hall of Fame player if he never hit a home run.

Amazingly, he starts from the assumption that all his career homers would fall for singles.

If all of his homers had been singles, Aaron would still have his 3,771 hits. Instead of being the second-best home-run hitter of all time, he�d be the third-best singles hitter of all time, after Ty Cobb and Pete Rose. His RBI total would have gone way down; based on the number of runs that Aaron knocked in on home runs and singles throughout his career, I estimate that he�d have 1,232 of them rather than 2,297. But 1,232 isn�t a shabby total; it would rank Aaron 141st all time, in the general vicinity of Derek Jeter, Edgar Martinez and George Sisler. He�d still be a lifetime .305 hitter and have a .374 on-base average.

Silver's a genius and all, and I enjoy the alternative history, but there would be some unaccounted-for consequences to him not hitting any homers (while gaining no bump in doubles and triples). His career playing time would likely drop somewhat precipitously, and his walks would be harder to come by.

[Benjamin Grimm]

So was Nate Silver sitting around one day wondering what would have happened if Hank Aaron was more like Jason Tyner?

[Edgy MD]

Silver was responding to this blog by Joe Posnanski, the nut graff being:

Henry Aaron was not a great home run hitter. To call him that diminishes him. Frank Howard was a great home run hitter. Harmon Killebrew was a great home run hitter. Reggie Jackson and Ralph Kiner were great home run hitters. Henry Aaron was a great HITTER � any qualifier put before that word cheapens his genius. Henry Aaron�s singular achievement is that he was great EVERY SINGLE YEAR from 1955 to 1973. That�s 19 consecutive seasons without anything resembling a down season. There really isn�t a record quite like it in baseball history.