HOF III - Rice

Well, was working on this before the hall of fame ballots came out. Had saved it to my draft files because I was getting blurry eyed from looking at the numbers. My problem was that I kept on noticing when I was looking at Jim's career that another Red Sox player kept popping up in the equation, a person who is not considered a HOFer. As I sat on this news I found a post about this individual and Mr. Rice. Since he says it better than I could possibly do I suggest you go there and see why he will probably not be in the hall of fame. This would be the classic slippery slope in my opinion.

This time we are going to look at the reasons why Jim Rice should be inducted into the Hall of Fame. Previous posts HOF I (David Wells) and HOF II (Curt Schilling).

As usual we start our post by looking at Rice's comparable players list:

1. Orlando Cepeda (HOFer)
2. Andres Galarraga
3. Ellis Burks
4. Duke Snider (HOFer)
5. Joe Carter - possible
6. Dave Parker
7. Billy Williams (HOFer)
8. Luis Gonzalez
9. Willie Stargell (HOFer)
10. Chili Davis

4 HOFers and one possible, not a bad beginning to promote his inclusion into the hall. So on to the second part of this advocacy.

Mr. Rice's career started with 24 games in 1974 and ended with 56 games in 1989. 16 years he played for the Sox playing in 1 World Series (he missed the 75 series due to injury). His first full year with the Sox was in 1975 where he played in 144 games batting .309 with 22 HR's and 102 RBI's and scored 92 runs. I've always wondered what might have been in that 75 series if Rice hadn't been hurt.

If we look at the 14 full seasons that he played we see that he started 1991 games playing in 2009. His batting average was an even .300, OBA of .354, Slugging of .507, OPS of .862 hitting 378 Home runs, scoring 1,221 runs and knocking in 1,410 runs.