I mean come on. They were both good, but neither hit above .300 or even hit 400 homers. But I agree; if Rice gets in, so should Murphy.

Jim Rice has absolutely no business going into the HOF. How this guy is getting votes and Tim Raines isn’t confuses me to no end. I’m not sure that Murphy deserves to get in, though certainly if Rice deserves to he does. But Rice doesn’t deserve it.

Give me Raines who has more times on base than near unanimous first ballot HOF Tony Gwynn as well as nearly 500 more SB. Raines is basically being punished for walking too much, and only having 2,600 hits.

I think both were good hitters, but I honestly don’t feel either should be in the Hall. Their numbers just weren’t good enough. There are lots of good hitters not in the hall. It’s not a popularity contest to get in.

Murphy would be in if he were a BoSox.

Rice was a Fenway illusion anyways. A career .789 OPS on the road.

The best argument I could make for Murphy is that he was one of the two or three best hitters during the 80s. The problem is that he wasn’t even really dominant for the entire decade and for me thats where I would have a problem voting for him. He was only a dominant player for about 7 seasons. Definitely not enough for me to consider him a HOFer.
 And this is coming from a guy who never had less than 4 posters in his room of Murphy and was present for his first return trip to Atlanta after the trade and was there the night his number was retired. He is and always will be my favorite baseball player, but I just can’t make the argument for him being a HOFer. If he had been productive until 93 or 94 then he would probably be a shoe in.

Murphy was arguably the best hitter in the National league from 1982-1987 (the counter argument is Schmidt, which is a very strong argument, but I’ll put that aside). His biggest problem is that he never had a productive offensive season outside of those years. Before 1982, he had a bad year in 1981, a solid year in 1980, and a fairly average year in 1979. Following ‘87, he was just plain bad for the balance of his career. He led the league in GIDPs twice, and as a corner outfielder, he didn’t have any kind of the desired offensive production.

If he’d only been able to produce at a fairly average pace outside of those 6 peak seasons, he’d probably be much more worthy of hall consideration. But his overall numbers, even adjusted for era, don’t stand out as a result of the number of seasons where he was an offensive non-factor.

The comparison to Jim Rice just damages his HOF resume even more. Rice isn’t HOF worthy, but his offensive numbers are much better than Murphy’s. I really like Murph, and want good things for him, but window for greatness just wasn’t big enough.

Is whether or not you can win an MVP in a year that wasn’t your personal best. Murphy won the MVP in 1982 and 1983. His best 5 years are as follows: 1987, 1983, 1985, 1984, 1982. If you can win the MVP in your 5th best year. Yeah. You know.

This is a very decisive argument amongst us Braves fans. I have my feelings and I’m gonna lay out a couple arguments.

First off I think Murphy is a better player than Rice in about every way. His avg was significantly lower but their OBP was essentially the same. Rice had more power, but Murphy was a better baserunner and defender. I grade Murphy slightly above Rice.

I don’t think Rice deserves to be in the Hall of Fame. MLB Network did a Prime 9 on the 9 guys who should be in the Hall (you had to be eligible so Pete Rose and Joe Jackson weren’t on the list…that’s a whole nother argument). I decided the official way to tell if a player deserves to be in the Hall is when you say his name does it sound right. To me saying, “Jim Rice Hall of Famer”, doesn’t sound right. His numbers aren’t great he played in a bad era where baseball was weak (IMHO).

Now since Murphy> Rice, and Rice is in certainly Murphy should get in. Unfortunately that’s horrible logic. You can’t use a bad precedent to make future decisions. Murphy doesn’t deserve to be in the Hall because while he was really good for a couple of season he didn’t maintain it over a period of time. The exception to this is Koufax and that’s because he made the entire NL his bitch for 7 straight seasons. Murphy was really good but he didn’t DOMINATE. He won some MVPs posted really good numbers but he didn’t dominate. Its a difficult lien to draw (what constitutes domination), but the line can be drawn).

I grew up in the 90s as I know many of you did. So maybe I am slanted because I never saw him play (although that’s probably a bad argument because i never saw Hank Aaron play and I realize he was really friggin good). I would compare Murphy to someone like Juan Gonzalez (if you strip away any conceptions of Steroid use). Juan Gonzalez was one of the best players in baseball for a short period. No pitcher ever wanted to face him he raked. Is he a Hall of Famer…definitely not.

There are tons of players int he Hall of Fame that don’t belong there. And personally I would like the Hall to be the best of the best. If you continue to compare players like Rice and Murphy you won’t get that. You’ll add a bunch of players who were great players and maybe even great guys, but aren’t Hall of Famers. Every player should stand alone when being judged for entrance into this prestigious class.

Ok, i’m done with my mini rant and I’ll get off the soapbox and let the next guy take over.

for Murph, by Joe Posnanski, who is one of my favorite baseball writers.

http://joeposnanski.com/JoeBlog/2009/01/12/the-murph/

I really hope we’re not in this situation in 10 years, wondering why no one is voting for Chipper. There just is no reason he should be left out of the Hall, and I’m worried that somewhere along the way his greatness gets lost in the mess of ’roid-boosted numbers.

I’m also getting very angry after the fact about the 2007 MVP voting. Maybe Chipper didn’t deserve to win, but he sure as hell deserved a lot better than 6th. Rollins and Holiday were both hacky choices to be the top 2 vote getters-one gets propped up because the line-up behind him was awesome, and the other benefited enormously from his home ballpark. Not only was that Chipper’s best defensive season (where he got robbed of a GG) but it was arguably his best offensive season as well. He took some punishment for missing 28 games ( a whipping 17% of the season). Every rate statistic shows he was the most valuable hitter per game for the season.

And then there’s another top ten MVP finish, 2001, where the top 3 are roid-city: Bonds, Sosa, and Gonzalez. And Chipper was easily better than two of the other guys he finished behind.

We need to get Chipper another ring, just to make sure he’s not drowned by the rest of the noise.

Think about this. Jim Rice hit .298. Dale Murphy hit .265. All right, this seems significant. But take into account what these numbers really mean.

There is a difference of .033 between their averages. That equates to 33 entire hits out of 1000 at bats—a very small amount. Then take into account that nobody approaches 1000 AB in a season.

Jim Rice averaged 702 AB for his career, while Murph averaged 672. Take the mean of these two figures and you get 687, or 68.7% of 1000 ABs.

Multiply the 33 hit per 1000 AB difference by 68.7% and you get 23 hits.

23 hits per season, on average, is what determined the difference in Jim Rice & Dale Murphy’s batting averages. Is this really all that significant? I argue no, but again, maybe my math and my opinion don’t amount to a hill of beans to you. I still say that if Jim Rice can get into the HoF, then Dale Murphy should be, too. How many people win 2 MVP awards? The list is short.