Obviously they’re two different kinds of players, but it’s kind of cool to see Derek Jeter tie Willie Mays on the career hits list.
Number 3,283 came on a seventh inning RBI single last night during the Yankees 2-0 win over Boston. It was his 195th hit of the year, which leads the majors. So, bone bruise in his ankle notwithstanding, he’s not just limping past people on the all-time hits list.
Jeter and Mays are tied for 10th* all time. Getting higher up the chart will have to wait until next year, however, as Eddie Collins stands 32 hits ahead, while the Yankees have 19 games to go. Assuming a healthy and productive 2013, however, Jeter could pass not just Collins, but Paul Molitor, Carl Yastrzemski, and Honus Wagner.
If he wants to move higher, he’ll either need a new contract that takes him into 2014 or else he’ll need to exercise his 2014 player option and be still good enough to get regular playing time. If that happens, there lies Tris Speaker at fourth place and Stan Musial at third.
That seems like a reasonably possible place for Jeter to top out, leaving only Hank Aaron, Ty Cobb and Pete Rose ahead of him. Then again, no one really figured Jeter would have a 200-hit season at age 38 either, so who the hell knows how far he’ll go?
*Fun times: when I first wrote this early this morning I had Jeter and Mays at 11th. Why? Because when you go to Baseball-Reference.com and look at the hits leaders, that’s where they are, and dammit, as an Internety baseball writer, Baseball-Reference.com is the word of God.
However, I did not take into account Cap Anson. Baseball-Reference.com lists him as sixth all time on the hits list with 3,435 hits. But they’re alone in this, however. Official statistics of Major League Baseball, the Elias Sports Bureau and the like don’t include Anson’s National Association totals, obtained in the first four years of his career in the 1870s. That’s over 400 hits he’s docked, putting him down in Wade Boggs/Rafael Palmiero land. I spoke with Sean Forman of Baseball-Reference.com about it this morning, and he explained to me that while scholarly and research consensus on the matter consider the National Association to be every bit as much a major league as the National League was back in the day, Major League Baseball disagrees.
Should we feel bad for Major League Baseball’s refusal to recognize all of Cap Anson’s hits? Nope! And not because I have any insight into why his National Association hits should or should not be discounted. Rather, it’s because he was also a total jackwagon racist scumbag who bore large responsibility for baseball’s segregation, and if it meant docking him 3,000 more hits I’d do it in a second because he helped cost America the chance to see Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson and those guys play against Major Leaguers on a regular basis in their primes.
But I suppose that gets us rather far afield of statistics.
