Joe Mauer and the Rule of 2,000
(Photo: Keith Allison)
Two thousand hits is not 3,000, and yet there was plenty of reason to celebrate Joe Mauer reaching that milestone on Thursday night at Target Field via a two-run single against the White Sox. If nothing else, it shores up the 35-year-old catcher-turned-first baseman’s case for Cooperstown, because 2,000 hits has functioned as a bright-line test for Hall of Fame voters for the past several decades. Neither the BBWAA nor the various small committees has elected a position player with fewer than 2,000 hits whose career crossed into the post-1960 expansion era, no matter their merits.
Just 34 of the 157 position players in the Hall for their major-league playing careers (including Monte Ward, who made a mid-career conversion from the mound to shortstop) have fewer than 2,000 hits, and only 11 of them even played in the majors past World War II:
Player | Years | H |
---|---|---|
Bill Dickey | 1928-43, ’46 | 1,969 |
Rick Ferrell | 1929-44, ’47 | 1,692 |
Hank Greenberg | 1930, ’33-41, ’45-47 | 1,628 |
Ernie Lombardi | 1931-47 | 1,792 |
Joe Gordon | 1938-43, ’46-50 | 1,530 |
Lou Boudreau | 1938-52 | 1,779 |
Ralph Kiner | 1946-55 | 1,451 |
Phil Rizzuto | 1941-42, ’46-56 | 1,588 |
Jackie Robinson | 1947-56 | 1,518 |
Roy Campanella | 1948-57 | 1,161 |
Larry Doby | 1947-59 | 1,515 |
Eight of the 11 players on that list had substantial career interruptions that contributed to their falling short of the milestone. Dickey, Gordon, Greenberg, Kiner, and Rizzuto all lost multiple seasons to military service, while Campanella, Doby, and Robinson were prevented from playing in the majors due to the presence of the color line, which fell on April 15, 1947 (71 years ago this Sunday) with Robinson’s debut. Of the other three, Ferrell and Lombardi were constrained by spending their whole careers as catchers; the former, a two-time batting champion, was classified as 4-F by the time the war rolled around, while the latter, one of the Hall’s lightest-hitting catchers (and the lowest-ranked in JAWS), was too old for the draft.