While I’m waiting for Puppy Bowl IV to arrive, I thought I’d flip through the STATS 1997 Baseball Scoreboard for inspiration. I’ve already used this source to re-examine Barry Bonds and now I see that there are a few more projections in here.
This time we’re looking at projected career hits. Specifically we’re looking at the players who were judged at that time most likely to reach 3000 hits. Let’s compare projected with actual, shall we?

Career Hits, Projected pre-’97 vs Actual post-’07

Player
Proj
Act
Diff

Cal Ripken Jr.
3166
3184
+18

Tony Gwynn
3139
3141
+2

Wade Boggs
3025
3010
-15

Roberto Alomar
2803
2724
-79

Rafael Palmeiro
2672
3020
+348

Chuck Knoblauch
2509
1839
-670

Frank Thomas
2355
2409
+54

Marquis Grissom
2328
2251
-77

Alex Rodriguez
2151
2250
+99

Points worth noting:

Those projections for Ripken, Gwynn, and Boggs are …read more

   Photo by Eddie~S   some rights reserved
J.D. Arney at Red Reporter has written a great post about exciting players he’s seen over the years. As you might expect, his list contains a fair amount of Reds. Actually, it contains only Reds, because — well, he’s the Red Reporter. Get it?
Anyway, I thought it might be fun to take this concept and extend it. Here are the most exciting players I’ve ever seen:
C: I’m not sure that I’ve encountered any “exciting” catchers. (I’m guessing Ivan Rodriguez, but I’ve only seen him play once or twice.) Maybe early Benito Santiago. I enjoyed watching Mike …read more