Ichiro!

As he prepares to break George Sisler’s record, I thought I would celebrate by passing along a remarkable junk stat. Bill James developed a series of tests that attempted to predict whether a player would make the hall-of-fame. One is called the Hall-of-Fame Monitor, which (looking at previous nominees) evaluates the chances of players on an accumulating scale, with 100 points making a player more likely than not to be elected. Ichiro’s number after 2003 (that is, before his greatest season, in which he is likely to hit around .370 and break an 80-year old record in the league’s best pitcher’s park)? 81. So, after this year he will almost certainly have a record that–after 4 years–gives him the big credentials of a median hall-of-fame outfielder.

Granted, this says as much about the Hall of Fame’s bias towards high-average hitters as it does about Ichiro, but it’s still pretty cool.