Chipper's great, but not yet “the Mick”

Lew Hege/Senior Sports Columnist

The other day I wrote a column about a hypothetical all-time major league all-star team. I had assembled a panel of former players, scouts, and both older and younger baseball writers and each picked his own team. It was fun to reflect on the records of the greatest men to play America's game.

In Friday's Atlanta Journal-Constitution, columnist Terence Moore wrote a column entitled “Comparing Chipper to Mantle not a stretch.”

Moore, whose specialty is swimming against the tide, opened his column by declaring, “This is sacrilege, if you ignore Mickey Mantle's 536 home runs and magical name for the ages, Chipper Jones is just a few seasons shy of ranking

as the greatest switch hitter ever.”

Moore, who usually writes articles that he knows will be contentious, also threw in Eddie Murray as the other great switch hitter, but few, if any, would mention Murray in the same sentence as Mantle.

Braves' manager Bobby Cox, has seen every one of Jones' 2,031 games and says, “He's in the Hall of Fame even if he stops playing now.”

Jones says hold the fort a minute. “If I have four or five more years with the same type of numbers, you might put me in the same breath as those other guys. But it's way too early to say I'm with the best of all time.”

As a Braves' fan, and having covered them for the past 33 years, longer than Moore has lived in Atlanta, and nearly as long as Jones has been alive; I think Chipper is a future Hall of Famer.

But a .309 career average and 398 homers, while laudable, will not validate your ticket to Cooperstown. So, the declaration by Cox is a bit premature.

And Moore's statement, “If you ignore Mantle's 536 home runs,” is comical. Why would you ignore them?

Having seen both in the prime of their careers, Mantle was the better switch hitter and player. He had more power, more speed, and he was a far better right-handed hitter than Jones. He was just one of the best players of all time. He played three seasons too long, and often played injured, and it cost him a career batting average over .300. He hit .298, so what's the problem?

Instead of “ignoring” Mantle's great career, let's look at the era in which both played. Mantle played in the “golden era” of the game, when baseball was at its peak. The version played now has too many teams with too many second-rate pitchers, and the best hitters are feasting on them. When the Mick played there were just 16 major league teams which meant there were only about 65 pitchers in the American League. It was tough just to get there-and tough to stay once you got there. Long-term, guaranteed contracts weren't invented yet.

If Jones has a few more great seasons and say, belts another 125-150 round trippers, and keeps his average over .300, he will be a lock for Cooperstown. But a fairer comparison would against the great third basemen, like Mike Schmidt, Brooks Robinson, Eddie Mathews, and George Brett, just to name a few.

Here's hoping Chipper makes it, but there is only one Mick.