To be fair, Biggio and Palmiero are the only eligible 3000 hit folks who aren't in the HOF, and most of the 500 HR guys who aren't in are a who's who of PED folks.

I also wonder if 500 HRs is the new floor for power hitters getting into the hall. There are a lot of bad hitters amassing totals in the mid 400s. Now please excuse me while I wash the memory of Adam Dunn from my brain.

I don't disagree with anything you said in your comment (the good v. goat distinction goes a bit far). I only was responding to the outrage that Thomas got more votes than Bagwell, not to how well Bagwell did in the abstract. I think that Bagwell might suffer from the PED stigma (I have no idea whether that's…

Neither swearing nor cherry picking three stats (in which Thomas still comes out on top) enhance your point. Both players were in the majors because of their bats. Thomas was significantly better at hitting than Bagwell was. Thomas in his prime was much better than Bagwell in his prime. Thomas's counting stats are…

I personally draw a (completely arbitrary) distinction between folks who would have had HOF careers w/o PEDs (Bonds, Clemens) and those who would not (McGwire, Sosa). Others may have felt similarly?

I knew the numbers when I made my comment. Bagwell is close in some power categories, and far behind in some advanced stats. There is no area of hitting in which Thomas was not superior to Bagwell. I don't have anything against Bagwell and I think he has as strong a case as any of the power hitters on next years…

Bagwell was a good hitter. Thomas was one of the best hitters of all time no matter how you measure hitting. However, I thought that the DH thing would cost him some votes, too.

The real questions at the heart of all this are "is Cutler a good enough QB to be the QB on a team that wins the super bowl" and "what is such a QB going for on the open market."

I think that a glance at the recent past winning QBs says that Cutler is good enough. I honestly think that McCown is not. He is a career…

Enjoy. RGIII played like hot garbage this year. He didn't look like he belonged on the field at all. I can't speculate as to why, but I will say I am generally not optimistic about a turnaround.

McCown is a worse QB than Cutler. How he played in a handful of games against bad defenses this year does not change that fact. Nobody is going to sign McCown to a big contract (okay, maybe the Vikings), and if they do, he won't earn it. He didn't magically become a very good QB this year. He is roughly the same…

See my previous post: being average does not mean being replacement level. This isn't baseball. The options are Cutler or somebody worse than Cutler. The league doesn't hand you a statistically average QB as a consolation prize for being super smart and not paying a lot for a statistically average QB. The draft…

Because McCown and RG3 are not better than Cutler. Pretty simple. McCown's small sample size against terrible defenses is not outweighed by his entire body of work to date. RG3 is just a mess right now; I seriously question whether he'll be starting in 2 years.

If we are using my metrics for measuring quarterbacks, then Foles wouldn't be on the list because his body of work is too small. I was being expansive to assuage people who want to extrapolate from tiny sample sizes or just to generally be over-inclusive. Regardless of whether a handful of QBs from 2013 become good,…

In the five years from 2006 to 2010, there have been 2 Cutler-level quarterbacks drafted. There are no Kyle Ortons or other "game managers" in the bunch. Look for yourself if you think I am too much of a Bears fan to do the math. Discount the last three years entirely, if you like. 2/60 is really terrible odds. …

Sounds like we're talking past eachother here, so I'll just bow out after noting this list of QBs drafted that are better than Cutler (by a generous definition of that term and generous extrapolation of their careers), by year, including his draft class:

2006: 0/12
2007: 0/11
2008: 1/12
2009: 0/10
2010: 0/14
2011: 1(2)/12 …

1. They are not committed to him for anything other than the guaranteed money plus the damage of the cap hit. If the cap his is manageable, they are not committed to him at all.

2. The Bears didn't upgrade from Sid Luckman for more than half a century, so that's a big fat NO.

The fact is that excellent quarterback…

Cutler's a better QB than McCown or any other QB that's available now or likely next year or the year after (if we take draft picks at their expected value given their bust rate, and presume that established starters like Dalton and Newton are likely to stay with their tems). I don't see why you saddle the Bears with…

Whether he was worth the draft picks the Bears spent on him is a difficult question (re: whether they are better off with him). The Bears haven't had a very good QB since the 40s and I think there was some desperation there. Sadly, with the GM we had at the time, I doubt those picks would have been more valuable…

That's true, but the extra two years might create more room for restructuring the deal in a year or two to finagle the cap hit. I don't know all the rules for this, but I know that you can convert some amount of salary into guaranteed $$ in order to alter the cap impact of a deal in a given year.

Yeah, obviously we'll never really know what the market for his services would have been. I think he would have made that much or more somewhere else. If you're a GM, and your QB is too horrible to stick with, you are faced with Cutler, Vick, McCown, or a middle first round draft pick on which to wager your team's…