Darryl

This is for all those who wonder what could have been.

Let's play a game of make believe, just for a moment.

Let's pretend Darryl Strawberry had, instead of signing with the Dodgers, re-signed with the Mets.

Let's pretend that all the issues he dealt with- marital, financial, drug and alcohol related, didn't exist.

Let's say he played six more seasons with the Mets at a Darryl Strawberry level. We can say they went something like this.

.253 BA, 36 HR, 104 RBI
.277 BA, 27 HR, 91 RBI
.286 BA, 32 HR, 110 RBI
.274 BA, 27 HR, 97 RBI
.297 BA, 29 HR, 89 RBI
.300 BA, 41 HR, 111 RBI

You might recognize those numbers. They're the stats from the seasons in which Reggie Jackson was from the ages of 29 to 34.

Let's now build in a fade to Strawberry's career, because producing at his level for 14 years definitely takes its toll. But let's make the presumption that he stayed a Met for life, and didn't have the luxury of the DH to fall back upon. We'll give him five more seasons, build in an injury or two, and an eventual decline in production, but presume enough sympathy from the Mets to keep him around because he was Darryl Strawberry. That would be something like:

.254 BA, 28 HR, 119 RBI
.231 BA, 26 HR, 74 RBI
.242 BA, 5 HR, 32 RBI
.222 BA, 13 HR, 54 RBI
.199 BA, 14 HR, 44 RBI

The astute baseball fan may recognize those as the numbers from the last five seasons in the career of Hall of Famer Harmon Killebrew.

When Darryl Strawberry left the Mets for the Dodgers, the two Hall of Famers whom he resembled the most statistically were Killebrew and Jackson. If we take the Mets portion of Darryl Strawberrys career and combine it with the work of Msrs. Killebrew and Jackson, we get a career line that reads:

.262 BA

530 HR

1,658 RBI

281 Stolen Bases

Don't think we'd be waiting this long for the Mets Hall of Fame, or any Hall of Fame to induct him if that had been the case.