Craig Biggio gets 3000th career hit!

In another of the current flux of baseball milestones, Craig Biggio got his 3000th career hit today.

Like Frank Thomas, Biggio is an obvious first-ballot Hall-of-Famer despite some seriously asinine skepticism on the part of some.

Once again, start by looking at the stats and then compare his stats to what other second basemen have done. The position one plays is an important part of the equation, and Biggio is perhaps in the top five ever at his position (and very close to it, at the minimum). If you want to look at sophisticated Jamesian statistics, Biggio is estimated to be something like the 37th best player of all time (though most people consider that to be an overestimate). [I don't know of an online reference for this, but one of Bill James' books goes through his top 100 players based on his way of combining statistics. Also, it may be 100 position players and 100 pitchers because I'm not sure how he compared those.)

I should also mention that even though he's never played for the Dodgers, Biggio is my favorite player. He plays the game the right way --- he runs to first base hard on every ball, he leads the world (second all time) in getting hit by pitches, he gets his uniform dirty and/or ripped every game, his helmet is just the cruddiest thing imaginable, and he has now played for a single team his entire 20 year career.

Incidentally, tomorrow marks the 19th anniversary of his first Major League hit, which came off of the Dodgers' Orel Hershiser.