Nurse the Hate: The Jim Thome Question

This is Jim Thome's rookie card in 1994. Above that is Jim Thome in 1997.




Six hundred home runs is a magical number. Here’s who has hit 600 Home Runs legitimately. Hank Aaron, Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, and allegedly Ken Griffey Jr. These are legendary players that literally set the standard in the game of baseball. Meanwhile, Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, and Alex Rodriguez all passed 600 home runs while juiced up out of their minds. Those guys would all have put up big stats on their own, but when they passed landmark numbers, baseball purists all gathered to put the dark clouds of suspicion around them. This makes what is going on regarding Jim Thome even more curious to me.

Jim Thome is now four home runs short of 600. I have not heard one word about how this guy went from a kinda stocky OK third baseman to a giant plow horse of a man in 26 minutes. Thome hit 25 home runs on the 1995 Indians World Series team as a starting third baseman. That’s really good output from your third baseman. A couple years later, a much larger Thome hit 40 home runs. Not a little bigger. Much, much larger. It’s easy to explain really. From 18-26 he probably didn’t know that working out would help him as a professional athlete. He probably hit the weights for the first time when he turned 26 and threw 40 pounds of muscle on. Maybe he changed his diet up and ate more protein. In fact, I was thinking about doing the same thing this summer.

The really interesting thing is when Thome was 30 through 35, he had his biggest home run outputs in his career hitting around 50 home runs annually. Huh? How did that happen? It's not like in the past 80 years prior to steroids, guys got a lot better when they turned 30. Hell, I sure didn't. So Thome had a bad back, didn’t re-sign with the Indians and promptly hit 255 more home runs. Good diet, exercise, and lots of stretching I’ll bet! Maybe mix in a little yoga. That statistical trend of numbers jumping at age 30 is exactly like Barry Bonds at pretty much the same time. The difference? Barry Bonds is a giant A-hole that hit 70 home runs while Thome "quietly" hit 50. Everyone hated Bonds too. If you made a poll of disliked people, I bet Bonds finishes ahead of people like Stalin, The OctoMom, Paris Hilton, and probably even that poor little innocent Casey Anthony girl that clearly didn’t have anything to do with her kid’s death.

Thome is almost universally regarded as a really great guy. Everybody loves him, especially the media. He’s polite, makes himself available for interviews, and has that “aw-shucks” Midwestern Roy Hobbs thing that baseball writers love. "Oh, that Jim Thome is good for the game of baseball!" He does always say the right thing, doesn't he? You can't find anyone bringing up the fact that Thome must have been taking Gorilla Adrenalin, Mexican Power Juice, HGH, and every kind of cream/clear/ointment available. I would think he's still got some magic powder working. Still, isn’t there one baseball writer out there willing to look into it? Shit, they tore Mark McGwire down and everyone loved watching him launch 500 foot bombs too.

When Thome gets to 600 and ESPN makes those "gosh darn ain't he a good ole boy" montages, remember these two pictures. If you rip down Bonds, McGwire, Sosa, Palmero, etc, you better get after Thome too. He ain't no Roy Hobbs.