You like the number crunching. Admit it. If you send in requests, our math guy, Max Wasserman, will take a stab at it. With Ken Griffey Jr. nearing his 600th homer, we felt like playing what-if. What if he didn’t have five brutal years worth of injuries? Max broke out the calculator, and what follows may surprise you. As required reading, you must read about Griffey’s 1989 Upper Deck card. Great stuff.

Someday very soon, Ken Griffey Jr. will hit his 600th career home run, reaching a milestone that only five other players have reached. It’s an amazing accomplishment to be sure, but with Griffey, it feels like he should have reached 600 home runs earlier than this. The numerous injuries he suffered since the turn of the millennium affected his performance and ultimately his record-breaking potential. So, TBL has asked me to project how many home runs Griffey could have hit at this point had he not lost so much time to injuries.

First, peruse Junior’s stats.

The injury years in question are 1995 and 2001-2006. (Remember that 1994’s fewer number of games was due to the strike.) As such, those are the years that we will be projecting. Since this is just an estimate, I’m going to use a method that is simple and that will likely underestimate the number of home runs Griffey could have had by now. Simply put, determine the rate of home runs per plate appearance for those years and multiply by an approximate number of plate appearances that could be expected for a full season. So here’s the projected data for those years:

graph1griffey

Putting it together with the actual data gives these potential stats for Griffey:

graph2griffey

That’s right, had Griffey stayed healthy all those years, he could already be at 700 home runs, over 100 homers more than he is at now. Comparing his projections with the all-time home run champions, both natural and chemical, over the first 19 full seasons:

graph3griffey

And this is a relatively conservative estimate. Since the injuries also affected Griffey’s swing and performance, his home run rates could be even higher. There is no question he would have been the all-time leader in career home runs if not for the injuries.

Although Griffey will soon reach an amazing milestone, he will always be in the “what could have been” group of players. (Here he is with another member of that group.) But when a player accomplishes enough to ensure their place in the hall of fame and people still talk about “what could have been”, you know that player is one of the greatest of all time.