Notes, quotes and comment

Ken Griffey Jr. and Mike Piazza joke about wearing their
caps backward during their Hall of Fame presser Thursday.

No surprise here: Ken Griffey Jr. said his Hall of Fame plaque will have a Mariners cap. Also not really a surprise: He says the cap will be worn in the traditional manner, brim forward. Junior, of course, was known for wearing his cap backwards during batting practice, and there was some chatter about having it backwards on his plaque.

Mike Piazza will have a Mets cap. There's a pretty good argument that it should be a Dodgers cap, but neither would be a mistake.

---

The three naysayers on Griffey have yet to fess up, so the current assumption is that they weren't skipping him to game the ballot. Whatever their reason, I'm not particularly wound up by the mystery; they didn't keep Griffey from going in.

---

A Ken Griffey factoid I love: Both he and his father, Ken Griffey -- the right fielder on the Big Red Machine of the 1970s and a darn good player himself -- were born in Donora, Pennsylvania. Which makes the elder Griffey the third best left-handed hitting outfielder born in Donora.

Who else hailed from there? Stan Musial. That's a pretty good outfield for a town best known for a killer smog.

---

Former Twins outfielder Denard Span signed with the Giants: three years, $31 million. There were some Twins fans dreaming of him as the fourth outfielder, but he was looking for a starting job, and $10 million a year is not reserve outfielder money.

---

Former Twins catcher Josmil Pinto got designated for assignment this week, this time by the Brewers. The Twins waived him early in the offseason, and the Padres claimed him, only to waive him themselves and see the Brewers claim him.

My guess is that his merry-go-round will end without a 40-man roster spot, but there are apparently a number of teams hoping to be the one that gets him through waivers and onto their Triple A roster. For his sake, I hope it's an American League team, because most of his value, if he has any, figures to be as a designated hitter.

The Catcher Project: Mike Piazza

Born: 9-4-1968

Career: 1992-2007

Hall of Fame: Not eligible

Career highlights: Widely regarded as the greatest hitting catcher ever. NL rookie of the year 1992. No MVP awards, but runner up twice and in the top 10 of balloting seven times. Nine seasons of 30-plus home runs. Twelve All-Star teams. Regular catcher on one World Series team.

Career slash line: .308/.377./545

See his stats here

Games caught after age 30 season: 690. Age during last season as regular catcher: 37. Win shares after age 30 season: 119. Win shares after age 33 season: 51

Evaluating Mike Piazza's career isn't easy. There's a lot of smoke about him and steroids and very little clarity. There are those who suspect his entire career was a chemical construct.

Whether he juiced or not, however, his aging pattern — which is, remember, our concern in all this — followed a traditional path.

His offensive numbers fell off in two steps — slightly as he entered his 30s, and more sharply in 2004, which happens to be both the season when the players union agreed to steroid testing and his age 34 season.

At that point — whether because he was old or because he wasn't juicing — he was breaking down physically. He fell off to being roughly a league-average hitter — and his defensive skills weren't strong enough to support that. The Mets tried making him a first baseman, but that didn't take, and he reverted to catching in 2005 before completing his career as a DH.

More on Mauer

A tangent on Joe Mauer's season that I chose not to pursue in the Monday print column:

Mauer hit .365 for the season. This is — or isn't — a record for a catcher. It depends on how persnickety you want to be in defining catcher.

Here's the competition:

1) Bill Dickey, 1936. Hit .362. Actually, he hit .3617 — 153 hits in 423 at-bats. This distinction is significant because of

2) Mike Piazza, 1997. Hit 362. Actually, he hit .3615 — 201 hits in 556 at-bats.

And some sources list the record for batting average by a catcher as

3) Babe Phelps, 1936. He hit .367 — 117 hits in 319 at-bats.

Dickey and Piazza you probably know about already. Phelps was a platoon catcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers and figures in a number of amusing tales about the Daffyness Boys. He could hit, at least against right-handers — .310 lifetime average — but apparently wasn't much behind the dish.

If we apply the current standard for qualifying for the batting title to these three, only Piazza remains. Dickey and Phelps would have needed 493 plate appearances to qualify; Dickey had 472, Phelps just 349.

Dickey caught 106 games; Phelps caught in 98. Piazza caught in 136 — and had 595 plate appearances in those games, easily enough to qualify. And he hit "just" .358 in those games. (Interleague play allowed Piazza to DH in seven games, in which he hit .484.)

And Mauer? He caught in 109 games and had 473 plate appearances in those games. He hit .372 in those games, .330 in the 28 games as the DH, and .600 in his five pinch-hit appearances.

So if what you want is somebody who qualified for the batting title while playing catcher, it's Piazza.

If what you want is a batting title qualifier whose primary position was catcher, it's Mauer.

If what you want is somebody who caught in more than half his team's games, it's Phelps.

I can't come up with a definition that puts Dickey in the lead.