If you split Ken Griffey, Jr.’s career into two parts, you end up with one player who was an all-time great in MLB history and another who was not even close to that level.
Ken Griffey, Jr. will be inducted into the MLB Hall of Fame on Sunday having earned the highest voting percentage in the history of the BBWAA. He was named on 437 of 440 ballots. His 99.32% beat out the previous mark of 98.84% set by Tom Seaver in 1992. As much as we’d like to know the names of the three writers who DIDN’T vote for Griffey, it appears we will never know.
Griffey’s credentials for the Hall of Fame are impeccable. He’s 6th all-time in home runs, 15th in RBI, 33rd in runs scored, and 37th in slugging percentage. He was a 13-time All-Star, won nine Gold Gloves, seven Silver Slugger awards, and led the league in home runs four times. He was the A.L. MVP in 1997 and finished 2nd in MVP voting in 1994.
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More than that, Griffey was an iconic player throughout the 1990s, from his three Home Run Derby wins to his robbery of home runs in the outfield. His fame spread beyond baseball to pop culture. He had a candy bar made for him and was one of nine MLB players to appear in the classic Simpson’s episode “Homer at the Bat,” where an animated Griffey drank too much brain and nerve tonic and ended up with a gigantic, swollen head. In 1994, Nintendo released “Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball.” There would be three more Griffey-branded Nintendo games to come.
In 1996, Griffey became the first baseball player to have his name on a shoe when Nike released the Air Griffey Max, the first of seven Griffey-branded shoes from Nike. In the mid-90s, he appeared on “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” and later appeared on the HBO show “Arli$.” He added to his IMDB page with an appearance as the villain in the movie Little Big League, where he hit a clutch home run, then big league’d it around the bases. By my calculations, it takes him about 10 seconds to start his home run trot. His bat flip is not in the realm of Jose Bautista, but his time around the bases rivals David Ortiz.
He was featured in three songs by Seattle rapper Kid Sensation and did endorsements for Frosted Flakes, Foot Locker, Wheaties and, of course, Nike. Not everything he did was successful, though. Griffey, Andre Agassi, Monica Seles, Joe Montana, Shaquille O’Neal, and Wayne Gretzky were big-name investors in a sports-themed restaurant chain called the All-Star Café. The chain went defunct before Griffey’s baseball career ended. Despite that misstep, Griffey’s pop culture status was as impressive as his baseball success and it all started in a city that was far off the baseball map before he arrived.
Next: Putting Seattle on the Map