Dave Parker's place in baseball history

Sunday 6/29/30

Dave Parker, baseball great, died the other day. He is a member of baseball's most recent Hall of Fame class, which is due to be inducted next month. I hope Parker at least got a few months' enjoyment from knowing he made baseball’s ultimate hagiographical grade.

Parker isn't an easy player to retroactively assess decades after the completion of his career. He had his troubles, and they surely made his time in the game less than what it could have been, and he's also one of those guys who don't fare so well with modern analytics. Parker was a counting stat player to some degree--a traditional stat man--and though he made impressive plays out in right field--especially with his throwing arm--defensive metrics don't rate him that highly either.

But you remembered him, and at his best, Dave Parker was a difference maker. You could win a championship with him as your go-to guy and catalyst. He hit for power and average, but again, he's a player like a Dave Winfield--who I think is a good comp--where things such as WAR don't really align with how a Parker was rightly talked about when he played as this big-time star.

Parker had outsized star power. Wattage. He was funky and cool and badass. The 1979 "We Are Family" Pirates--one of the most fun teams in baseball history--don't happen without him. Willie Stargell was their heart and their soul, their leader, their mojo man, their guru, the vibe master, the shaman, but Parker was absolutely necessary talent. The deliverer of required goods.

But: Parker averaged 2.6 WAR per 162 games over his career, and that is....well, if we're just going by WAR, it's pretty blah. And it's not like you could chalk this up to him being a DH. Because with WAR, you get a boost simply by playing the field, as long as you're not lousy at it. You can actually be kind of bad. But not totally bad.

Parker won three Gold Gloves. Usually if you're a big-time hitter--and Parker twice led the league in batting average, and in RBI once--and a three-time Gold Glove winner--and you play for nearly two decades like Parker did, then you're an 80 career WAR guy, not a 40 career WAR guy, which is where Parker ended up.

Eyes matter. What your eyes tell you when you watch a player. You can, for instance, insist to me all you want that Joe Carter wasn't that good, he was barely above replacement level, but having watched him, I know this not to be true. Context matters as well. Being the man. In the late 1970s, the men, as such, in baseball were Jim Rice, George Foster, Mike Schmidt, and Parker.

People talked about them, kids wanted to be them. They had a Paul Bunyan quality. You told stories about them, described how they'd done this or that and how impressive it was. Parker was a popular character--and I mean it like a character in a story--on playgrounds and in backyard games. He had, in abundance, what is now called "swag." And crossover, pop culture resonance.

The drugs undermined his career. By the early 1980s, he had also packed on a weight, and his range in the outfield--which was never outstanding--had shrunken considerably. Parker was in effect a DH in a league where the pitcher hit and thus there was no DH. But the man known as the Cobra could still hit. He was ponderous, though. A bopper, yes, but someone who no longer bopped, in the pacey jazz sense of the word.

He had a resurgence in the mid-1980s, which this great comeback year in 1985, when he finished second in MVP voting in the National League. But then we get way into Joe Carter type of territory with 1986, when Parker hit 31 home runs, with 116 RBI, a .273 batting average, and 304 total bases, in his age thirty-five season.

I'm taking those numbers all day long. I don't care how you got them. If those are your numbers, I want you in the meat of my order. Parker's WAR for that year? An anemic .3. To give you an idea of what that means: Right now, on June 29, 2025, the Red Sox' Trevor Story has a WAR of 1.3 in this dismal season of his than Parker did in the whole of his 1986 campaign.

So, yeah, WAR, you gotta be careful.

Parker had six top-ten MVP finishes. He hit thirty plus homers thrice, and we lose sight of this now, but thirty homers was a big deal. Twenty homers in the 1970s--and for a good chunk of the 1980s--meant you had legit power.

Tom Brunansky would hit twenty plus home runs a bunch of years in a row, and it was noted as a biggish deal. Okay, the year in, year out aspect was a large part of that, but it wasn't like it is at present, when everyone swings from their ass and hopefully you run into a pitch every five or six games and knock the ball over the fence.

This will sound strange, but baseball was a lot more like baseball when Dave Parker played than it is now. And Parker was a hell of an actual baseball player.

I think he's an absolutely deserving Hall of Famer, and I was glad when he got the call. The fearsome Bash Brothers Oakland Athletics teams of Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire from the late 1980s and early 1990s won a single World Series, and that was in 1989. And you know who led them in RBI that year? Dave Parker in his age thirty-eight season. I've noted this before, but it's just an awesome bit of trivia. He only hit a .188 in the ALCS and .222 in the World Series that year, but he hit three homers.

Defensively, Parker's arm strength out in right was his calling card. He wasn't as accurate as Dwight Evans, but when Parker got behind a throw, man would that ball fly.

He played with a lot of flare during an era of notable individuality. Guys cut loose, were themselves, rocked some boats, led the way. It was just a really fun time in baseball history, and Parker was an important reason why.