Cal Ripken Jr. is not a top 50 all time MLB player

My opponent's debate falls into two main caterogies, awards and stats. I would first deal with awards. 1) All-star: all star votings are conducted by fans. So, no professionals are involved and therefore this honor is not totally important and meangingful. Futhermore, fans are encouraged to vote as many times as possible. So, these votes are about popularity asmuch as skill. 2) Silver Slugger: Ripken is competing against shortstops. If you can hit 15 home runs, you will likely win the sliver slugger award. So, if Ripken can beat players offensively like Tony Fernandez, Omar Vizquel and Alan Trammell, he would win the Silver Slugger award. Fernandez hit 94 home runs, Vizquel hit 80 and Trammell hit 185. Heck, even Pee Wee Reese would provide a formidable challenge. 3) Gold Glove: Ripken won two. That is all right, but the professionals who vote for these awards judge defense by how many plays the player make that look hard. This doesn't show range factor, how many plays the player can make. Sure, Ripken was an all right defensive shortstop but he wasn't a great one. All of the other awards: Lots of them are kinda useless. They literally don't show anything. Sports Illustrated, Associated Press, it is all about fanfare. They look at who has the bigger name and who made the largest splash, they don't care about who is better. So, most of those awards Ripken won are because he played against bad offensive shortstops. -Ripken was listed as number 78 on the The Sporting News and I do remebered that I would not bring in Negro League players, but I do not imagined there would be 33 Negro League Players ahead of Ripken. So, The Sporting News agrees with me that Ripken is not a top 50 all time MLB player. -Ripken was named to the All-Century Team. So? There are a lot of players on the All-Century Team. Most of them are better than Ripken. -Beat Gehrig's streak. Once again, so? Ripken hurt his team a lot because he was so selfish and that he would not remove himself even when he was doing so poorly. Ripken isn't a better baseball player because he played in 2632 straight games. -Ranked third best Shortstop by Bill James. Third best shortstop =/= top 50 all time. -Number 8 uniform retired by Orioles. LOTS of players have their uniform numbers retired. -Elected to Hall Of Fame with 95.3% of votes. Doesn't prove anything. Cobb had a higher percentage than Babe Ruth. So Cobb is better than Ruth? No. Ripken ended up higher than Ruth and Cobb. So Ripken is the best postion player? No where close. Ripken was elected with 98.53% because he was popular and because of the streak. Neither should count much. -Tony Gwynn was there when he was elected. Well, he was there out of respect. If no major league player appeared, that would be damaging to Gwynn's image. \ Besides, Gwynn isn't that good. He isn't top 50 material himself. -Most grounded into double plays at 350. Um, that isn't a good thing. The more double plays you ground into, the more outs you created and the more you harm your team. In fact double plays are called "pitcher's best friends". So, Ripken is helping the opposing pitcher. -Most home runs by a shortstop. Shortstops can't hit home runs, not an advantage. -All time leader in All- Star Voting. Voted by FANS, useless. -Most American League All-Star Selections. Voted by fans, played 21 years. Immensly popular. Useless. -Oriole records are useless. I'm talking about top 50 all time in the whole MLB. Just because you're the best Oriole does not land you on the list. Now, let's look at Ripken's stats. By far, the most impressive are his RBIs and Runs. If however, if you measured his (runs+rbis-home runs)/plate appearances, to get his runs+rbis per plate appearance, you get .226. That is rather low, too low for a top 50 all time player. Ripken's career batting average is .276. In history, normal is about .260. So Ripken is better than normal, but not by much. His career On base percentage is .340. Normal is .330. Once again, not better by much. His career slugging is .447. For his career, the league slugging went everywhere. It started early inhis career at around .370 went up to .408, dip back down to .385, then soared to .445. It didn't fall back down to .410 until Ripken retired. So, Ripken was playing in a hopped league where the average slugging was .400 or more(usually). And the fact that Ripken had "only" .447 is not impressive. Sources: 1) . http://www.baseball-reference.com...