Best Hitters of the 90s

As I was watching the Giants-Cubs game tonight, the announcers talked about how during the current homestand at Wrigley, the Cubs are celebrating the 90s and will be wearing the ugly blue alternate 1994 jerseys that reminded people more of the baseball uniforms of the Cuban National Team rather than the Chicago Cubs. 

One of the announcers, Len or Jim I can't remember, mentioned that Mark Grace was the hits leader of the 90s. 

So I did some investigating and found a Sporcle quiz on the top twenty hitters of that decade. Don't read on just yet if you want to take the quiz.


I got the first three pretty easily (1. Grace, 2. Palmeiro, and 3. Biggio), but then I started having some trouble because I'm not the best at baseball trivia.

Ones I should have gotten but horribly didn't are Tony Gwynn, Roberto Alomar, Paul Molitor, and Frank Thomas. 

Players that I had forgotten about but were a bit surprised to see on the list were Dante Bichette, Steve Finley, Marquis Grissom, and Lance Johnson. 

Part of my trouble is that back then when I watched baseball, it was mainly the National League and mostly Cubs games, so I had difficulty retrieving many of those AL, West Coast, and East Coast hitters from my brainpan. Neurons weren't firing too well. 

What's impressive to me is that Grace is first with 1,754 hits in the decade. He's atop a list of twenty players that has five hall-of-famers on it and six players (Rafael Palmeiro, Craig Biggio, Ken Griffey, Fred McGriff, Edgar Martinez, and Barry Bonds) that will or could get into the Baseball Hall of Fame. 

Biggio and Griffey will certainly get into in the Hall. McGriff and Martinez spawn interesting cases for induction. And talking about whether Palmeiro and Bonds should get in is comparable to getting a group of people together to poke a big, nasty, smelly bag of trash with sticks.  

But Mark Grace is the hits leader of that wonderful decade.