Roy Hobbs in the game

[yankees1979]

first of all i wanna say that i love the NY knights uniform! i think it would kick *** if there was a Roy Hobbs in the game that could be one of the legends players. i tried to find "stats" on the ficticious player but had no luck. anyone else wanna give it a shot?

[krawhitham]

Another good question. Shaq's character, Rod Tidwell, the Wolf from "Teen Wolf" and Willie Mays Hayes would all get drafted in the first round. And don't forget about Bernard King as Hustler in "Fast Break." At that stage of his career, Bernard had a more polished game than either Penny Hardaway or Shaq in "Blue Chips" (he was good for 30-35 a night and 10-12 boards, easy).

But my No. 1 choice for "best fantasy player in a sports movie"? Roy Hobbs. In fact, the question, "What were Roy Hobbs' stats during his one season for the New York Knights?" has to rank among the most mindless-yet-fun sports movie arguments, right up there with "How many points did Jimmy Chitwood average for Hickory High?" and "What did Danny Noonan shoot on the back nine at Bushwood after he replaced Al Czervik?"

To answer the Hobbs question, you need to figure in a few variables:

# The Knights called Hobbs up to the majors after the season started; once he joined the team, Pop buried him on the bench for the first few weeks behind Bump Bailey, even barring him from batting practice. So that cost Hobbs at least a month of the season before Bump Bailey's tragic death pushed him into the starting lineup.

Roy Hobbs

Don't refer to Total Baseball for Roy Hobbs' statistics.

# If you want to pinpoint an exact date for Hobbs' first game, following his four-homer barrage in Chicago -- when Hobbs reunited with Glenn Close's character and snapped out of a long slump -- the movie showed one of those highlight-newspaper clip montage scenes, and one of the papers said "July 5" on it. Since he'd been in the lineup for a few weeks, that means Hobbs probably didn't start playing every day until mid-May at the earliest.

# We also need to factor in his late-June slump (when he started dating Kim Basinger).

# The movie showed at least 17-20 Hobbs home runs during the season. Warrants mentioning.

# Without any protection hitting behind him in the Knights lineup, Hobbs probably drew a ton of walks (like Barry Bonds this season).

# Redford was painfully slow as Hobbs, so he didn't beat out many leg hits (think Ted Williams in the late-'50s).

# If he were hitting over .400 near the end of the season, they probably would have alluded to it in the movie.

# Hobbs missed three games in the final week with abdominal pains. And since baseball only played 154-game seasons back in the '40s, that means Hobbs lost out on another eight possible games.

So taking everything into account, I would imagine his stats looked something like this:

G	  AB	R	H	BB   K	HR   RBI	AVG	OBP	 SLG


115   400   92   140   75   85   44   106	.350   .447	.750

Here's the scary thing: Barry Bonds' numbers from this season were much more impressive. I mean, much more impressive.

And frankly, I'm not sure what to do with this information.

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