One thing that always fascinates us as baseball fans, historians, and journalists are the .300 lifetime hitters who are not in the Hall of Fame (yet?). We will do occasional MLB Monday pieces on these players, and we do it today with a closer look at Michael Young, an infielder who spent most of his 14-year career with the Texas Rangers (2000-2012), while also playing for the Philadelphia Phillies and the Los Angeles Dodgers.

After making his brief MLB debut in 2000 , Young’s rookie season in 2001 was nothing special: a .249 batting average with a .699 OPS. He did deliver 11 home runs and 49 RBI in 106 games, so there was some life in his bat, but overall, not that many people blinked. But age 26 in 2003, he had arrived as a .300-plus hitter: he hit .300 or better in seven of the next nine seasons, in fact, winning a batting title in 2005.

He also compiled six seasons of 200-plus hits, including five years in a row (2003-2007). All these accomplishments are impressive, and it has to be noted that Young was not just a singles-only slap hitter: he never hit fewer than eight HRs in a full season, and in nine seasons, he reached double digits in HR, too. He was never a huge drawer of walks, but his overall OBP (.346) and SLG (.441) demonstrate his abilities.

All that added up to only a .787 career OPS, of course, which is not super special. In context for his era and positions played (second base, shortstop, third base), though, his 104 OPS+ mark shows he was certainly better than the average player in his situation(s)—although not overwhelmingly so. That kept his career WAR pretty low, too, as his 24.7 mark is not even close to the Hall of Fame expectation level. So be it, really.

His glove work was never special, as clarified by his minus-10.4 dWAR, although he did win a Gold Glove once: in 2005 when he managed a 0.5 dWAR mark, the second-highest valuation of his career. His best defensive season came in 2002 with a 1.3 dWAR effort. As a result, he definitely spent a lot of time rotating through the DH slot in the lineup: starting in 2004, he would regularly take a turn in that role for Texas.

Young’s peak years were age 28 to age 31, the only four seasons he surpassed 3.0 WAR (a total of 13.3 WAR in those years combined). His 3.8 WAR in 2006 at age 29 represents his specific peak, interestingly enough the only season of his career where he played in all 162 regular-season games. He was just a .238 hitter in the postseason, as well, across 43 games in four straight Octobers (2010-2013). The Rangers needed more there.

Remember, Texas was hosed out of the 2010 title by a cheating team from San Francisco, and the Rangers blew it on their own in the 2011 World Series, of course. Young had a combined three HRs and 19 RBI in those two postseason runs, and he had just three hits in his final 14 ABs in the playoffs across 2012 and 2013 to cement the disappointment. This included a 1-for-10 effort with the Dodgers in the 2013 postseason.

For his troubles, Young made an estimated $91M in his career, and he certainly had a clean reputation despite playing in Texas. He was drafted by the Baltimore Orioles in 1994 but did not sign. He was then drafted again, this time by the Toronto Blue Jays in 1997, in the fifth round. The Jays traded him to Texas for Esteban Loaiza in 2000, before he made his MLB debut there. Eventually, his salary made him expendable.

If you didn’t see him play in person or weren’t a baseball fan during his career, then you probably wouldn’t even know who he was, despite his lifetime .300 batting average. For a fifth-round draft pick, he had a pretty decent career, and it’s the combined salaries he made in his career that really stand out the most to us: that’s a lot of money for playing a simple game. Yet he was a seven-time All Star, so there’s that, too.

He made the Midsummer Classic six straight times, in fact, from 2004-2009 and then one more time in 2011. Perhaps really the only thing missing from his résumé here is the Hall of Fame, and as noted, he didn’t rate that well despite the batting title, the Gold Glove, and all the All-Star nods. His below-average defense held him back, and his lack of ability to draw walks probably hurt him, as well. But he has our respect, truly.