1. Maybe there weren't really dominant sluggers in that era the way there are today.  Two really amazing third basemen, some great all-around players who used speed as a key weapon.  Scary Monsters?  Not so much.

Rice is a pretty good comp with Magglio Ordonez as a hitter although Mags is (or at least was) a very fine defender as well.  Anyway, is it that nuts to consider that in another era, a guy like Magglio might have been one of the very best hitters, just because that's how it turned out?  This is kind of the opposite of Vizquel's dilemma -- say what you will of the guy, he'd have been considered a superstar 20 years earlier.  Well, 20 years later, maybe Rice would have been considered someone who's almost as good as Brian Giles.

2. Various changes in the playing environment have introduced far greater variability into hitting statistics, such that we had 15 active players at the end of last season with a 140+ OPS+, compared with Rice's era, when there apparently were only a handful at that level.  Any number of things conceivably could have produced such a change, including increased expansion, new ballparks, performance enhancing drugs, improved medicine and conditioning, improved training and development, harder balls, you name it.

To wit:  In Rice's best years, from 1975 to 1986, there were 173 seasons where a player had an OPS+ of 140 or better, where in the past 12 years, it was done 268 times.  That seems like a significant difference to me.

Now it may be that that era just didn't have truly dominant hitters, and a whole crop of truly dominant hitters has played in the past 10-15 years.  But another possibility is that OPS+ is flawed in some way -- specifically, that it's too linear, based on comparing the OBP and slugging to league averages as simple ratios.  But what if simple ratios are not reflective of the real differences in ability?  What if it was really harder to produce a 140+ OPS+ season in 1980 than it was in 2000?