CANADA’S WALKER FINALLY GETS CALL FROM HALL OF FAME
Former Expos star elected to Cooperstown shrine in his 10th and final year on ballot
Larry Walker was telling the story just minutes after he got the Hall of Fame call.
About what it was like to be a Canadian without much background, with little training, trying not to make the Hall, but trying to carve out a career of some kind.
He was 18 years old, standing on first base in the New York Penn League, and the hit and run was on. The ball was hit and he ran. And the out was made — and he had to get back to first base.
He was somewhere between second base and third at the time — and he ran back to first base. Right across the diamond. Right across the pitcher’s mound. Like a kid playing T-ball for the very first time.
His manager, Ken Brett, was coaching at first. Walker slid in proudly, figuring he was safe.
“You have to go back and touch second,” Brett said.
It seems simple when you think about all you know about baseball — but Walker recovered from that moment of embarrassment to enjoy a wonderful major league career of 17 seasons. Then came nine years of disappointment on the Hall of Fame ballot — until yesterday, when he finally made it.
The second Canadian player to make the Hall.
Ferguson Jenkins was the first. Superb Toronto Sun baseball writer Bob Elliott was inducted, as well. And now there are three — two players, one writer — all of them remarkable in their own way.
The Hall of Fame journey for Walker, the former Montreal Expos star, through the last 10 years of voting, was not unlike his humble base running beginnings in Utica. He started from almost nowhere. And got worse after that.
His first year on the ballot, he received just 20.3 per cent of the vote from Baseball Writers of America. By his fourth year, he had dropped to 10.2 per cent. He was basically a non-factor. There wasn’t much hope of him getting close to the 75 per cent vote necessary for election.
But in his eighth and ninth times on the ballot, he started to move — from 34.1 per cent two years ago and then 54.6 per cent last year. Then the excitement of yesterday came. To be named on 76.6 per cent of the ballots — making it by a mere six votes — is so much what Walker’s marvellous career has been all about. A mountain climb that never stopped.
Early Tuesday, Walker took to Twitter and indicated he didn’t think he was getting the needed votes. He seemed both sad and understanding of his plight. That’s kind of who Walker has always been. Funny, self-deprecating and very Canadian.
When he didn’t win the Lou Marsh Award in 1997, losing to race car driver Jacques Villeneuve, he had the famous quote: “I lost to a car.”
On Tuesday, he lost to no one. After receiving the call in Florida, he told a story of playing the little bit of baseball he played as a kid. What he really liked wasn’t baseball — he loved fastball games with his dad and his brothers. If he could have made millions doing that, he never would have left British Columbia.
You can see him, can’t you, with the Joe’s Garage softball uniform, in the Legion after the game, hanging with his buddies and his dad and the softball guys. And no one believed then that this guy was going to have a career OPS of .965, better than Willie Mays, better than Mike Schmidt and Frank Robinson, right there with Mickey Mantle and Joe Dimaggio and Stan Musial.
It doesn’t matter how long it takes or how many votes you need to finally get in the Hall of Fame, what matters is when you arrive. Right there with Mantle and Mays. The same Hall. Right there with the best we’ve ever seen. Right there with Jenkins, who is no longer alone among Canadians in the Hall.
And right there with first ballot Hall of Famer Derek Jeter, who came within a single vote of being the second unanimous choice in history. The juxtaposition wasn’t lost on Walker, who knows of Jeter’s iconic place in baseball history.
He made an old singles record analogy when talking about his entering the Hall of Fame.
Jeter was on the A-side of the record, he said. He was the guy on the flip side, the song you never listened to. And that was said partly in appreciation of Jeter and partly in Walker being Walker.
“I’m the B-side,” said Walker on the MLB Network. But no, he’s not. It’s the same Hall of Fame and they’re going in together.
Walker, with a WAR of 72.7, ahead of Jeter, with 2,160 hits, 383 home runs, a 965 OPS, a seven-time gold glove winner, and a .400 career on base percentage. He was a power hitter, a power runner, a power arm. And now he’s in Cooperstown.
The kid who went to the instructional league four or five times. The kid who didn’t know the rules. The kid who never stopped being from Maple Ridge, B.C.
“Being Canadian, you’re born into this world with a stick in your hand and skates on your feet,” said Walker. “When hockey didn’t go the way I wanted it to, baseball sort of found me.”
He didn’t start loving it until he realized how naturally he took to the game.
“I literally had to learn everything in the minor leagues,” said Walker. And learn he did.