PUT HIM IN
If Edgar Martinez goes to Cooperstown, former Expos great Larry Walker deserves to go, too. STEVE SIMMONS makes his case
Next year is Edgar Martinez’s last time on the Baseball Hall of Fame ballot.
He came 20 votes short this year and less than 5% away from being elected, which means he is all but certain to be voted in to the Hall a year from now.
Larry Walker is making slow progress, but progress nonetheless. The great Canadian had his strongest Hall of Fame support this year, with the induction announcement coming Wednesday, but still he received only 144 votes — or 34.1% of all ballots. You need to be named on 75% of ballots to be inducted.
He has two eligible years left on the ballot and he needs to more than double his votes. And the truth is, without an active campaign of any kind, the kind that got Tim Raines elected, time is running out on Walker — and really, it shouldn’t be.
I voted for Larry Walker and Edgar Martinez on my Hall of Fame ballot this year, as I have done in other years.
And as we vote, we just put checkmarks beside the names we select. We don’t rank them in any order. You pick who you believe in. For reasons you believe in.
I believe in Edgar Martinez, who will be inducted. I just happen to believe in Larry Walker a little bit more, and wonder if he’ll ever hear his name called.
While there is so much debate every year about Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens and the PED cheaters, what rarely seems to get discussed is that baseball is more than just numbers and charts and complicated fancy stats — and, for whatever reason, Hall of Fame voters are historically consumed by offence.
Like Walker, Martinez was a brilliant hitter, so great a designated hitter that the award for best DH is now named for him. But Walker finished with a higher career batting average, more home runs, more RBIs, more runs scored, and a better OPS than Martinez.
Martinez had a marvellous .418 career on base percentage, just ahead of Stan Musial on the all-time list, just behind Frank Thomas and Mickey Mantle. That’s wonderful exclusive company to keep.
Walker’s career OBP is .400, just behind the new Hall of Famer Chipper Jones, and just ahead of Joe DiMaggio. Fine company also. For perspective: In Josh Donaldson’s MVP season in Toronto, he had a .385 OBP. Walker’s career number is higher than that.
But it isn’t at the plate where Walker and Martinez separate. It’s the rest of the game. Walker was a brilliant fielder and a terrific base runner, 11 times stealing in double-digit numbers, getting as many as 30 once, back when base stealing seemed to matter. He won seven Gold Glove Awards playing the outfield. Tony LaRussa once said Walker was a top-three player in baseball in just about every category you could think of.
Martinez played in 2,055 major league games but for 1,465 of those he never played in the field. He missed half the game. When his team went on defence, he stayed on the bench as a DH. While Walker was changing games with his glove and his arm, Martinez was spitting seeds.
The fact he didn’t play defence shouldn’t be held against Martinez. But the fact Walker was tremendous in the outfield should in no way be discounted, maybe even applauded.
By my logic, anyone who votes for Edgar Martinez — anyone — should also be voting for Larry Walker. And yet, the discrepancies exist. Martinez more than doubled Walker’s vote total this year, 297-144. Martinez made his debut on the Hall of Fame ballot nine years ago and started with a reasonably strong 36.2% of the voting.
Walker has never been that high. He’s at 34.1% of the votes right now, which is less than where Martinez began nine years ago. That doesn’t add up for me. Martinez dropped down to 27% of the voting in 2015 but in recent years he has vaulted from 43.4% to 58.6% to the 70.4% he received this year.
Walker won three batting titles, played in five all-star games, was a seven-time Gold Glove winner and gets penalized now for two reasons: one, he was injured a lot and two, he spent almost 10 years of his career playing in Colorado, where altitude historically enhances offensive statistics and balancing what that actually means has somehow been lost in translation.
Walker needed 173 more votes than he received this year for induction to the Hall. In other words, that’s a huge hill to climb and only two years to get there. The Edgar Martinez voters, who will get their man in next year, need to expand their strike zone.
You shouldn’t have a Hall of Fame with one and not the other.