HOW IS WALKER NOT A HALL OF FAMER?
Canadian superstar has all the numbers for Cooperstown — except the 75 per cent
Next year is Edgar Martinez’s last time on the Baseball Hall of Fame ballot.
He came up 20 votes short this year — less than five per cent away from being elected. It means he is a virtual certainty to be among the class of 2019 heading into Cooperstown.
Larry Walker is making slow progress, but progress nonetheless. The great Canadian had his strongest Hall of Fame support this year, but only received 144 votes, or 34.1 per cent of all ballots. You need to be named on 75 per cent to be inducted.
He has two eligible years left on the ballot and he needs to more than double his vote count. 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.
When we vote, we just put check marks 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 much debate every year about the legitimacy of 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. For whatever reason, Hall of Fame voters are historically mesmerized 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 RBI, more runs scored and a better OPS than Martinez had.
Martinez had a marvellous .418 career on-base percentage, just ahead of Stan Musial on the alltime list and just behind Frank Thomas and Mickey Mantle. That’s wonderful company to keep. Walker’s career OBP is .400, just behind new Hall of Fame inductee Chipper Jones, and just ahead of New York Yankees great Joe DiMaggio. Fine company also. For perspective, in his 2015 MVP season, the Toronto Blue Jays’ Josh Donaldson had an OBP of .385. 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 baserunner, 11 times stealing in double digit numbers and getting as many as 30 once, back when base stealing seemed to matter. He won seven gold gloves playing the outfield. Hall of Fame manager Tony LaRussa once said of Walker that was in the top three 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 saw the field. He missed half the game. When his team went on defence, he stayed on the bench. He was a designated hitter for 1,465 of his games. 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 either. It should be applauded.
By my logic, anyone who votes for Edgar Martinez — anyone — should also vote for Larry Walker. Yet the discrepancies exist. Martinez more than doubled Walker’s vote total this year, 297 to 144.
Martinez made his debut on the Hall of Fame ballot nine years ago and started with a reasonably strong 36.2 per cent of the voting. Walker has never been that high. He’s at 34.1 per cent right now, which is less than where Martinez began nine years ago.
That doesn’t add up for me. Martinez dropped down to 27 per cent of the voting in 2015 but in recent years has vaulted from 43.4 to 58.6 to the 70.4 he received this year.
Walker, born in Maple Ridge, B.C., won the NL MVP in 1997. He also won three batting titles, played in five all-star games and was a seven-time gold glove winner. He gets penalized 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. Balancing what that actually means has somehow been lost in translation.
Walker needed 173 more votes than he received this year to get into Cooperstown. 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.