I WROTE A column a few weeks ago that Edgar Martinez would never make the Baseball Hall of Fame because of what I consider a ridiculous bias against designated hitters among Hall of Fame voters (i.e., sports journalists, many of them old-timers who don’t consider the DH a legitimate position.).
It appears that maybe, just maybe, I was wrong about that.
Something is happening here. A sea change. Quite unexpected. Perhaps people are listening to me — and lots of others out there.
According to a ballot tracker being compiled by Ryan Thibodaux of The Sporting News, Martinez is darn close to making the Hall of Fame.
According to Thibodaux’s tracker, out of 158 ballots made public so far, Martinez is getting 68.9 percent of the vote. It takes 75 percent of the vote to get in. The final tally will be announced in mid-January.
There’s more than 400 ballots total, and not all sportswriters are going to make their vote public.
I expect Martinez’s vote percentage to likely drop with the secret ballots, which has been the trend in the past.
But, its a giant step in the right direction. Martinez has never gotten more than 43.4 percent of the vote before, so he’s seeing a huge jump this year. I expect he’ll end up with well over 60 percent of the vote.
That means his chances are pretty good to get in the Hall in the next two years. Almost everyone who gets that close to 75 percent eventually gets in. Martinez has two more years of eligibility left after this year.
I’ve been advocating for Martinez to be in the Hall for years. He was simply the best DH in history (with David Ortiz a close second). He hit .312 for his career, had an on-base percentage of .418, 21st best in the entire history of baseball, and an On-Base Plus Slugging percentage of .933, 33rd best in history. An OBP of .418 and an OPS of .933 are usually slam-dunk for the Hall of Fame, but since Martinez was mostly a DH, he’s had to fight against the old-timer vote.
What I expect is helping Martinez is that the Baseball Writer’s Association of America removed hundreds of voters in the past couple of years, mostly old-timers, a lot of them who don’t cover baseball or hadn’t covered baseball in decades.
Other highlights of the vote
Players at this moment getting into the Hall of Fame are Jeff Bagwell (92.1 percent), Tim Raines (91.5 percent), Ivan Rodriguez (84.1 percent) and Vlad Guerrero (76.2 percent).
Another interesting phenomena going on with Thibodaux’s numbers is that voters are becoming increasingly open to the idea of electing players into the Hall of Fame who have been implicated in PEDs.
Barry Bonds is getting 70.1 percent of the vote, a huge jump for him, and Roger Clemens is getting 69.5 percent of the vote.
It appears both of these guys will get in eventually.
I have mixed feelings about this. I don’t like PEDs and don’t like what they did to the game. In my opinion, they turned baseball into a home run hitting contest. But, the fact is, there is absolutely no way to know who was juicing between 1995 and 2005, the Golden Age of Steroids. I have a strong suspicion that the vast majority of players were doing some level of PEDs. I also have no doubt that some juicers have already been elected into the Hall of Fame.
I base that on what happened with cycling. I was once naive and a huge Lance Armstrong fan. As more and more guys from Armstrong’s era got busted for PEDs, it got harder for me to believe that Armstrong had raced clean. Because it appeared that virtually everyone from that era but Armstrong was dirty. Sure enough, my suspicions turned out to be right when Amrstrong copped to juicing.
So, I find it hard to believe only a handful of guys in baseball were juicing.
Is it fair to punish the guys implicated in steroids, when it’s likely there were a heck of a lot of guys who simply never got caught … like Armstrong? And, do you only punish guys who tested positive? Or guys implicated by sworn testimony? Or guys we simply know (See: Sammy Sosa) juiced?
I don’t have any of these answers. Baseball created this mess, and to a degree so did the writers, by looking the other way for over a decade to the obvious juicing going on in the sport.
Curt Schilling, professional martyr
I have zero sympathy for Curt Schilling. Schilling’s HOF vote total is stuck at 53.7 percent, and will likely drop below 50 percent before all is said and done. He isn’t getting a lot of traction for the Hall of Fame, and I think for two reasons — 1) He was kind of a borderline Hall of Famer to begin with and 2) He’s an obnoxious jerk.
Without getting into politics, because Schilling loves to make this all about politics, I think a lot of writers are probably fed up with Schilling’s antics. The last straw I believe was Schilling reposting a tweet calling for the lynching of journalists, along with his personal comment of “awesome!”
This was the latest in a long line of controversial tweets, retweets and other comments from Schilling. The lynching retweet appears to have become the Bridge Too Far for some baseball writers.
Schilling predictably later said it was just a joke and this week, he’s been on the warpath about it, playing the victim which he usually does when he catches flack and claiming if he had joked about lynching Trump, he’d be getting 90 percent of the HOF vote.
I seriously doubt that, but Schilling can believe whatever he wants.
Here would be my response to Schilling:
“Curt, lynching isn’t funny. Not in any context. Not in any way, shape or form. Joking about it is really sick.
“And secondly, you retweet jokes about murdering journalists and then seem surprised that it might be affecting your Hall of Fame vote … which come from journalists?
“According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 48 journalists worldwide were killed in 2016 over their work. Thirty-three journalists have been murdered in Pakistan since 1992. Another 36 in Russia since 1992.
“So, Curt, killing journalists isn’t ‘just a joke.’ Because it actually happens.”
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Sports Editor Pierre LaBossiere can be contacted at 360-417-3525 or plabossiere@peninsuladailynews.com.
