Thoughts on Edgar Martinez and the Hall of Fame

Published 5:50 pm Wednesday, January 18, 2017

The voting results for the Baseball Hall of Fame were released Wednesday, and once again Seattle Mariners legend Edgar Martinez came up short. However, Martinez continued to trend upward.

Martinez, who played for the Mariners from 1987-2004, received 58.6 percent of the possible votes. That remains well short of the 75-percent threshold for enshrinement to Cooperstown, but was up significantly from the 43.4 percent he received last year, and his 15.2 percent increase was the second-largest among returning players on the ballot.

This was Martinez’s eighth year on the ballot. That means he has just two more years remaining to be voted in by the Baseball Writers Association of America. Is he going to get to the 75-percent threshold in time?

I am not an expert when it comes to the Hall of Fame vote, so I don’t know how much to read into vote trends. I don’t know how the new players coming onto the ballot the next two years — Chipper Jones and Jim Thome become eligible next year, Mariano Rivera the year after that — will affect Martinez’s chances. And I don’t know what effect the increased vote totals for players suspected of using performance-enhancing substances — Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds both topped 50 percent for the first time this year — will factor in.

But here’s one thing I will say: I am confident Martinez will be elected to the Hall of Fame eventually. But it may not be by the baseball writers.

What Martinez’s gradually increasing vote totals show is that advanced statistics are being considered more and more by the voters. The things working against Martinez are the fact he spent most of his career as a DH, and by playing in Seattle he was out of the national consciousness. But what works in Martinez’s favor are the numbers, and those are what hold up best over time.

Martinez’s strengths as a hitter were, well, everything. He hit for average (.312 in his career), he hit for power (309 homers) and he had a keen batting eye (1,283 walks and a career on-base percentage of .418).

Taking all his contributions into account, FanGraphs.com gives Martinez 65.5 WAR (wins above replacement). That ranks 123rd all-time in baseball history. After today there are now 220 players in the Hall of Fame, so Martinez is comfortably within the criteria of a Hall of Famer by WAR, ahead of the likes of Tony Gwynn, Yogi Berra, Mike Piazza, Ernie Banks, Bob Feller and Carl Hubbell.

What about strictly as a hitter? Again doing a deeper calculation, FanGraphs gives Martinez 147 wRC+ (weighted runs created plus). That ranks 33rd all-time, ahead of such top-tier Hall of Famers as Honus Wagner, Mike Schmidt and Eddie Collins, as well as his contemporary and former teammate Alex Rodriguez.

Will these numbers be enough to get Martinez in the Hall of Fame before his 10 years expire? I don’t know. But the numbers are too impressive to ignore, and if Martinez isn’t enshrined by the baseball writers I have little doubt that the Era Committee — which takes up the cases of players who weren’t honored by the writers, and will also become more statistically inclined over time — will recognize him somewhere down the line.