Worthy of Cooperstown?

He didn’t finish his career with 3,000 hits. He wasn’t close to 500 home runs.

And it might have taken him a couple more seasons to reach 1,500 runs batted in.

So why in the world should Edgar Martinez, who defined the role of designated hitter with the Seattle Mariners, go into baseball’s Hall of Fame? In so many ways, the numbers just don’t support it.

If numbers were the only criteria, then Pete Rose would have been in the Hall of Fame years ago. And Sandy Koufax, with 165 career victories, wouldn’t.

Saturday night, the Mariners inducted the most deserving of their former players, Martinez, into the team’s Hall of Fame. He joined Alvin Davis, Jay Buhner and broadcaster Dave Niehaus.

Now the attention turns to the big Hall, the one in Cooperstown. The one Martinez deserves to be in.

He’ll be eligible in 2009 and chances are good he won’t get in without considerable debate. Designated hitters may rank just below closers in the amount of respect they get.

“It’s not going to happen overnight,” said Mariners bench coach John McLaren, whose coaching career in Seattle spanned much of Martinez’s major league years. “Closers are just now getting their due. But with Edgar, in time he’ll get his due. He was absolutely the best DH of all time. He defined the position.”

The problem, of course, is convincing Hall of Fame voters – most of them 10-year members of the Baseball Writers Association of America. Some of them will argue that a DH isn’t a full-time player.

He played his career in Seattle, where the best media coverage he got occurred whenever he did something to the Yankees. Fortunately, that happened a lot, especially in the 1995 playoff series when his 11th-inning double to beat the Yankees became the greatest moment in the history of Seattle sports.

Those who’ve been exposed only to the National League game – without the DH – will never know the impact Martinez had not only on the Mariners, but on his sport.

With 2,247 career hits, 309 home runs, 1,261 RBI and 514 doubles, he was more than the greatest DH of all time. How many right-handed hitters have been better? Martinez won two American League batting titles, the only right-hander to do that since Joe DiMaggio.

Yeah, but he didn’t come close to 3,000 hits or 500 homers or 1,500 RBI, some will argue. True.

But those so-called hitting thresholds haven’t stopped others from getting into the Hall of Fame. Former first baseman Orlando Cepeda had 2,351 hits, 379 homers and 1,365 RBI, all slightly better than Martinez and all good enough to get him inducted into the Hall of Fame.

But Cepeda hit nearly 100 doubles fewer than Martinez, scored almost 100 fewer runs, had an on-base percentage that was 68 points lower and a slugging percentage that was 16 points lower.

Cepeda was a seven-time All-Star – just like Martinez – but he never won a humanitarian award. Hardly. Cepeda’s arrest on a marijuana charge stained all the good he did on the field, and it took 25 years before he made it to the Hall of Fame in 1999.

Go ahead and try finding another player who represented himself, his team and his game with more class than Martinez. Three years ago, Major League Baseball named the annual award for the AL’s best DH as the Edgar Martinez Award.

“You ask anybody and they’ll tell you what a great player, what a great DH he was. But they’ll all tell you that he’s an even better person. He’s a true class act,” McLaren said.

“Once (the media) starts realizing the designated hitter’s role and what Edgar achieved in his career, momentum will pick up and the recognition will be there. If you took a poll of the players who played against him during his career, they’d say he was one of the greatest hitters they ever saw.

“It’s going to happen for Edgar.”

Kirby Arnold covers the Mariners for The Herald. His new book – “Tales from the Seattle Mariners Dugout,” chronicling the stars, characters, funny moments and big games throughout the team’s 30-year history – is available wherever books are sold.