But Edgar Martinez? Other than your say-so, do you have even a shred of evidence, hearsay or not, that suggests he was a PED user? I paid very close attention to Edgar’s career throughout, and have never even seen that suggested. Usually, it is the contrary….

Believe what you want, but don’t make things up and try to pass it off as some kind of reasonable, fact-based suspicion.

I can answer this one. There’s a belief in baseball circles, that there will be someone who took steroids that we do not know about that will get into the Hall. There is also a belief that once one gets in, ALL of them will have to be put in. The most popular name to fit this is Jeff Bagwell. Second is Mike Piazza. Third is Edgar Martinez.

Rick Reuschel had a better career than Jack Morris.
Will Clark had a better career than Don Mattingly.

Did Heyman vote for those one-and-done candidates?

Portland Oregonian columnist John Canzano recently said that the late, great Maurice Lucas was the heart and soul of the great Blazers teams of the 1970s and 1980s in ways that other Blazer greats like Walton, Drexler, and Roy could not be. Without diminishing those greats, he wrote that “the contributions of Lucas cannot be quantified any more effectively than you can catch a man’s spirit in a pillow case.” And so it was with Edgar, whose everyman’s work ethic, dignity, and quiet humility closely matched the ethos of the town he chose to spend his entire career playing for.

While not the most flashy, Edgar was the engine of the Mariners offense in their greatest years. There was no way to get the man out – he’d simply adjust, and hit the ball hard no matter where you pitched it, and if you didn’t thrown it in the strike zone, he simply didn’t swing at it. He was the protection, and the reason Ken Griffey, Jr. saw so many fastballs that he could hit (or nearly hit) 50 home runs in four consecutive seasons.

Oh wait! I am appealing to intangibles, like Jon did? Although mine has the benefit of being true, it’s kind of hard to rebut that kind of argument, isn’t it, Jon? I respect the hell out of Heyman as a reporter, but I really wish he would check the record against his memory, to make sure he’s even remotely close to being right, or consistent, with such an important vote. And really, that’s the point of Craig’s quote from “Memento” as well as his recent pleas for consistency. It’s not really too much to ask.

In the past Heyman has cited the lack of high placement in MVP voting as somehow evidence of Edgar’s lack of necessary dominance, but of course that is a kind of circular argument because so much of that is precisely because of the kind of anti-DH bias Edgar is facing now, as a HoF candidate.

Fortunately, we now have better tools to check our memory and opinion on these sorts of things, against an objective record. Fangraphs now has an ability to look and see who led MLB, or the AL, for a 1, 3, or longer-year period in all kinds of things: WAR, wOBA, RC+, WPA, you name it. Let me tell you what it shows:

1) There was never any rolling three-year period in Edgar’s career as a regular, from the 1990-1992 period all the way until the 2001-2003 period, when he didn’t finish in the top ten in the AL in both wOBA and wRC+, which are probably the best adjusted offensive stats out there. In fact, he only finished outside of the top 10 in either of those categories in all of MLB in three 3-year perods: 1992-1994, when he was injured (still, 12thin wOBA and 9th in wRC+); 1999-2001 (12th in MLB in wOBA but 8th in wRC+); 2000-2002 (again, during periods of injury, but still 21st in MLB in wOBA, and 16th in wRC+); and 2001-2003 (19th in wOBA and 15th in wRC+).

2) Edgar led virtually every offensive measure in 1995 (specifically, led MLB in AVG, OBP, TOB, OPS, 2B, RC, RS, offensive WAR, wOBA, wRC+, OPS+, Win Probability Added, and several more) and by all rights should have been a much more serious MVP candidate, if not the winner.

3) During Edgar’s peak, from 1995-2001, he hit .329/.446/.574, 163 OPS+, with per-162 game averages of 191 hits, 47 2B, 1 3B, 32 HR, 111 RS, 123 RBI, and 120 BB. He earned nearly 41 WAR during that seven-year stretch (the median HoFer has only 58 WAR, *career*), even after the heavy negative positional adjustment DHs face with the WAR stat (only four players in history have ever had a higher negative positional adjustment than Edgar Martinez, and all of them either saw significant time as a DH as well, or were among the worst defenders at positions that also see high negative positional adjustments such as 1B and corner OF, and none of them played anything close to the 564 games Edgar played – as a slightly above-average defender – at the relatively more difficult defensive position of 3B). In the AL, over this period, he had the second-highest WAR behind only A-Rod (all of which was due to the positional adjustment; Edgar was worth almost 125 runs more – 12+ wins – than A-Rod offensively); 1st in wOBA, wRAA, WPA, wRC+, the highest BA of anybody with at least 3000 PA over those 7 years (roughly 400 PA/yr), the highest OBP (.016 better than Frank Thomas), was top ten in SLG (and 6 of those ahead of him are admitted or suspected PED users), AND among all the contenders for these top offensive categories, Edgar led in GP, PA, and hits, too. If that’s not dominant, I don’t know what is.

People criticize Edgar for a too-short career (on a 162-game basis, it was only about 12.5 years, and he really only spent 14 seasons as a regular), and that is a fair criticism – though as you know, also not entirely fair to Edgar, as he absolutely dominated AAA while the Mariners favored Jim Presley for about three years. But his GP and PA totals are far from unprecedented in the HoF, and many of those with similar numbers were far less than the consistent offensive force Edgar was.

Again, using the new Fangraphs database, from 1990-2003, in all of MLB, Edgar was: 4th in WAR behind only Bonds, Bagwell, and Griffey (and just *ahead* of Frank Thomas); 5th in wRC+ behind Bonds, Pujols, Thomas, and Ramirez; 8th in wOBA (at .414 in a virtual tie for 4th with Walker and Thome, behind the group of Pujols, Thomas, Ramirez, and Helton in the .423-.433 range, and then Bonds in another world); 8th in BA (behind Helton, Pujols, Ichiro, Nomar, Vlad, Piazza, and Jeter); 10th in hits, 2nd in doubles, 9th in XBH, and 5th in Wins Probability Added (behind only Bonds, Bagwell, Sheffield, and Thomas).

It was virtually an entire career of dominant-level performance. While not ONE thing particularly stands out for its excellence (aside from OBP perhaps), the BREADTH of excellence as a hitter is unmatched in his era, and nearly unmatched in history outside of the elite inner circle of the Hall. As you yourself once emphasized to Larry Stone (even though you pooh-poohed it in your latest article, there are only 11 retired players who have played more than 2000 games and retired with at least a .300/.400/.500 slash line, and all of those are in the Hall of Fame. And I’ll go you one better: there are only seven men ever to have that slash line, 3500 or more times on base, 500 or more doubles, 300 or more home runs, 1000 or more RBI, all while making fewer than 6000 outs. They are Ted Williams, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Rogers Hornsby, Edgar, Manny Ramirez, and Al Simmons. Of those players, Edgar made the fewest outs. Isn’t that the point? [And, anticipating your objection that those guys had many more TOB, if you look at TOB/Outs, Edgar trails only the first four of those men; in fact, if you look at the Top 1000 players in TOB in history, and then measure TOB/Outs Made, Edgar is 15th on that list, and everybody ahead of him who is eligible is in the Hall of Fame.]

I realize that Edgar isn’t Babe Ruth, or Ted Williams, but he is significantly better than the average HoF hitter. Should the fact that he spent two-thirds of his career count against his case? Perhaps, but again, WAR already adjusts for that and still shows that Edgar clears the bar by a pretty significant margin.

From 1990 to the end of his career, Edgar had 8392 PA. If you look at all players with at least 7000 PA in that span, only Bonds and Frank Thomas were better. Edgar is in a group with Thome, Sheffield, Bagwell, and Junior vying – closely – for the title as the third best hitter of their generation. Expand that a bit, to the entirety of their careers, and anybody born within 10 years or so of Edgar, and you add Manny to that list, and maybe Chipper or even Jason Giambi (putting PEDs aside, as I am here for Bonds, Sheffield, and Manny, too). Edgar’s in the discussion of the best and most dominant hitters of a generation. Those kinds of players deserve to be in the Hall of Fame.

The man defined a position that, like it or not, has been around for 40 years and isn’t going away. The City of Seattle named a street after him, and Major League Baseball named an award for those who excel in the role he once defined after him. If character and integrity count, let’s remember this is a man never associated or suspected of PED use, a Roberto Clemete Award winner who is in the Sports Humanitarian Hall of Fame. He is worthy, on EVERY level.

Sums up my feelings perfectly.

http://joeposnanski.si.com/2007/12/29/best-pitcher-of-the-1980s/

Then these same writers discredit ball players because the writers of 20 years ago did not share their new progressive way of thinking. Using MVP or Cy Young or even All Star tallies only proves that the press at the time, using rather archaic criteria, often did not properly recognize the best players. It is even more frustrating when it was their very own vote (or lack there of) being used as ‘evidence’ against the player. i.e., if 1990 Jon Heyman didn’t vote for this guy for Cy Young or MVP, how can 2010 Heyman vote him into the hall of fame? They player gets penalized twice for Heyman’s lack of understanding, even though he claims to understand now.

“Morris has a high lifetime ERA, 3.90. But some of that is due to the 6.19 and 5.60 marks he put up in his final two seasons. And part of it is due to him pitching to the scoreboard, which the very best pitchers could do.”

Now, I took away those two seasons and he still had a 3.73 ERA…so it was not just those two seasons.

I also did this for Bert, and his ERA went from 3.31 to 3.16….So, his argument is rubbish!

Ding ding ding ding ding! And the entire argument for Morris is that he got better run support from the other players on his team.