Larry Walker combined hitting, slugging, running, fielding and throwing as well as any player in his generation. Yet this is his 10th and final chance to get into Cooperstown.Gary Caskey/Reuters
Derek Jeter grew up beside a baseball field in Michigan, dreaming of playing shortstop for the New York Yankees. The fates cooperated, and Jeter lived out a fantasy that will soon earn him election to the Hall of Fame on the first try.
Life was different in British Columbia for young Larry Walker, whose high school did not have a baseball team. Walker played goaltender on hockey teams with Cam Neely, the future Boston Bruins star, and expected that sport to be his destiny.
At 17, a summer fling with a youth baseball team led to an unlikely spot on the Canadian national team and a free-agent contract with the Montreal Expos worth US$1,500. Walker was so raw that, in his first summer as a pro, as a base runner for the Utica Blue Sox, he crossed the diamond from third to first – without touching second – after an outfielder unexpectedly caught a fly ball.
“He didn’t know the rule,” said Walt Weiss, a former teammate and close friend, repeating a story that is part of Walker lore. “But he ended up being the most instinctive player that I ever played with. He had a sixth sense on the field.”
That sixth sense became the sixth tool for Walker, who combined hitting, slugging, running, fielding and throwing as well as any player in his generation. But while Jeter can start making plans to be in Cooperstown, N.Y., for induction ceremonies in July, this is Walker’s 10th and final chance to be elected by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America.
Voting members must submit their ballots by Tuesday, and the Hall of Fame will announce the results three weeks later. As recently as 2014, Walker seemed unlikely to make it; he collected just 10.2 per cent of votes on a crowded ballot that included 12 players now in the Hall, plus Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, who have been shunned for ties to performance-enhancing drugs.
But Walker’s support has risen steadily since then. He climbed to 54.6 per cent last year, and this year’s public ballots suggest he will amass the necessary 75 per cent. In 60 votes revealed through Wednesday, as compiled by Ryan Thibodaux – @NotMrTibbs on Twitter – Walker was polling at 85 per cent.
To Weiss, who played with Walker on the Colorado Rockies from 1995-97, the upward trend makes sense. Weiss shared clubhouses with the Hall of Famers Rickey Henderson, Chipper Jones and Harold Baines – and steroid-era sluggers such as Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire – but calls Walker the best player on any of his teams. Yet even for Weiss, it took a while to understand Walker’s place in history.
“A few years ago I was unsure, even though I knew how great a player he was,” Weiss said. “But then, when you start to dig in and see where he ranks in some of these categories all time, it blows you away.”
Walker ranks 12th on the career list for slugging percentage, ahead of Hank Aaron, Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle. Only six players can match him in batting average (.313), on-base percentage (.400) and slugging percentage (.565) – Jimmie Foxx, Lou Gehrig, Hank Greenberg, Rogers Hornsby, Babe Ruth and Ted Williams.
Walker played in only 1,988 major-league games, fewer than all but two position players elected by the writers since 1970: Mike Piazza, a catcher, and Kirby Puckett, whose career ended abruptly because of glaucoma. But Walker’s total is within a season of the recent electees Jeff Bagwell (2,150), Vladimir Guerrero (2,147) and Edgar Martinez (2,055) – and he ended strong, with an .886 on-base plus slugging percentage for the St. Louis Cardinals in 2005.
The bigger issue, for many voters, is where Walker spent his prime years: in Colorado, with the Rockies, the only existing franchise with no alumni in the Hall of Fame. Many voters dismiss the distorted offensive numbers from the funhouse mirror of Coors Field and its mile-high elevation.
“There’s such a stigma to having played there that I think we go too far when we want to penalize guys for it,” said Weiss, who also managed the Rockies from 2013-16. “Yes, you get rewarded offensively, there’s no doubt about it. But there’s also some unique challenges of playing there, too.”
Switching from thin air to sea level all season takes a toll on the body, Weiss said, and the Rockies are the only team that must leave its time zone for every road game. Hitters can struggle on the road because pitches behave differently, he added; the same ball that hovers in the strike zone in Denver may break out of the zone elsewhere.
To be sure, Walker benefited from Coors Field, where he hit .381 with a .462 on-base percentage and a .710 slugging percentage. But his career road totals are excellent (.278/.370/.495), and when he won the National League’s Most Valuable Player award in 1997, Walker had a better OPS on the road than at home.
His career road OPS, .865, is equal to or better than those of George Brett, Ken Griffey Jr., Reggie Jackson and Willie Stargell, all first-ballot Hall of Famers. Walker has more stolen bases (230) than all of those players, in addition to winning seven Gold Gloves.
“He’s one of the best base runners I ever saw, and other than Andruw Jones, he’s the best outfielder I’ve ever seen – and for sure the best corner outfielder,” Weiss said. “He did all the other things, the peripherals, and for me that’s what puts him over the top.”
Weiss compares Walker’s baseball acumen to that of another former teammate, Hall of Fame pitcher Greg Maddux. Nobody else, he said, could so routinely surprise him with a tip or a strategy he had never considered.
“In the outfield, when the ball was hit down the line, he’d run in the general area of the ball, but he wouldn’t watch the ball – he’d be watching the runners,” Weiss said. “He always said that the hitter would tell you if it’s fair or foul, and then he wanted to know where the runners were the whole time. He just did things like that that I never heard anybody else say before.”
Advanced metrics have raised the profile of recent electees such as Bert Blyleven, Tim Raines and Ted Simmons (elected by a veterans’ committee this month), and they are kind to Walker, too. Baseball Reference credits him with 72.7 wins above replacement; Jeter had 72.4, in 759 more games. Of the past four outfielders elected to the Hall of Fame – Andre Dawson, Griffey, Guerrero and Raines – only Griffey has more WAR than Walker.
WAR is an imperfect statistic, but it tries to encompass everything, including ballpark factors. Walker ranks well above the Cooperstown borderline, and voters should recognize that games in Denver – where Major League Baseball has sanctioned its product for 27 seasons – count just like all the rest, with unique complications for the players who call it home.
The writers have one last chance to recognize Walker for the all-around force that he was, without punishing him for where he played.