'Cooperstown Chances' examines the Baseball Hall of Fame case of one candidate each week. This week: Former Rockies slugger Larry Walker.
Who he is: When Larry Walker debuted on the Baseball Writers' Association of America’s Hall of Fame ballot in 2011 with 20.3 percent of the vote, it shouldn’t have been huge cause for concern. After all, the Colorado Rockies great drew a higher percentage of the vote than Duke Snider or Orlando Cepeda his first time out with Hall of Fame voters. Many other players have debuted on the Cooperstown ballot with less than the necessary 75 percent of the vote and have gone on to achieve it. Many of those players didn’t have the case Walker has either.
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Quietly, Walker was one of the best all-around players of his time. Per Baseball-Reference.com, Walker’s 72.6 WAR ranks fifth-best among position players for the years he played, 1989 to 2005, trailing only Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez, Ken Griffey Jr, and Jeff Bagwell. Walker also hit .313 lifetime, winning three batting titles, seven Gold Gloves, and the 1997 National League Most Valuable Player Award. The only real knocks on Walker’s candidacy is that he was somewhat brittle and padded his numbers playing in Colorado during a peak offensive era.
But things have gotten tougher since 2011 for Walker and a few others on the writers ballot like Tim Raines and Mike Mussina. The ballot has seen its greatest influx of talent in many years over the past two elections. With several Steroid Era holdovers glutting the ballot, the Hall of Fame has also dropped the amount of time the BBWAA can consider players from 15 years to 10. Where in the past a candidate like Walker could slowly build momentum toward enshrinement, he might now be consigned to future Veterans Committee consideration.
From a high of 22.9 percent in the 2012 election, Walker dropped to 11.8 percent in the 2015 writers vote and could be in danger of falling below five percent, which would disqualify him from future BBWAA elections. Fellow candidates Mark McGwire and Fred McGriff have been on similar vote trajectories. Since the institution of the five percent rule in 1985, Walker, McGwire, or McGriff could be the first candidate to debut with at least 20 percent of the vote and fall below five percent on a later ballot. Walker would be the most egregious snub of these three, though there’s hope for him.
Cooperstown chances: 50 percent
Why: First off, after a few densely-packed elections, the writers ballot might be thinning, finally. Baseball researcher Adam Darowski cited 2015 as the strongest Hall of Fame ballot in half a century but noted that a few lighter years should be in store. This gives Walker time to regroup and regain some momentum, critical in Hall of Fame voting. Darowski has Walker as the seventh-best player on this year’s ballot after Bonds, Bagwell, Griffey, Roger Clemens, Curt Schilling, and Mike Mussina.
Walker will suffer a little in that the clearly superior Griffey is newly eligible for Cooperstown this year and a shoo-in for induction. It will be far from the first time the presence of an elite player on the Hall of Fame ballot has delayed the induction of another player perhaps a tier or two below them in ability. For instance, in the 1982 writers vote, Hank Aaron and Frank Robinson sailed in on their first ballot while Billy Williams debuted at 23.4 percent of the vote. Williams needed another five years on the ballot to be enshrined.
But on a thinner ballot than recent years, Walker might be the next-best presumably clean position player after Griffey. While that’s far from a fair measure for candidates like Bagwell or Mike Piazza, it might win Walker back some votes this year. Expect him to rise to at least 15 or 20 percent of the vote this election. If all the steroid-connected players were to disappear from the ballot tomorrow, Walker might rise as high as 30 percent of the vote this year and have a reasonable shot at eventual enshrinement through the BBWAA. The sooner the Hall of Fame can create a special committee for the Steroid Era, the better.
Walker can make himself crazy counting on induction through the current mess that is BBWAA voting. It’s a tough thing for casual observers to understand, but the best thing Walker can do right now as a Hall of Fame candidate is go for a good long game. Fans sometimes seem to believe that if a player fares poorly in Hall of Fame voting once, they’re done forever. Historically, this often hasn’t been the case. After all, the Veterans Committee has enshrined more Hall of Famers than any other group and will continue to do so.
Walker needs time to position himself as a good candidate for the Expansion Era Committee or whatever the Veterans Committee is calling itself in 10-15 years. He needs time to gather BBWAA votes which will make him more attractive to the committee. He needs time to show he wasn’t just a product of playing his prime years in Colorado during baseball’s best offensive era since the 1930s.
To be sure, Walker benefited from logging roughly a third of his career at-bats in Denver’s high elevation. Between Mile High Stadium and Coors Field, Walker hit .381 with a .461 on-base percentage and .709 slugging percentage. But he wasn’t a bad player elsewhere, hitting .282 at all other parks with a .372 on-base percentage and .500 slugging percentage. Others have gotten in the Hall of Fame with vast home-road splits from Mel Ott to Chuck Klein to Bobby Doerr. Those three didn’t have Walker’s arm, defense, and speed either.
Even sabermetricians still don't agree on Walker. Darowski has Walker as the 66th-best player and seventh-best right fielder all-time with a 150 Hall Rating. Jay Jaffe and Pete Palmer are less bullish. Jaffe has Walker with 58.6 in his Hall of Fame metric JAWS, with the average Hall of Fame right fielder at 58.1 JAWS. Palmer has Walker about 10 percent over his threshold for Hall of Fame players. Scott Lindholm of the venerable, saber-slanted Beyond the Box Score gives Walker his statistical due, but added in an email:
My final criteria is a very simple one—if I really have to think about it, chances are that player doesn’t belong in the HOF, at least my HOF. Reggie Jackson—in. Manny Ramirez—heck yeah. Alan Trammell—of course, and Lou Whitaker would get a good looking-over. I just can’t do it with Larry Walker for the same reason I just can’t for Tim Raines—they’re both very good players with solid credentials, and they even fare well on my favorite tool to analyze players. But it’s not enough—I may be a man of numbers, but I never claimed to be 100 percent rational. Larry Walker will be the latest inductee to the Hall of Very Good, perhaps even its leading light, but that’s as good as I can do.
So it may take years longer for a positive consensus to build about Walker, if it does.
It's worth noting that sometimes the Hall of Fame needs a few decades to give a player their due. It’s happened with a number of hitters who had relatively short careers in peak offensive eras including Klein, Earl Averill, and Johnny Mize. There’ve also been delayed inductions for players whose careers were disrupted by injury, Duke Snider coming to mind. It’d be great if the Hall of Fame had a quicker cycle for honoring players like Walker, but a sometimes glacial pace is better than frivolous, erratic enshrinement.
'Cooperstown Chances' examines the Baseball Hall of Fame case of one candidate each week. Series author and Sporting News contributor Graham Womack writes regularly about the Hall of Fame and other topics related to baseball history at his website, Baseball: Past and Present . Follow him on Twitter: @grahamdude .