The Cooperstown Casebook by Jay Jaffe

Author:Jay Jaffe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

CASE STUDY: EDGAR MARTINEZ

I’ve faced a lot of Hall of Fame hitters, and my gosh, Edgar is the best hitter that I ever saw.… You know how you love something and you carry it around with you? When I got to Seattle, Edgar was walking around with a bat all the time.… I’d look at the top of his locker and he would have his bats lined up and his own scale to weigh the bats. Who does that?25

—RANDY JOHNSON

All Edgar Martinez did was hit—the statement is almost completely true in both the literal and figurative senses. Even after adjusting for his high-scoring surroundings, Martinez could flat-out rake. A high-average, high-on-base percentage hitting machine with plenty of power, he put up numbers that place him among the top 30 or 40 hitters of all-time even after adjusting for the high-offense era.

Martinez played a key role in putting the Seattle Mariners on the map as an AL West powerhouse, emerging as a folk hero to a fan base that watched Ken Griffey Jr., Randy Johnson, and Alex Rodriguez lead the franchise’s charge to relevancy, then force their way out of town over contract issues. But while Griffey and Rodriguez were two-way stars at key up-the-middle positions, Martinez spent the bulk of his career as a designated hitter, and all he did in that capacity was put a claim on being the best one in baseball history.

More than 40 years after it was introduced—in perhaps the most significant rule change since the AL adopted the foul strike rule in 1903—the DH continues to rankle purists who would rather watch pitchers risk injury as they flail away with ineptitude. Not until 2014 was the first player ever to spend a majority of his career as a DH inducted into the Hall of Fame, namely Frank Thomas, who made 57% of his plate appearances in that capacity. Thomas’s election came a full decade after Paul Molitor provided the Hall with its first player to spend the plurality of his career (44%) as a DH after bouncing all around the infield. By comparison, Martinez took 72% of his plate appearances as a DH, while David Ortiz took 88%.

In reviewing candidates who spent a significant chunk of their careers at DH, the precedent I’ve set—starting with Molitor in 2004, before the system was even called JAWS—is to compare them with respect both to the position where they spent the most time and to all Hall position players. Both Molitor and Thomas, who had milestones that made their enshrinement near-automatic (3,000 hits for the former, 500 homers for the latter), exceed the JAWS standards at their positions (third base and first base) and relative to all position players despite incurring WAR’s substantial built-in penalty for not playing the field. Other DH candidates with superficially impressive counting stats, such as Harold Baines, Jose Canseco, and Chili Davis, did not.

Martinez, who ranks fourth in games by a DH at 1,403, but who also played 564 games at third base

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