Forgotten, and almost gone: 5 Hall of Fame candidates hampered by their era

This past November, a proposal by the Baseball Writers' Association of America to expand the Hall of Fame ballot from 10 to 12 spots was tabled by the museum's board of directors, an effort to keep induction to the shrine difficult.

Combined with the ongoing disagreement over how to deal with steroid-tainted players like Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Sammy Sosa, Mike Piazza and Gary Sheffield, the limitation has resulted in a ballot logjam that figures to hamper the cases of some worthy candidates and, at least in one instance, led to a well-credentialed player getting bounced out after one go-round.

Former Toronto Blue Jays star Carlos Delgado received less than 5% of the vote in his first year of eligibility in 2015, meaning he’s no longer on the ballot even though his career stats compare favorably with fellow first baseman Fred McGriff, who probably won’t gain induction but may get his full 10-year run.

In a different time not so long ago, Delgado (473 career homers, .929 OPS) and McGriff (493 and .886) might have gained entry into the Hall, but their stats lost value by virtue of them playing the bulk of their careers during the steroid era, which saw offensive numbers explode to cartoonish proportions.

The same may eventually be said of other standouts in the current class, such as Sheffield, Jeff Kent, Jim Edmonds and Larry Walker, who appear longshots to have their names etched on Cooperstown plaques despite meritorious careers.

Other than Edmonds, who is making his first appearance on the ballot, they share a bond with McGriff: All have statistics that bear a long look by the electorate - yet all of them received just 10-15% of the vote in last year’s election, well short of the 75% required for induction.

Here’s a look at all five cases:

Sheffield: The Similarity Scores on Sheffield’s baseball-reference.com page put him alongside seven Hall of Famers and two more likely ones among the top 10 names. That’s impressive company, even when only one of those Hall of Famers – Frank Thomas – was a contemporary who played in the steroid era.

But while Thomas was an outspoken critic of the use of performance-enhancing drugs, Sheffield was named in the Mitchell Report and testiifed in the BALCO trial. Voters have been harsh on players with such direct links to steroids – Rafael Palmeiro is no longer on the ballot and Sosa and his 609 career homers may fall off this year – so it came as no surprise that Sheffield received just 11.7% of support on his first try last year.

In addition, Sheffield’s indifference toward fielding will be held against him. Though fielding metrics remain unreliable, his inability to record a single season with a positive defensive WAR in his 22-year career shows consistently subpar performance in that aspect of the game.
In the past, such foibles may have been overlooked because of the impressive nature of Sheffield’s offensive accomplishments: 509 home runs, 25th on the career list, along with 1,676 RBI (27th), a .907 OPS (56th, right behind Ken Griffey Jr.), five Silver Slugger awards and three top-three MVP finishes.

They’re compelling numbers, but in a crowded field that includes better-rounded outfielders like Edmonds and Walker, they’re probably not enough to lift Sheffield above the competition.

Edmonds: The eight-time Gold Glove winner left an indelible mark with his back-to-the-plate catches both with the then-Anaheim Angels and St. Louis Cardinals. The spectacular, reckless nature of his play in center field sometimes overshadowed Edmonds’ feats at the plate, but in his first full season he earned All-Star recognition in compiling a .290 batting average with 33 homers and 107 RBI.

Such production was not rare when Edmonds stayed healthy for a full season, especially after he joined the Cardinals in 2000. He averaged 35 homers, 98 RBI and a .989 OPS in his first six seasons in St. Louis, two of them earning him a top-five spot in the MVP voting. But even though Edmonds played 17 years, many of them were truncated by injuries, especially late in his career, when concussions hampered him, and he fell short of some of the milestones that catch the attention of Hall voters.

Edmonds’ offensive output was just a notch below the numbers put up by Hall of Fame center fielder Duke Snider, who finished with a career OPS of .919 with 407 homers and 1,333 RBI in 2,143 games. Edmonds, a better fielder, finished with a .903 OPS, 393 homers and 1,199 RBI in 2,011 games.

It took Snider 11 attempts to earn entry into the Hall. Edmonds will have fewer chances, maybe just a handful of tries, and runs the risk of failing to get the minimum 5% to stay on the ballot.

Walker: The big, wisecracking Canadian won three batting crowns in a four-year span from 1998-2001 and earned NL MVP honors in 1997. He was a seven-time Gold Glove winner as a right fielder with a formidable arm, and he reached double figures in stolen bases 11 times. His .965 career OPS ranks 15th all-time, right between Thomas and Miguel Cabrera, ahead of iconic outfielders like Mel Ott (.947), Ty Cobb (.945) and Willie Mays (.941).

And yet, Walker’s highest voting total was 22.9% in 2012, his second year of eligibility, and it has been down to the low teens the last two years. His biggest sin hasn’t been a link to steroids – there hasn’t been any credible suspicion – but rather playing home games for 9½ of his 17 seasons in Colorado’s thin air.

Walker was already a multifaceted star by the time he arrived in Denver in 1995, but his game took off in Coors Field, and some of his inflated stats have been logically ascribed to playing in that hitters’ paradise. A career .313 hitter, Walker produced a .381 batting average and a preposterous 1.172 OPS in 597 games at Coors, along with 154 of his 383 homers. For his career, Walker had a 1.068 home OPS, .865 on the road.

In Denver, he hit a homer every 16.2 plate appearances. Elsewhere, one every 24.1. Over the course of 600 plate appearances in a season, that’s the difference between hitting 37 and 25 homers. The latter is nice production, but not hall worthy.

McGriff: He’s tied with Lou Gehrig in the 28th spot on the home run list and led each league in homers once. At one point, coming within seven homers of the 500-homer mark earned a hitter strong Hall of Fame consideration. Willie Stargell got in with 475 home runs and an .889 OPS that was just three points higher than McGriff’s.

But the standards had changed by the time McGriff entered the ballot in 2010. Years of reports about the steroid abuses in baseball and the bloated power numbers they had engendered rendered once-magical milestones nearly meaningless. Of the 12 players who have joined the 500-homer club since 1997, six are currently eligible for the Hall (excluding Griffey, who’s on his first year on the ballot). Of those, only Thomas has been voted in. Bonds, Sosa, Mark McGwire, Palmeiro and Sheffield remain on the outside. So does McGriff, even though he never aroused suspicion of PED use.

Bill James’ Hall of Fame Monitor establishes 100 points as the figure at which a candidate becomes a likely Hall of Famer. McGriff hit that number on the nose, but his trend has been going in the wrong direction. After surging to 23.9% of the vote in his third year of eligibility in 2012, he has dropped substantially ever since as the ballot has gotten more congested. Last year’s 12.9% was his second-lowest and likely served as an indication his chances are doomed.

Kent: You would think holding the record for the most home runs as a second baseman, along with an MVP and four Silver Slugger awards, would merit strong consideration for Hall admission. And it might eventually come for Kent, but the voting totals in his first two years – 15.2% and 14% – present a stark picture of the long way he has to go to attain the 75% required for election.

Kent was more than merely Bonds’ foil and the beneficiary of his lineup presence during their highly successful if contentious six seasons together with the San Francisco Giants. During a nine-year stretch that included his MVP season of 2000, Kent averaged 28 homers and 110 RBI, and three of those seasons came after he left the Giants.

Kent hit 351 of his 377 career home runs as a second baseman. The next four on the list -- Ryne Sandberg (275), Rogers Hornsby (271), Joe Morgan (268) and Joe Gordon (246) – are all in the Hall. Among that group, only Hornsby had a better OPS than Kent’s .855 mark.
Modern fielding metrics don’t favor Kent, who lacked the range and defensive acrobatics of Roberto Alomar or the versatility of Craig Biggio, two second basemen elected to the Hall in the last five years. But besides being notoriously fickle, those stats don’t measure factors such as hanging tough to complete a double play, a Kent trait.

Still, his candidacy is based more on his offensive exploits, and like some of his contemporaries, it has taken a hit both by the jam-packed ballot and the reevaluation of stats accumulated during the era they played in.