Sheffield, Edmonds, Walker: Who Belongs in the Hall?

It’s less than four weeks until the results are announced for the class of 2016 for the Baseball Hall of Fame. Two new center fielders are on ballot for the first time, Ken Griffey Jr. and Jim Edmonds.

This article will not be about Junior Griffey. He will be a 95% or better vote-getter in his debut on the Cooperstown ballot. I’m going to focus on three other outfielders on the ballot: Edmonds, Larry Walker (on the ballot for the 6th time) and 2nd-time candidate Gary Sheffield. There are three other notable outfielders eligible for the Hall this year: Barry Bonds (one of the greatest players in the history of the game but tainted by the stain of PED’s), Sammy Sosa (whose cartoonish home run totals at his peak reeked of steroid use) and stolen base artist Tim Raines (long overdue for enshrinement but a completely different type of player).

Walker debuted on the 2010 ballot with 20% of the vote (way, way short of the 75% needed for induction), stayed barely above 20% on the next two tries but, with the over-crowded ballots of the last two years, lost about half of his support. Twelve months ago he garnered just 65 votes (12%) of the 411 needed. Sheffield, on the ballot for the first time last year, received almost exactly the same support as Walker (64 votes for 12%). At first glance, Sheffield looks like he’s in a different class than the other two. Here are the basic statistics, ranked by career plate appearances. Although Sosa is clearly not getting into Cooperstown (he pulled just 6.6% of the vote last year), I’m including his and Griffey’s numbers in some of these charts for comparison purposes:

Career
PA
HR
RBI
AVG
OPS
All-Star Games



Ken Griffey Jr.
11304
630
1836
.284
.907
13


Gary Sheffield
10858
505
1664
.292
.909
11


Sammy Sosa
9096
609
1667
.273
.878
7


Larry Walker
8030
383
1311
.313
.965
5


Jim Edmonds
7980
393
1199
.284
.903
4

Comparing Sheffield to Walker and Edmonds in particular, it does not take an advanced degree in statistics to see that Sheffield’s superior home run and RBI totals are directly attributable to having enjoyed a longer career, with over 2,800 plate appearances more than either of the others. It also doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that Walker enjoyed playing 9 1/2 seasons with the Colorado Rockies and half of his games in the mile high air of Coors Field.

Normally, in the history of Hall of Fame voting, Sosa and Sheffield would be in Cooperstown with Walker and Edmonds as question marks. However, as we all know, being in the 500-home run club doesn’t mean what it used to. Sheffield was named on the Mitchell Report about steroids and admitted having used the “clear,” which was a rubbing cream which he says he didn’t realize was a steroid. This is not an implausible claim: baseball players aren’t scientists and there are so many supplements these days that you practically need a degree in chemistry to determine what’s what. Sosa wasn’t in the Mitchell report but he was in an another PED-linked affidavit after the fact and there is universal belief in the baseball community that his chief claim to fame (the crazy home run totals) are not even close to being authentic.

Anyway, as I’ll show in this piece, the three players in question (Sheffield, Walker, Edmonds) are very close in total career performance despite Sheffield’s huge edge in home runs and RBI based on having a longer career. The reason that the others are close to Sheff is that both Edmonds and Walker were superior defensive players; Edmonds won 8 Gold Gloves in center field, Walker won 7 in right field. Sosa never won a Gold Glove but was a pretty solid defensive player. Sheffield, on the other hand, wielded an iron glove in the field. I don’t swear by advanced fielding metrics when applied to records of the past but those metrics call him one of the worst defensive outfielders in the history of baseball.

Gary Sheffield grew up in Tampa, Florida. His mother, Betty, was the older sister of Dwight Gooden, who took the baseball world by storm in 1984, winning Rookie of the Year at the age of 19 and then the Cy Young Award one year later. Gooden was biologically Sheffield’s uncle but was really more like a big brother because he was only four years older. Sheff’s full biography is a really interesting tale and you can read about it here.  Sheffield, just 17 years old, was the 6th overall pick in the 1986 draft by the Milwaukee Brewers. He made his major league debut just two years later as a shortstop, moving to 3rd base at the end of 1989. Sheffield’s tenure in Milwaukee was tumultuous; he was considered somewhat of a bad apple with an attitude problem and was traded to the San Diego Padres shortly before the 1992 season. Clearly, San Diego agreed with Sheffield; he had a spectacular season, hitting .330 with 33 home runs and 100 RBI, finishing 3rd in the MVP voting.

Unfortunately, Sheffield was part of a summer fire sale in 1993 by owner Tom Werner and was shipped to the expansion first-year Florida Marlins in a trade that sent a young relief pitcher named Trevor Hoffman to the Pads. In 1994, the Marlins moved Sheffield to right field; it wasn’t exactly a Hanley Ramirez-esque transition but Sheffield struggled in the outfield, straining his rotator cuff twice while diving for balls. His first two seasons were both shortened by injuries but Sheff broke out with a superb season in 1996, slugging 42 home runs, with 120 RBI and a .314 batting average. He struggled with a subpar 1997 season but that Marlins team had a lot of quality veterans and were the surprise Wild Card winners of the World Series. In that post-season run, Sheffield delivered a .320 batting average, a 1.061 OPS with 3 home runs and 7 RBI. His contributions weren’t as famous as those by teammates like Livan Hernandez or Edgar Renteria, but he was a key part of that title effort.

As most remember, Sheffield was part of another fire sale when Marlins owner Wayne Huizenga decided to break up the championship team; he was sent back to Southern California and the L.A. Dodgers in a multi-player trade that included another current Hall of Fame candidate, Dodgers catcher Mike Piazza. After being an injury-plagued player throughout his 20’s, Sheffield finally had a sustained run of mostly good health in his 30’s. Playing for the Dodgers (and subsequently the Braves and Yankees), Sheffield had a six-year run in which he played an average of 148 games per season and made five All-Star teams during those six years. Alas, in 2006, a collision at first base while running out a ground ball resulted in an injured knee and an injured wrist which required surgery. Sheff, at the age of 38, had a bit of a renaissance in 2007 with the Detroit Tigers but then slumped to a .225 average in 2008. He was released by the Tigers shortly before the 2009 season and played that final campaign back in New York, this time with the Mets, hitting his 500th career home run at Citi Field.

The question here is that, considering that he played during the steroid era (and by his own admission unwittingly used once himself), do Sheffield’s 509 home runs and 1,676 RBI make him a Hall of Famer?  Let’s forget about the brutal defensive metrics for a minute because you have to take them with a grain of salt; so we’ll just focus for now on the prodigious bat that he wielded.

Let’s start with the home run total: in any other era, 509 home runs would make him a lock for Cooperstown. But this hasn’t been any other era: Sheffield is one of a whopping twelve players since 1986 who have clubbed at least 500 taters and one of seventeen who have hit at least 450 (until recently the highest home run total for a non-Hall of Famer was Dave Kingman’s 442). So we need to take a closer look at whether being part of the 500-home-run club means a player was a truly prolific home run hitter during this era.

Let’s take a look at how Sheff’s home run performance stacks up with his contemporaries (which we’ll define as any player whose career began in the 1980’s or later): I’ve ranked these players by the number of at bats per home run. These numbers are for the 14 players who hit at least 473 taters between 1986-2015 (I picked the number 473 to add Fred McGriff and Carlos Delgado into the conversation).

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Of the 14 players since 1985 who have hit 473 or more taters, Sheffield’s rate of at bats per home run is 2nd to last (to Rafael Palmeiro, whose career was one of long term consistent production and durability aided to an unknown extent by PED’s). Now, to be fair, five of the top six on this chart (McGwire, Bonds, Sosa, Ramirez, A-Rod) have been linked to steroids. Still, we can see that Sheffield’s membership in the 500 home run club is based on longevity and not on being one of the best of his era. In his entire 22-year career, he only finished in the Top 10 of Major League home run hitters three times, never higher than a tie for 7th. Again, yes, there were PED guys hogging up many of those top spots but if you look at the leader boards for all those years on Baseball Reference you’ll see tons of names not named Sheffield and not linked to steroids populating those top 10’s.

In case I haven’t beaten this dead horse enough I’m saying that, in the era where balls flew out of the park faster than any other time in history, being in the 500 home run club is not enough by itself enough to warrant a plaque in Cooperstown.

Of course, being a home run hitter is not the sole criteria upon which to base a Sheffield Hall of Fame candidacy. He was a terrific all-around hitter with exceptional plate discipline (his 1,475 career walks are 11th most in baseball in the last 50 years) and had enough speed to swipe 253 career bases.

If you take the same list of 14 players and rank them by OPS+ Sheffield’s numbers look much better:

(OPS+ values on-base percentage plus slugging percentage on a scale where 100 is league average. For example, an OPS+ of 150 means that the player was 50% above average.  This measure is adjusted for ballpark effects and the overall favorable or unfavorable hitting environments of the year in question.)

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Home runs have great value because they guarantee runs to score but singles, doubles, triples, and walks matter too. Interesting, isn’t it, that the controversial Sosa and Palmeiro occupy the last two positions on this list?

It’s notable here that Sheffield’s career OPS+ is also better than Griffey’s.  Still, with Sheffield, we’re talking about a player who added limited or no defensive value while Junior won 10 Gold Gloves.

Compare, on a shorter different list, Sheffield’s numbers to Delgado’s (who was drummed off the Hall of Fame ballot after garnering just 4% of the vote last year) and McGriff’s (who got 12%):

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These three are all really close in all categories except for some of the “counting” stats (HR, RBI, runs, hits). Again, this is because of nearly 1,000 more plate appearances than McGriff and over 2,000 more than Delgado, whose career ended prematurely at the age of 37 because of hip injuries. Still, as we look at these impressive power numbers, if Delgado is out of the Cooperstown conversation and McGriff on balloting life-support, it’s clear why Sheffield is currently a marginal candidate, hampered additionally by the Mitchell Report factor.

Now, it is absolutely true that long-term durability and sustained excellence is worth a lot when considering a Hall of Fame candidate. It’s also important to to consider how many Hall of Fame quality seasons a player had. Sheffield had eight seasons in which he finished in the top 10 of his league’s MVP voting and eight different campaigns in which he clubbed at least 30 home runs and drove in 100 runs. In the first 95 years of the 21st century, there were a grand total of seven players who had at least eight such 30 HR/100 RBI seasons. Their names were Ruth, Aaron, Mays, Gehrig, Foxx, Killebrew and Schmidt, all obvious Hall of Famers.

But we’ve lived through a different home run hitting environment in the 1990’s and the current century: Sheffield is one of sixteen players who were in the 30 HR/100 RBI club at least eight times since 1990. Delgado did it 9 times. Among the members of this no longer as exclusive club are Mark Teixeira, Vladimir Guerrero, Albert Belle and fellow Cooperstown candidate Jeff Bagwell.

The Sheffield-Guerrero comparison is interesting because Vlad will join Sheff on next year’s ballot.  Here are Guerrero’s and Sheffield’s side by side statistics including WAR.

WAR, like OPS+ is an advanced metric designed to measure all aspects of a player’s ability (hitting, fielding, base-running), adjusted for ballpark effects and the relatively difficult or easier hitting environments of the year in question.

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Not much to choose from, is there?  The home run and RBI advantages for Sheffield, again, are because of nearly 1,900 more plate appearances (the injury-plagued Guerrero was finished after his age 36 season). Sheffield made 11 All-Star teams; Guerrero made 9.  Sheffield came close but never won an MVP trophy; Guerrero won in 2004 with the Angels. Sheffield was poor defensively; Guerrero (early in his career) was a very good defensive right fielder with a cannon for an arm. The fact that their Wins Above Replacement (WAR) are nearly identical despite Sheffield’s longer career is testament to their respective career defensive value.

If I had to pick one or the other, I’d probably lean to Guerrero. But Vlad is not on the current ballot so I’ll go back to the current candidates: if you had to pick between or rank the three on-the-fence outfielder candidates that are on the ballot now (Sheffield, Walker, Edmonds), who do you choose?

Let’s take a look at Larry Walker next. The big right fielder, nicknamed Booger, was born in Maple Ridge, British Columbia and, like most Canadian boys, dreamed of a career in the National Hockey League. Booger was much better at baseball, however, and was signed by Canada’s Montreal Expos in 1984 at the age of 17.

Walker debuted with the Expos in late 1989 and became a full-time player the following year, in his age 23 season. Walker became a star in 1992. He hit .301 with 23 home runs and 93 RBI while making his first All-Star team and winning the first of his seven Gold Gloves. Walker finished 5th in the National League MVP that year. The ’94 Expos team was perhaps the biggest casualty of the devastating players’ strike which wiped out the post-season. With Walker, future Hall of Famer Pedro Martinez, Ken Hill, John Wetteland, Moises Alou and Marquis Grissom leading the way, les Expos finished the shortened regular season with the best record in baseball but never got a chance to showcase their talents in October.

The winter of 1994-95 was in essence the offseason in which baseball in Montreal died. Walker was part of a fire sale which saw him, Grissom, Alou and Wetteland shipped out of town in a cost-cutting purge. The Canadian-born Walker’s career flourished since he was the lucky one who was traded to the hitters’ paradise of Coors Field. After a great Mile High debut in 1995, Walker suffered through an injury-plagued ’96 campaign before his MVP-winning 1997 season. In that MVP season, Walker hit 49 home runs, drove in 130, hit 46 doubles, stole 33 bases and posted a whopping 1.172 OPS, all career highs.

If you rank this year’s Hall of Fame outfield candidates by WAR (Wins Above Replacement), Booger is 3rd behind only Bonds and Griffey.

If you don’t believe in WAR (call me a skeptic who looks at it as a conversation-starter), I’ll break down some more traditional stats below. In any event, here’s the list, ranked by WAR:

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With Bonds a steroid-tainted legend and Griffey a lock for the Hall this year, being third on this list is a nice credential for Walker. Now, it’s easy to reflexively dismiss much of his career as having been fueled by his time in Colorado, which was nearly ten years in duration. But remember that WAR and OPS+ take park effects into consideration so the Mile High effect is supposedly already discounted into these metrics (I’ll explain the qualifier “supposedly” a little later in this piece).

Walker’s WAR is boosted by good base-running and excellent defensive metrics, which say he was an all-time great right fielder and that Sheffield was brutally bad. Being more specific, WAR for hitters is calculated by tallying how much above (or below) average a player is at batting, fielding, base-running, and hitting into double plays with an adjustment made for the importance of the position played. According to Baseball Reference, there are 53 players since 1946 who have played at least 1000 games in right field. Here are the top seven defensive right fielders (plus Sheffield and Hall of Famer Dave Winfield):

Also included: each of these player’s ranks (of the 53 post-1946 right fielders) on hitting, base running and avoidance of double plays (according to WAR). In addition, I’ll show how these men rank with respect to two all-encompassing offensive statistics: OPS+ and Runs Created (an advanced formula started by sabermetric pioneer Bill James and refined by others which is designed to take traditional statistics and calculate the impact on how many runs were created from those actions).

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Before getting to the matter at hand, one thing I found really interesting here is that Sammy Sosa’s best rankings are on defense and NOT on hitting. That’s counter-intuitive considering his crazy power seasons but he was a very good defensive player and perhaps not as magnificent an offensive force (over the entirety of his career) as many would believe.

I’m especially skeptical of advanced defensive metrics because they tend to wildly fluctuate from year to year in ways that don’t meet the eye test. I find it hard to swallow Winfield as the 2nd worst defensive right fielder in the last 70 years. What’s especially damning to Sheffield, last on the list, is that his “defensive runs below average” is twice as low as the next worst (Winfield).

Regarding Walker, having watched him play many games, I think the good defensive rep is warranted but not enough to declare him a Hall of Famer on that basis. Walker deserves credit for having an excellent all-around game: he was well above average at all of the five tools: overall hitting, hitting for power, base running, fielding and throwing.

Now, if you expand “defensive runs below average” metric to include all outfield positions, Walker ranks 20th, which is excellent but behind many non-Hall of Fame players (Barfield, Jimmy Piersall, Paul Blair, Brian Jordan, and Darin Erstad). Sheffield is still last, by the way, behind even Manny Ramirez and Adam Dunn.

So, to me, the case must be primarily an offensive case, with the fielding and base-running components being the cherries on top. Walker’s offensive resume of 383 career home runs, 1,311 RBI, and 2,160 hits would normally not be quite good enough for a Cooperstown plaque but a career .313 batting average, .400 on-base % and .965 slugging % are worthy of very serious consideration.

So to what degree are Walker’s Cooperstown-caliber rate statistics a byproduct of the Colorado effect?  Let’s compare Booger’s home-road splits for the time he spent in the Mile High City:

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Well, there’s a pretty dramatic difference here, methinks. Because we as baseball fans are conditioned to recognize hitting batting average, the .383 batting average at Coors is especially eye-popping over this 10-year period.

There is no such thing as a career .383 hitter. Ty Cobb’s .366 is the best ever for any player with at least 1,000 plate appearances; Ted Williams hit .344 lifetime. Since Williams hit .406 in 1941, only four players have bested .383 for an entire season (Williams, Tony Gwynn, George Brett and Rod Carew).  Four players in 74 years. So .383 is just plain silly.

Walker’s .463 on-base% at Coors Field would be (if sustained throughout his career) 3rd best ever only to Williams and Babe Ruth.

His .713 slugging % at Coors Field (if sustained throughout his career) would be the best ever (Ruth’s career slugging % was .690, the 2nd best ever was Williams’ .634).

These numbers are simply ridiculous, nearly as inauthentic as a barometer of overall worth as Bonds’ 73 home runs or Sosa’s three out of four seasons of 60+ home runs.

Walker’s overall Coors Field average as a member of the Rockies was .384 (the .383 total from 1995-2004 includes two games as a visitor with St. Louis in 2004 in which he went 1 for 8). The .384 average is the best ever for any Rockies player with at least 1,000 plate appearances (2nd best to Jeff Cirillo’s .385 if you apply a smaller standard of 600 plate appearances, the equivalent of a full season).

Using the more relevant number OPS, Walker blows his fellow Coloradans away; his 1.179 OPS as a member of the Rox is more than 100 points higher than the next best player, Matt Holliday (1.068). So it is absolutely undisputed that Larry Walker is the best hitter (by a mile) in the brief history of the Colorado Rockies.

So how do we properly account for this when evaluating his Hall of Fame candidacy? What you’ll see here in the chart below is a hypothetical. I’ve re-calibrated Walker’s career numbers by doubling his road statistics during the 1995-2004 and compared those numbers to his actual career.

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Gulp. This hypothetical career doesn’t look like a Hall of Fame career, seven Gold Gloves or not.

Let’s look at this another way: how did Walker’s road numbers during his years in Colorado compare to the average player in the game. In the table below, you can see Walker’s “rate” statistics in his non-Coors Field games from 1995-2004 compared to the league average in those parks.

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If I’ve lost you now, let me explain the last two rows. Looking at batting average, Walker’s .281 clip in games not played at Coors Field was 16 points better than the league average in all games not played in Denver. The “rank” (61st out of 90) is where Walker ranks for batting average above the league average among the 90 players who posted 4,500 plate appearances during this time period.

In case you’re wondering how a player 16 points above average would rank only 61st out of 90th, remember that any player who earned at least 4,500 times at the plate over a 10 year period had to be, by definition, a reasonably good baseball player and likely to perform above the league norm.

Anyway, the most important metric for a hitter is not batting average, it’s OPS (which combines on-base ability with slugging). In this category, Walker’s road OPS of .905 is a full 148 points above average (which is really good) and 25th best out of those 90 players.  Still, it’s below the numbers posted by Carlos Delgado, Brian Giles, Bobby Abreu, Mo Vaughn and significantly behind fellow Hall of Fame outfield candidates Edmonds and Sheffield.

Still, you could make the argument that his hitting at Coors was so super-humanly spectacular that, despite very good but not great numbers elsewhere, the Mile High dominance Walker showed deserves a Cooperstown plaque. WAR measures Wins Above Replacement, which means: how much better was a player than a replacement player from the highest level of the minor leagues. When you hit .384 in your home games, Coors Field or not, that is way, WAY above a replacement level player.

The Coors effect is one that will continue to fascinate. It’s a ballpark where curveballs go to die since the thin air tends to hamper their bite. In its first seven years, the offensive numbers at Coors were so severely skewed from the rest of baseball that, starting with the 2002 season, the Rockies started storing baseballs in an atmosphere controlled climate (known as a “humidor”) to keep the balls from shrinking, hardening and losing friction in the unique Colorado environment.

The question here is whether Coors Field itself (especially in those first seven years) has a disproportionate benefit to its best hitters, a benefit beyond the expected home-road splits you would normally see.  Has Coors conveyed a Superman impact to its best regular players?  So much about hitting in major league baseball begins with confidence. Any player on the Rockies has to feel more confident hitting in the spacious Coors than they do anywhere else. And, by the same token, Coors has routinely gotten into the heads of visiting pitchers, who sometimes don’t throw their best stuff because they’re not quite sure what to make of the effect of the thin air.

ESPN’s Buster Olney, in a recent column, shared this theory:

The most challenging thing for Colorado hitters in making the adjustment from home to road games — is that they see a completely different caliber of breaking ball when they play in cities outside of Denver, because of the effects of elevation. This would be like a team seeing nothing but 80 mph fastballs in home games, and then the typical 90-92 mph on the road; the transition would be difficult.

— Buster Olney, ESPN, Dec. 28, 2015

To study the invincibility effect that Coors might convey upon it’s hitters, I took a look at the nine key Blake Street Bombers in the franchise’s first 21 years, eight players who posted an OPS of over 1.000 at home (plus Troy Tulowitzki). The chart below shows the home-road splits for OPS for each of nine seven players compared to the league-wide splits.

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The column on the far right of the table (highlighted in green) is the key.

What you can see here is that all nine players outperformed the expected split between their OPS in Denver compared to their OPS elsewhere. For many of these Rockies All-Stars, the difference is eye-popping. Clearly, what Walker did during his time in Denver was spectacular. His home-road split was a full 129 points beyond what you would expect based on the league-wide norms but the average Rockies player (compiled from 21 years of data) outperforms the expected split by 116 points!

What we’ve learned here is that a good offensive player, put into the unique batting environment that is Coors Field, will make more of that advantage than your typical visiting player.  So Walker is clearly the best Rockies hitter in the franchise’s history but his much better than MLB average home-road splits while in Denver are actually normal for a Rockies player. 

So, despite the high WAR and OPS+, I’m not convinced Walker is a Hall of Famer. The Coors effect seems to me to exaggerate a long-time Rockie’s WAR and OPS+ in ways that go beyond the league-wide ballpark factors. Whether it’s the “Superman” effect that boosts the hitters’ confidence or, more likely, that the visiting pitchers simply can’t pitch the way they normally do, the home-road splits for all Rockies players are significantly better than the Coors-non-Coors splits of all of their opponents. I don’t have the supercomputer program to calculate it exactly but that factor has to have boosted Walker’s career OPS+ by several points and his WAR by several wins.

Regarding a Hall of Fame plaque, when you spend nearly ten years in Colorado as a right fielder during the greatest home run era in baseball history and still finish shy of 400 career home runs, I don’t think the rest is quite enough given the strength of competition currently on the ballot. The BBWAA would seem to agree, having conferred just 12% of the vote a year ago. Walker was a terrific player, well above average in all five tools. I think, compared to many others currently enshrined, that Walker is deserving of the honor but I wouldn’t put him in above Sheffield and he’s certainly not in the top 10 of candidates this year.

Now, having dissected Walker’s career, how do we evaluate the Hall of Fame candidacy of Jim Edmonds who, as we saw earlier, had very similar career “counting” stats as Walker but lower “rate” stats due to Walker’s Mile High factor?

James Patrick Edmonds was born in 1970 in Fullerton, California. He grew up a California Angles fan and was drafted by his home-town team in 1988, making his debut in Anaheim in 1993 at the age of 23. Edmonds made his first All-Star team in ’95 and won the first of his eight Gold Gloves in ’97.

It was early in his career that Edmonds became known for his signature diving catches. I can’t remember precisely but he’s probably the player that was responsible for ESPN’s Baseball Tonight creating a segment called “Web Gems.” Edmonds had a way of diving in a way that put his body parallel to the ground with his outstretched glove snaring the baseball with his right arm fully extended.

After an injury-plagued 1999 campaign, Jimmy Baseball was traded to the St. Louis Cardinals and promptly had his best season to that point, hitting 42 home runs to go with 111 RBI, a .994 OPS, another Gold Glove and a 4th place finish in the NL MVP voting.  Edmonds was a Gold Glover in each of his first six seasons in St. Louis and he compiled a superb .989 OPS (translated to 154 OPS+) during those years.

In 2004, Edmonds and Walker became teammates and the pair both participated in their first World Series in what would be a four-game series loss to Boston. Walker retired after the 2005 season while Edmonds enjoyed his first and only World Series title with the Cards in 2006. After the ’06 championship, Edmonds’ career started to decline. He was traded after the 2007 season to the San Diego Padres for future Redbirds’ post-season hero David Freese,

Released by the Padres after a brutally bad start (.178 batting average in 26 games), Edmonds had a mini-renaissance with the Chicago Cubs, posting a .937 OPS and 2.1 WAR in just 85 games. Then, after missing all of 2009, Edmonds finished his career by splitting the 2010 campaign between Milwaukee and Cincinnati.

When you put Edmonds up directly against Walker, their careers are remarkably similar. Here are the numbers.

Career
PA
HR
RBI
Runs
Hits
AVG
OBP
SLG
OPS



Larry Walker
8030
383
1311
1355
2160
.313
.400
.565
.965


Jim Edmonds
7980
393
1199
1251
1949
.284
.376
.527
.903

As we’ve stated ad nauseam, Walker’s numbers are inflated by his years in the Mile High city. So, what I’ve done below is stripped the Coors Field numbers from both Walker and Edmonds and re-calibrated by boosting their non-Coors numbers by the appropriate percentage to give them the same number of games played that they actually had.

In Walker’s case, he played 30% of his career games on Blake Street in Denver, 70% elsewhere. So, to project to an equal number of games, his non-Coors numbers have been multiplied by a factor of 1.429 (the ratio of non-Coors-to-Coors games).

Normalized excluding Coors Field
PA
HR
RBI
Runs
Hits
AVG
OBP
SLG
OPS



Larry Walker
7901
327
1129
1143
1923
.282
.372
.501
.873


Jim Edmonds
7970
387
1189
1244
1945
.284
.375
.524
.899

Looking at it this way, Edmonds was actually the better hitter. This is NOT a hypothetical, all it does is equalize their actual statistics in all ballparks not named Coors. Interesting to know, in his 28 games in Denver, Edmonds posted a 1.149 OPS, just 23 points behind Walker’s mark in 597 games.

Regarding the other aspects of the game, Walker was by far the superior base runner and, advanced defensive metrics say that he was a better right fielder than Edmonds was a center fielder. I’m not sure I would agree with that but it is easy to put too much weight on the highlight-reel catches for which Edmonds is famous. Still, having played a more important defensive position (center field) and been responsible for so many spectacular plays, I think that starts to tip the scale in Edmonds favor when comparing directly to Walker.

What is interesting from a comparative analysis perspective is that the bulk of Edmonds’ productivity as a major leaguer coincides almost exactly with Walker’s years in Colorado. Edmonds became a star in 1995 and had an 11-year peak that consists of the vast majority of his career value. Using WAR for a moment (remembering that it includes defensive metrics, base-running and also a bonus for playing a key position on the defensive spectrum), look at how Edmonds ranks in WAR for that long 11-year period of time.

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As I’ve said many times, WAR is a conversation starter and not to be overused but it’s nice to be #3 (and almost the best) for an 11-year period for players not named Bonds or Rodriguez. There’s no doubt that Jim Edmonds was one of the premier players in baseball at his best and I find it fascinating that he actually hit more home runs and drove in more runs than Walker did while the Canadian was making Colorado his home.

Taking a look strictly at center fielders, Edmonds was clearly right up there with Griffey as the best at his position for this period of time. There were 22 center fielders who amassed 3,000 plate appearances and played at least 60% of their games in center from 1995-2005:

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The reason Edmonds is such a borderline candidate for Cooperstown is that he didn’t have much production in the two years prior or four years after that peak. Griffey, Sheffield and Walker had already enjoyed multiple productive seasons before 1995. Interpret this as you will: I’ll chalk up the superb 11-year run at a premier defensive position as a major plus on the Edmonds resume.

There’s one other key factor here that I haven’t brought up yet: post-season baseball, something that I’ve always felt should garner critical bonus points when viewing the entirety of a player’s career. Edmonds has a superior post-season resume to both Walker and Sheffield. Here are the broad strokes with the statistics:

Post-Season Career
PA
HR
RBI
Runs
AVG
OBP
SLG
OPS



Jim Edmonds
263
13
42
33
.274
.361
.513
.874


Larry Walker
121
7
15
18
.230
.350
.510
.860


Gary Sheffield
202
6
19
27
.248
.401
.398
.799

Obviously, Edmonds had many more opportunities in October than the others since he was a member of the post-season perennials in St. Louis but he delivered in those chances.

Edmonds also has something that Walker and Sheffield lack in October: the signature moment, which was his walk-off 12th inning home run in Game 6 of the 2004 NLCS with the Cardinals facing elimination to the Houston Astros.  You can see it here.  Edmonds added his signature defensive flair to that series in Game 7 with this diving grab of a Brad Ausmus line drive with two runners on base in the 2nd inning. Walker and Edmonds were teammates in 2004 (and 2005); Walker had a really good post-season himself in ’04 (with 6 home runs, 11 RBI) but fell flat in in ’05 (his last major league season), hitting just .107 with only 1 RBI in 28 at bats.

There are several types of careers that make up a Hall of Fame player: some have long, sustained careers and accumulate benchmark career totals (like Ken Griffey Jr.), Others have brief bursts of absolute dominance that overcome a lack of long-term career numbers (Pedro Martinez). Then there are those in between: they didn’t play long enough to reach the gaudy career totals nor did they have the brief window of “best in the sport” which would result in Cy Young or MVP Awards. Sheffield is the former: he had a long productive career. Edmonds and Walker are in the “in between” category. In the first half of the 20th century, a career like their would have eventually resulted in a Hall of Fame speech in Cooperstown. Today the bar has been raised to a much higher level. The PED issue has created a logjam on the ballot that makes it impossible for the really good but not megastar candidates to gain traction. Edmonds, Walker and Sheffield are all borderline candidates; none will likely even gain 15% of the vote this year but would be easy Hall of Famers if the standards of the past were applied.

So, in the end, I would rank the three outfielders discussed here in this order.

1. Gary Sheffield
2. Jim Edmonds
3. Larry Walker

It’s my belief that the long-term body of work produced by Sheffield is a tick above the excellence of the others. It’s not really close offensively, given the long-term view; it’s defense that puts Edmonds and Walker into the same conversation.

These three players are all really, really close. Despite the way I ranked them, if I had to vote this year, I would go with Edmonds over Sheffield on the basis of his superior defense, having played a premium defensive position and the fact that Edmonds doesn’t have the PED link that Sheffield does. There’s another, more practical reason: Sheffield’s and Walker’s Hall of Fame support is already established at over 10%. If I were a voter and could find room on the crowded ballot for this first-timer, I would be inclined to make room to make sure he doesn’t become collateral damage to the 5% rule.

Now, I ultimately think Edmonds and Sheffield are both Hall of Fame players and would (if given the chance) vote for both this year if not limited to choosing ten players. I’m not as sure about Walker. His home-road splits are really severe: they bother me. Just as many players who used PED’s (Bonds, Sosa, etc) have statistics that aren’t authentic, Walker’s near decade in the Mile High City add a lack of authenticity to the totality of his offensive numbers. Would he even be a candidate were it not for his years in Denver? I’m thinking maybe not.

Thanks for reading!

Chris Bodig