Colorado Rockies: Larry Walker belongs in the Hall of Fame

Why Larry Walker should but won’t get it

Larry Walker’s 17-year career is absolutely Hall of Fame worthy, at least going by the numbers. As you saw at the start of the first slide, his career WAR is exactly that of an average HoF right fielder.

Sure, about 60% of his at-bats were taken as a Rockie and roughly 30% at Coors Field, the place where baseballs tend to travel much more favorable for home run hitting sluggers. But even without his numbers at Coors Field, Walker is still a .282 hitter who gets on base at a 37% clip.

The problem is, Walker currently owns the third-largest home/road OPS gap… ever. Around this time last year, FanGraphs’ Jay Jaffe wrote up a piece on Walker and illustrated just how large his splits are: throughout Walker’s entire career, he owns a .203 differential in OPS, or a 1.068 OPS at home and a .865 OPS on the road. Only Chuck Klein (1928-44) and Bobby Doer (1937-51) have larger differentials, though both players are in the HoF.

Although, Jaffe goes on to look at Walker’s OPS+ (a park-adjusted version of OPS), and the former MVP’s 141 OPS+ is tied for 43rd all-time with David Ortiz and Hall of Famer Chipper Jones. The Coors Effect is there, but it’s not as if Walker ONLY benefited from the Rocky Mountains.

Currently, Walker’s 72.7 WAR is the 11th-most WAR by any right fielder ever, and he’s ahead of 15 HoF right fielders right now. If that’s not enough to illustrate that he belongs than nothing can.

But to continue with this good-then-bad analysis, the truth is Walker has struggled with the voters. After starting on the ballot in 2011 at 20.3%, he fell into the teens for several years (even as low as 10.2% in 2014). However, thanks to a growing appreciation of advanced stats and more education regarding the Coors Effect, Walker has benefited from a bit of a surge — he experienced an increase of 20.5%, putting him much closer to the threshold, at 54.6%.

The bad news… this is, of course, is Walker’s final year on the ballot, meaning he needs to almost exactly repeat his gains from this past year, an almost impossible feat to accomplish. According to Jaffe’s recently released piece on Walker’s HoF bid, if Walker were to cross the 75% threshold in 2020, it would be the second-largest two-year gain since 1966 (by Luis Aparicio, who gained 42.7% from 1982-84). The chances are certainly slim.

Although when going by The Bill James Hall of Fame Monitor — a metric that scores players’ career, with 100 resulting in a score favorable for HoF induction — Larry Walker seems like a lock, scoring a solid 148. Although, the metric wasn’t designed to account for the effects of Coors Field.