Tomorrow is the day that the annual Hall of Fame voting results will be announced and I’m pretty certain Edgar Martinez will be on the outside looking in once more. Martinez garnered an impressive 36.2 percent of votes in his first bid last season, but that’s still a long way from the 75 percent needed to get into Cooperstown.

My ballot had Roberto Alomar, Bert Blyleven, Barry Larkin and Tim Raines on it.

Martinez had a great career and the fact he was a designated hitter doesn’t take anything away from that, nor does it lessen what he meant to the Pacific Northwest. But there’s still a difference between a great career and a Hall of Fame career. Martinez will always be a borderline Hall of Fame case, where there will be compelling arguments both for and against in years to come. I remain open to new arguments in his favor. But just as last year, I can’t see enough to justify giving him my vote.

Yes, the DH thing is a big part of it. Not because it isn’t a baseball position — it clearly is, albeit for only 14 of 30 teams and merely 14 of 284 players listed in the lineups by those teams at any given time.

But having a position does not require somebody from that position to be voted into the Hall of Fame every year, every decade or even every quarter century. Nor does somebody having an award named after them — the DH award carrying Martinez’s name — require automatic entry into the Hall.

The fact that Martinez didn’t get called up until he was 27 also isn’t relevant. The M’s declined to use him over a veteran because he didn’t convince them to. We can agree, or disagree with that call. It’s a tough break. But that’s baseball.

My biggest reservations about Martinez’s candidacy are the things I find voters being asked to overlook when it comes to his merits.

1. We are being asked to overlook his lack of so-called “counting stats”. Clearly, Martinez isn’t even close to traditional Hall measurements for automatic entry, like 3,000 hits or 500 home runs. He barely compiled 300 homers at a position where teams load up with their most powerful guys.

2. We are also being asked to overlook his limited MVP credentials, since we are told that those awards tend to lean towards home run hitters. Part of the problem Martinez will have garnering votes, I think, is the lingering perception he was never even the MVP of his own team. Remember, those teams included Ken Griffey Jr., Alex Rodriguez and Ichiro, so that’s some pretty tough company. But the Hall is all about hanging with such company.

3. Here’s what I am having the most trouble trying to overlook: the likely boost to Martinez’s number of seasons and games played and offensive numbers garnered by not having to play the field day-in, day-out, the way most of his contemporaries did.

Some say Martinez should get in because many hitters have trouble adjusting to the DH job while he excelled. That’s true, some do struggle. But the ones who go on to make a career as a DH are usually pretty good. Those are the only ones I care about in a Hall of Fame discussion, no matter how few there are.

Relief pitchers are in a similar boat. The vast majority of relief pitchers aren’t good enough to close games out in the ninth inning. But that doesn’t mean we automatically give a Hall of Fame nod to any closer who becomes eligible. Even the pioneer closers, or best of their era don’t always make it. Just ask Lee Smith.

In the end, relievers as a group are compared to all pitchers in Cy Young Award and Hall of Fame voting and every once in a while, a really good closer breaks on through by doing something historic. But it doesn’t happen often, mainly because starting pitchers as a group are viewed as more valuable in baseball and are asked to do more for longer. I happen to think the same judgment system should apply to a DH, where they are scrutinized more critically as a group compared to the wider body of hitters because they do less. They don’t play the field every day. And even if one guy happens to be the best DH of his era, it shouldn’t automatically mean inclusion in the Hall.

The fact is, prior to his being made a permanent DH in 1995, Martinez was appearing in fewer games due to injury. He played only 131 games combined in 1993 and 1994, primarily as a third baseman.

In baseball, the more you play the field, the more prone you are to injury. You dive for balls, get hit by them, get slid into by runners, and also leave your muscles vulnerable by having to explode from a standing spot when a hitter connects. The wear and tear on a body over a 162-game season can take its toll just as much as crashing into a wall on any one play can. Your knees wear down big-time, especially on the type of artificial surface found at the Kingdome. Ask Griffey.

Martinez got to avoid all of this during his years as a DH. So, how much worse off would his offensive numbers have been if forced to continue playing a third base position that was banging him up prior to 1995? Would he still have gone on to play more than 140 games per season? Would he still be a career .312 hitter with a .418 on-base percentage, a .515 slugging percentage and a .933 on-base-plus-slugging percentage (OPS)? Or would he have drifted down just far enough to make this whole debate moot?

Better yet, if the majority of elite hitters Martinez is being compared to were given the same advantages to reduce long-term wear on their bodies, how much higher would the bar be set for Hall of Fame inclusion? Would a .400 on-base-percentage be a lot more commonplace? Might the 500-homer “minimum” for Cooperstown be upped to 600? Who knows? Griffey might have hit his 800th homer last year if he didn’t have to spend much of the past decade sidelined by injuries sustained playing the outfield.

I think it’s an important question. I’ve seen stats from Martinez supporters that show he had the 13th best on-base percentage all-time amongst players with at least 8,000 plate appearances. That’s impressive. I’m not here to denigrate the accomplishment, believe me. But what the stat doesn’t tell you is that the 12 other guys ahead of him — and many right behind — all played the field for up to nine innings per night. Would Martinez still be 13th on the list if all those other players got to limit their nightly activities to hitting only? Or would many of them have added even more years to careers, making the 8,000 plate-appearance threshold being used to support Martinez’s bid seem rather low?

This isn’t about his WAR (Wins Above Replacement) value as a fielder. Even if WAR was totally reliable in judging a fielder’s value (which it isn’t, because they’re still working out kinks in new defensive metrics), I’m not suggesting Martinez would have been so bad with the glove that it would have significantly lowered his overall worth.

No, this argument is strictly about Martinez not having to lug his body out on to the field night after night for nine innings the way most of his peers did. Whether he would have played good defense or bad isn’t really the issue. Somebody has to man positions for teams every night — whether they are good or bad at it — for games to be played. But Martinez was exempted from that physically-demanding duty.

I know his offensive WAR is very high from an historical perspective. But I also believe that Martinez’s numbers need to be extraordinary as a starting point just to consider his Cooperstown candidacy because his only job in a game was to hit. And the expectations of him should automatically be higher because his body was not being put through the same rigors as his contemporaries.

It’s because of those high numbers that I’m sitting here considering him. Believe me, I’m not shrugging him off. He got more than a third of the votes last year, so he’s hardly being treated like a fringe guy.

But now comes the added scrutiny needed because of the DH stuff. And the real question voters are struggling to answer: did Martinez do what he did for a long enough period that we can forget his lack of “counting” stats (hitting milestones reached)?

Unfortunately, we don’t have a clear-cut barometer for these things. Should the excellence be maintained over 10 years? 15 years? 20 years? We don’t have the answer. Traditionally, we have relied on the “counting stats” like career home runs, hits, RBI and runs scored to give us a clue.

If Martinez had 500 homers or 3,000 hits, he’d probably get in easily. Paul Molitor played more than half his games as a DH, but got in the Hall because he logged 3,319 hits — the ninth most all-time. Frank Thomas will likely be a first-ballot Hall of Famer, despite lengthy DH service, because he hit 521 homers. What these “counting stats” do is help eliminate the argument that a guy was only “Cooperstown great” for a relatively brief segment of their career. You don’t get to 3,000 hits or 500 homers by playing six exceptional seasons. Or eight. We’re not talking Dave Kingman here, either. Most of the guys voted in to the Hall have the other stats to go with their counting stat milestones.

But Martinez just doesn’t have the counting stats. He’s not even close. We are being asked to make an exception in his case, while we’re already overlooking the fact he didn’t play the field like most of his contemporaries.

We are asked to look at his “rate” stats — his career batting average, on-base percentage and slugging percentage. All are highly impressive. But the question becomes: did Martinez post his .312 average, .413 OBP and .515 slugging over a long enough period? And that’s the problem with his candidacy. He’s right on the border.

The best argument I’ve seen for Martinez to-date, the one that’s truly made me stop and think over the past year, comes near the bottom of this ESPN.com column. It states that Martinez’s park-adjusted OPS+ was at 150 or greater in eight different seasons. That means he was 50 percent better than his peers in those seasons. Most others with such stats are in the Hall or headed there soon.

But let’s examine that a bit further.

First, let’s ask the question: how many 150 OPS+ seasons would Martinez have had if put through the same daily rigors as those other Hall of Fame players? How would his body have held up? Can you really compare Martinez with Mickey Mantle when the latter was sprinting and diving all over the outfield in between putting up his offensive numbers? It’s just not the same thing. Even if both had at least eight seasons of an OPS+ of 150 or greater.

Second, let’s start comparing apples to apples by looking the significance of Martinez’s eight seasons of 150 OPS+ when compared to actual Hall of Famers. Because in many cases, the rate stats posted by Martinez simply don’t stack up as well as you might think. To me, this “eight-season” thing seems rather arbitrary, a creative way for some people to slip him on to a list of Hall of Fame names where he’s clearly outgunned when you dig beneath the surface.

Photo Credit: AP

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