Nomar Garciaparra: Four Years a Hall of Famer

The Hall of Fame voting was revealed last week. Maybe you heard the shouting. There’s nothing that brings out some good internet shouting like the Baseball Hall of Fame. Pretty strange when you think about it. People don’t typically freak out over museums or old baseball players, but put them together and things get all crazy like a conversation about sandwiches on the internet up in here. Watch the heck out!

But with regard to the voting. As it turns out, two players were voted in, both deserving, and one other specific player, Nomar Garciaparra, was not elected. Because he was not deserving. But oh, he could have been because, oh, what could have been! Garciaparra — a name I just had to force my computer to learn due to it inexplicably and repeatedly trying to change it into “Garcia parrot” — received just 1.8% of the vote. By rule, players receiving less than 5% of the vote are dropped from the ballot.

So. This is it. Nomar is officially not a Hall of Famer, meaning he’s officially not as good as Derek Jeter. The day much of South Boston literally believed would never come has come. But that doesn’t mean Nomar wasn’t Hall of Fame-good. He was. Just not for long enough.

His career was like a plane passing in the night, only it was a jet plane and the night lasted for years. The peak seasons came from 1997 through 2000 when Nomar was worth a total of 27.6 WAR. We can’t say what would have happened had he stayed healthy, but it seems logical to guess based on his age, that his peak might have extended another season, maybe longer. But in 2001, on the heels of hitting .372, Garciaparra’s wrist began acting up during spring training. It’s unclear when the original injury occurred but the result was wrist surgery in April of 2001. We know wrist surgery can mess a player up for a long while, and though Nomar came back and played 21 games in 2001, he wasn’t the same guy. Over the next two seasons, 2002 and 2003, he recorded a 4.8 and 5.8 WAR, respectively. Quite good, but even so, he was never really the same player again. The insane bat-to-ball skills were just a tad diminished, and that was enough to turn him from a Hall of Famer into a plane old ordinary good player.

For that four-year run, Garciaparra hit .337/.386/.577 with 113 home runs. That includes his age-23 and -24 seasons, but it was his age-25 and -26 seasons where he really shined. That’s when he hit a combined .365/.426/.601, including the aforementioned .372 batting average in 2000. All this is known or can be learned from a simple glance at Nomar’s player page. The point is, Nomar played those seasons at a Hall of Fame level. But no player gets in based on four seasons’ worth of production — nor are we likely to see consecutive 20 WAR seasons in the near future — but a seven-win average over four years is damn impressive. Keep that up and you’ll be the subject of internet yelling five years after your career ends. Nomar made it to the second ballot, which, as it turns out, is something.

Garciaparra’s body of work before his body gave out on him in 2004 was fantastic. How fantastic? Marc Normandin at Over the Monster found that, from his rookie campaign in 1997 through his age-29 season in 2003, Garciaparra recorded 41 WAR (Baseball Reference version) which ranks 43rd all time for total WAR by hitters between those ages. Nomar ranks ahead of Hall of Famers Andre Dawson, Eddie Murray, Robin Yount, Ted Williams, the newly inducted Mike Piazza, and yes, one Derek Sanderson* Jeter. Of those 200 players, 23 are designated as shortstops. Nomar is fifth among that group, behind only Cal Ripken, Arky Vaughan, Alex Rodriguez, and Ernie Banks.

*It would be funnier if his middle name were Ampersand, but sadly I wasn’t consulted on this. 

That’s the company with which Garciaparra was running even after his wrist injury. That’s a Hall of Fame trajectory, folks — and for a significant, if ultimately insufficient, period of time. Jay Jaffe of Sports Illustrated corroborates this finding with his JAWS system where he found Garciaparra’s peak to be above average for a Hall of Fame shortstop. Nomar passed the peak test for a Hall of Famer, but injuries robbed him of his chance to pass the career duration test.

That’s not to say Garciaparra was treated unfairly by the baseball gods. Sports are physical activities and physical activities, as anyone who has run long distance, lifted weights, or even been to a trampoline gymnasium can attest to, can lead to injuries. Sometimes pushing your body past it’s breaking point is what an athlete must do to be successful. It’s one of those Faustian bargains you have to make.

Thing is, I’m not so sure not missing the Hall and falling off the ballot diminish Garciaparra at all. He is the marathon runner who was leading the pack going into mile 15 before tripping over a paper water cup and breaking his… well, wrist. You don’t win a medal for that. You don’t win anything, in fact. They don’t even give you a certificate saying “Be More Careful Next Time, Klutz” in calligraphy. But you know and the crowd knows what they saw, and they saw you leading the race and for a long time, and showing no signs of stopping. Sometimes, even if that’s not enough, that’s enough. Nomar wasn’t a Hall of Fame player end the end, but while he was on the field he was a Hall of Fame-level player.

When Garciaparra was cutting up the league and dealing with nightly “NOMAH!” chants at Fenway Park (and anywhere else he happened to appear in the Boston area), he was regarded as a Hall of Famer. Heck, he wasn’t just a run-of-the-mill Hall of Famer, either. He was Ted Williams. We know because Ted Williams himself told us so. The fact that Garciaparra’s quest ended this week in the fashion we all knew it would for the last decade does not dim the luminescence of what he accomplished during his peak or his career. Plaque or not, for four years Nomar was as good as a Hall of Famer, even if, after this week’s results, he’ll never be one.