Ultimate Mariner was always class act

The microphone hadn’t cooled from Edgar Martinez’s retirement announcement Monday afternoon and already the Hall of Fame debate was under way.

Should he be in or shouldn’t he?

Egad. Another high-speed chase to the irrelevant.

Edgar Martinez has long been a member of the Hall of Decency, the Hall of Toughest Out with Two Strikes (Pre-40-year-old Division), the Hall of Clubhouse Veneration, the Hall of I’m Staying Even When the Other Big Names Have Bailed, the Hall of Giving the Yankees a Sandpaper Wedgie, the Hall of Quiet Dignity, the Hall of Best TV Commercial Character Ever, the Hall of Regional Treasures and the Hall of Consummate Professionalism – all of which are more exclusive than the damned Baseball Hall of Fame.

And if they’re going to induct guys who pitch an inning at a time in maybe 38 percent of their teams’ games or lifetime .260 hitters then, yeah, Edgar Martinez should be in the Hall of Fame, too.

Who are they bothering to keep out these days?

Whatever votes he manages to coax from the anal-retentive gatekeepers of baseball’s little Guggenheim, Edgar Martinez got yours years ago – a significance too often lost on the sport’s drones and shills. Without the honest bonds forged in neighborhood ballparks, without a bleacherite being able to pick out at least one favorite and stick with him without free agency ever getting in the way, then the ESPN goobers never get to practice yelling their annoying home run catchphrases in our ears and Bud Selig has to stop extorting new stadiums from helpless citizens.

Baseball is Edgar Martinez and you. Really, that’s what it is.

So while it’s no great surprise that he gave the Seattle Mariners his two-month notice on Monday, there is already a void and he’s still here. Imagine how weird it will be to turn on the TV next spring knowing Edgar’s doing the same thing at his house.

When the M’s let leak word that Martinez would be having an afternoon press conference, the subject was a foregone conclusion. The only issue was whether the resignation would be immediate – unlikely, given his record of service – or at season’s end. A few news outlets rushed to report the latter, rationalizing that he was miffed over the club’s recent jettisoning of first baseman John Olerud, the stolid statesman at the opposite end of the Safeco locker room – to say nothing of his own dwindling at-bats with the call-up of Bucky Jacobson, who has become the Seattle fan’s John Daly without the vices.

But what would be the point of recriminations after 22 years in the organization? Surely there are plenty of those going around as it is.

Failure was a shared responsibility in Seattle this season, and like Olerud before him, Martinez stood up.

“We haven’t been able to perform the way we expected,” he said, “and I haven’t been able to perform the way I expected. Both things have made this season tough.”

Martinez insisted he “never saw it coming,” meaning the team implosion – the bats that took ill, the bullpen that took on water, the baserunning that took on the look of a Marx Brothers movie. He, like most everyone else, bought into past performance and didn’t figure everyone would get old at the same time.

As for himself, he was a little less romantic.

“I guess, personally, I was prepared for failure in some ways,” he said. “I felt I could do it, but I always knew mentally that there’s a possibility you could have a bad season. Not that I would dwell on that, but I consider myself to be a realistic person. That can happen to anyone, especially at my age.

“But it was harder for me to see the team going in the direction it’s gone this year.”

Yet this is more an ordinary season than outright bad – except that for Martinez, ordinary is bad. When he’s been healthy, he’s never had an ordinary season – not since he joined the lineup as a regular in 1990, or probably about two years late, the M’s clinging to the faith that third baseman Jim Presley was going to get to those low-and-away fastballs if he just kept swinging often enough.

The fact is, that too-late start – he was already 27 – and the three injury-interrupted seasons probably cost him more than 500 hits, which would put his career total close to 2,800 with a .312 average, and making that Hall of Fame argument into even more of a hair-splitter.

Naturally, to the M’s, it’s not an argument at all.

“Whenever players would talk about the best left-handed hitters in the game, it was a debate – Brett or Mattingly or Boggs or Griffey,” said M’s manager Bob Melvin, who had to pitch-plan against Martinez more often than he wanted to as an opposing catcher. “Right-handed, it was always Edgar – to a man.”

Who from that side of the plate was as feared, during the years of his prime (1992-2001)? Frank Thomas for certain. Mike Piazza, Juan Gonzalez and Manny Ramirez have all been able to combine power and average, yet none has the “pure hitter” reputation Martinez shared with the likes of George Brett and Tony Gwynn.

Mariners fans reveled in every hit, of course, but the relationship obviously went deeper. His stardom allowed them a small window into his impeccable values, and his delivery in the hardware ads and You-Gotta-Love-These-Guys commercials only made them love him more.

And, of course, there was the fact that he never left. Not when Randy Johnson tanked his way out of town, when Ken Griffey Jr. sulked his way out and when Alex Rodriguez slicked his way out.

“We always just felt,” he said, speaking for himself and wife Holli, “this was the perfect place to be.”

It was never more perfect than the night of Oct. 8, 1995, when he smacked Jack McDowell’s fastball down the right field line and Griffey churned home with the run that gored the Yankees in the ALCS. In Northwest sports, it remains the signature goosebump moment.

Let’s not forget another. Last year, when the M’s were playing themselves out of the playoffs, former general manager Pat Gillick grumpily ordered departure of the team bus to the Anaheim airport moved up. The man who did nothing but take a number and wait at the trade deadline as other teams were trying to improve themselves felt the M’s had gone through the motions in a loss to the Angels.

“Hey, we’ve been busting our asses all year,” Martinez told Gillick firmly, speaking up for his teammates for all in the clubhouse to hear. “We don’t need this.”

The bus left at the originally designated time. Guess you’d call that Hall of Fame respect.