His home province of British Columbia is sure proud of him, and so are baseball fans all across Canada. To celebrate Maple Ridge, B.C., native Larry Walker becoming the first Canadian position player to be elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, we will be running a series of tribute articles from many who have known and been inspired by him - including former teammates, managers, coaches and even his dad - leading up to the September 8 ceremony. We will also be publishing tributes to Walker's fellow 2020 inductees Derek Jeter, Ted Simmons and Marvin Miller.

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Larry Walker’s on Larry Walker, Jr. ||||| Steve Rogers on Marvin Miller

Clint Hurdle on Larry Walker IIIII Mario Ziino on Ted Simmons

Stubby Clapp on Larry Walker IIIII Buck Showalter on Derek Jeter

Gene Glynn on Larry Walker IIIII “The Legend” Dick Groch signed Jeter

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August 27, 2021

By Allan Simpson

If Larry Walker had to wait 10 long years to be elected to Baseball’s Hall of Fame and his actual enshrinement in Cooperstown was delayed another 14 months, it only seemed appropriate.

In many respects, Walker was something of a Johnny-Come-Lately to baseball.

Growing up in Maple Ridge, a suburb of Vancouver, Walker’s passion was always hockey, and he took up baseball in earnest only when his career ambition to play in the NHL fizzled. Even as he was billed as the greatest Canadian-born prospect ever to play for the Montreal Expos and largely fulfilled those expectations in a six-year career with the club, Walker never truly established himself as a Hall of Fame worthy candidate until he left Canada and blossomed into a legitimate star over the course of a spectacular nine-year run with the Colorado Rockies.

In the process of becoming just the second Canadian ever saluted in Cooperstown, Walker hit .313 with 383 home runs, while also stealing 230 bases over his 17-year major-league career. He undoubtedly would have enhanced those numbers had he not spent 10 stints on the disabled list—a reflection of his all-out, hell-bent style of play. As it was, he won three batting titles—all as a member of the Rockies—and seven Gold Glove Awards for defensive excellence.

By all rights, Walker defined a five-tool ball player, but he was more than that as he also earned acclaim throughout his career for his superior athleticism, uncanny base-running and fielding instincts, and deft bat-handling skills.

Yet for all he accomplished on the diamond and the recognition that has come his way, the ebullient Walker would just as soon be inducted this year in the Hockey Hall of Fame, if he had his druthers, and not so much baseball’s place of honour.

Hockey was Walker’s sport of choice as a teenager, and he has maintained a lifelong passion for Canada’s game. From the beginning, he had designs on following in the footsteps of his older brother Carey, a goaltender who was drafted in 1977 by the Montreal Canadiens and spent four years playing professional hockey, though never made it to the NHL. Walker also played street hockey alongside long-time NHLer Cam Neely in his Maple Ridge neighbourhood and idolized goalie Billy Smith, who led the New York Islanders to four consecutive Stanley Cup championships.

As a rising goalie himself, Walker attended the training camp of the Western Hockey League’s Regina Pats as both a 15- and 16-year-old. On both occasions, he was the odd man out.

“They kept two goalies,” Walker said, “and I was the third one each year.”

Somewhat disillusioned by that experience, Walker returned home to Maple Ridge with a renewed focus on playing a different sport.

“I made up my mind about baseball,” he said, “right after I didn’t make it with the Pats.”

Though he had played in the Maple Ridge Minor Baseball Association since he was 11, playing mostly for his father, Larry Sr., a left-handed pitcher who had a brief fling in pro ball in the mid-50s with the Vancouver Capilanos of the Class A Western International League, he only ever played a handful of games each spring and summer because of the typical abbreviated schedule afforded Canadian youngsters.

He also never played baseball in high school because it was not offered as an interscholastic sport. If anything, Walker focused his attention on playing volleyball at Maple Ridge High School, while pursuing hockey more vigorously as an outside activity.

Walker never displayed much more than a passing interest in baseball as the popularity of the sport in Canada during his formative years had yet to ascend to the heights it rose to in the early 1990s, when the Toronto Blue Jays won consecutive World Series titles—or even when an aspiring Walker, coincidentally, was developing a significant following while cutting his teeth with the Expos.

The closest he really came to embracing baseball was playing fast-pitch softball on a local team coached by his father that also included Walker’s three older brothers, all athletes of some form or another.

“I played more fast-pitch than I did baseball,” Walker said. “Nobody ever played baseball thinking about making the major leagues."

*

Walker’s path to baseball stardom began in the summer of 1984, upon graduation from high school. As an unfulfilled 17-year-old, he was determined to play a faster brand of baseball than he had ever been exposed to and hooked on with the Coquitlam Reds, a nearby team composed of some of the top 16-18-year-olds from the Greater Vancouver area. Despite his relative lack of experience, he quickly settled in as the team’s shortstop and began spreading his wings.

Through the course of playing with the Reds, Walker stood out sufficiently that he was afforded an opportunity to attend a tryout for the Canadian Junior National Team that would participate in the World Junior Championship in Kindersley, Sask., in the latter part of July. He not only made the team but was installed as the starting shortstop.

In Canada’s opening game at the 10-team event, the eventual champion United States won 8-1 as future big leaguer Jack McDowell struck out Walker, Canada’s cleanup hitter, four times in a row.

Jim Ridley, a Canadian-based Blue Jays scout, served as the head coach for the Canadian entry, and didn’t pay much more than a passing interest in the left-handed-hitting Walker as most of his focus was on another 17-year-old shortstop, Cuba’s brilliant Omar Linares. “He’s the best player here,” Ridley said, matter-of-factly. “That boy’s one year away from being in the major leagues.”

Jim Fanning, then the director of scouting for the Expos, was also in attendance at the tournament. Fanning was there at the insistence of the team’s Western Canada scout, Bob Rogers, who got a glimpse of Walker’s offensive upside prior to the tournament and insisted that Fanning come to Kindersley to get a first-hand look.

Though Fanning was not enamoured with Walker’s glove work or his other undeveloped skills, he was sufficiently intrigued with his explosive bat, especially when Walker drilled a home run using wood while other players in the tournament were typically swinging aluminum.

“He hit a long, long home run,” Fanning said, “and I saw enough of him in a couple of games to tell Rogers to sign him.”

In their 15th year of existence, the Expos had never had a native-born everyday player—especially someone who a city, and even a nation could rally around. There was little to no indication that the raw, unskilled Walker might ever become that player.

While Canadians weren’t eligible for the baseball draft at the time, they could be signed as free agents on the open market. Yet even as Rogers liked Walker’s bat and overall athleticism and had Fanning’s blessing to sign him, Rogers had concerns that Walker was maybe just a little too raw in terms of his overall baseball development. So, based on his hot-and-cold performance in Kindersley, Rogers made little effort to try and get him under contract.

He needed to see Walker one more time in another tournament setting to become convinced he was worthy, and Rogers got the chance a few weeks later, over the Labor Day weekend, at the annual Grand Forks (B.C.) Invitational Tournament. Playing mostly against U.S. college players, Walker had a breakout tournament, especially with the bat but he also flashed impressive raw speed and arm strength.

While he was now convinced that Walker was the real deal, Rogers knew he was the only scout in attendance in Grand Forks, so he determined there was no real urgency on his part to get him under contract. It took him until Nov. 14—more than two months later—to officially sign Walker. The signing bonus? A mere $1,500.

In a story a few days later in the Vancouver Sun that documented the rare signing of a home-grown player, Rogers commented on Walker from his home in Portland, Ore. “He has a number of tools,” Rogers said. “He can swing the bat, he’s a better than average runner, he has good size, desire . . . he has a temper problem but all kids his age do. He wants to play. That’s a large part of the battle. He will be a babe in the woods at Expos camp. But I’m not worried about him. He’s very mature for his age. He can handle himself.”

With high-school graduation behind him and little interest on Walker’s part in pursuing a baseball career at a U.S. college, he had gone to work that fall at a bowling alley in Maple Ridge.

“I cooked burgers, chased pins, everything,” he said.

An offer to sign a contract with the Expos was practically the last thing he anticipated.

“It was a complete surprise when Rogers phoned. I knew the Blue Jays were looking at me for a while, and while I knew there were scouts in Kindersley, I didn’t know anybody was there to watch me. I didn’t have a clue that (Fanning) was even there and was following me, too.”

On the prospects of playing pro ball, Walker was largely unprepared for the task.

“I had no idea what I was getting into,” he said in an autobiography, Canadian Rocky, written by Tony DeMarco. “I was just going to go and have fun, as far as I was concerned.”

Walker attended his first training camp with the Expos the next spring in West Palm Beach, Fla., and it was clear from the outset that the pitching he faced was a mystery to him. He swung indiscriminately, expecting every pitch to be a fastball.

“My approach to hitting,” Walker said, “was, ‘Guy throws the ball, I try to hit it. If I hit it, I run.’ But the hard part was hitting something with a wrinkle in it.”

Walker stuck around West Palm Beach once spring training ended and continued working out on the side with the Expos’ high Class A club in the Florida State League until the short-season Class A New York-Penn League began play in mid-June. It was anticipated that Walker would be assigned to the Expos’ farm club at Jamestown, N.Y., along with others from extended spring training and most of Montreal’s top picks from the 1985 draft.

Instead, Walker was one of six Expos farmhands assigned to a co-op entry in the same league at Utica, N.Y., where he was joined by an amalgam of castoffs from other organizations. The Expos simply didn’t have room for him on the Jamestown roster, or any of their four farm clubs. No matter, most players in the New York-Penn League came from college backgrounds or had previous professional experience, so Walker’s first venture into professional baseball figured to be a challenging one.

“It was quite a change for me to go there,” Walker said. “All of a sudden, I was playing in big parks and going against pitchers who threw curveballs that were breaking. I’d never seen a forkball, never seen a slider. I didn’t know they existed.”

Not surprisingly, Walker struggled in all phases of his game in his professional debut. In 62 games, he hit just .223 with two homers and 26 RBIs; he had little command of the strike zone as he drew just 18 walks while striking out 57 times.

He also had a tough adjustment in the field, and on the bases.

“I remember one game,” said Gene Glynn, a coach at Utica. “We had a hit-and-run on. Larry was running on the pitch and the hitter swung. Larry came around second base and I’m coaching third, yelling at him to get back to first because the batter lined out. All of a sudden, he cuts across the infield, goes over the mound and gets back to first. The umpire calls him out and Larry gets in an argument. He couldn’t understand why he was out when he beat the throw. I knew we had a few things to work on with him.”

Ken Brett, the older brother of Hall of Famer George Brett, was Walker’s first manager and even as he acknowledged that Walker needed a lot of repetitions in addition to mastering some of the game’s basic rules, he was impressed with Walker’s superior athleticism, impressive hand-eye coordination and tough mental approach.

“He was as fast a learner as I’ve ever seen,” said Glynn, who went on to become a major-league coach. “He never made the same mistake twice.”

Defensively, Walker divided his time at Utica between first base, third base and the outfield, but struggled learning the nuances of each position. He was even knocked unconscious by a line drive at the hot corner.

“After my first year at Utica,” Walker said, “it didn’t look too promising. I still didn’t know much about the game. The U.S. kids were so far ahead.”

Fanning acknowledged as much in a Canadian Press story a year later.

“He was raw and green,” Fanning said, “and he didn’t exactly tear the league up.”

Though Walker struggled in his introduction to professional baseball, he soon began opening the eyes of Montreal’s development staff, in particular Ralph Rowe, the team’s minor league hitting instructor, when the club invited Walker to participate in the Expos instructional league camp that fall. Walker worked diligently with Rowe on his hitting mechanics and soaked up all the instruction that was available to him.

Rowe, in turn, was so impressed with Walker’s potential upside at the plate that he uttered to other staff members, “nobody mess with this boy’s swing.”

“Larry hadn’t played that much baseball,” Rowe told the Palm Beach Post, “and sometimes that’s good. A lot of kids have played the game all their lives and it’s hard to get them to change some of their bad habits. He developed a quick, powerful swing. Maybe in another year we’ll start working on cutting down on his strikeouts after he learns a little more about hitting.”

Walker’s big breakthrough came during the 1986 season. When he reported to his second Expos camp that spring, he was bigger and stronger, and much better prepared for the task at hand. In particular, he had developed a resolve to become the best ball player he could be.

“I was smart enough to listen to my coaches, and I worked hard in practice,” he said. “I knew very little. I had everything to gain. I had a lot to learn but I ate it all up.”

At Class A Burlington, he started the season still playing third base, but after committing eight errors in 26 games, he was shifted to left field as it had become apparent that his raw speed and arm strength were better utilized there. The position switch coincided with a visit by Bob Gebhard, the Expos farm director, who also happened to spot a flaw in Walker’s set-up at the plate.

“He was standing too far from the plate,” Gebhard said, “trying to pull balls he couldn’t reach.”

With that adjustment and no longer encumbered by the demands of playing in the infield, Walker immediately went on an offensive tear. After 60 games, he was hitting .335 while leading the Midwest League with 20 homers and 51 RBIs. He wasn’t just hitting home runs, either, but titanic blasts and he even went deep three times in one game.

“At first, I didn’t want to go out there,” he said. “But as soon as I moved to the outfield, my average went up 30 points because the added pressure (of playing infield) was taken off my shoulders.”

Before long, word began filtering back to Canada and circulating throughout the Montreal organization that the Expos had a legitimate Canadian-born star on the horizon—even as Walker, somewhat amazingly, had little more than a year of practical baseball experience under his belt.

“To do what he’s doing at 19,” said Fanning, then the Expos director of player development, “that’s the kind of productivity that takes you to the majors. We’re only talking facts, but he’s way ahead of what (Gary) Carter and (Ellis) Valentine did at his age. We don’t like to puff our players and build them up unnecessarily, but you can’t deny this kid. He’s the best offensive Canadian player we’ve signed in my 18 years here.”

Walker eventually cooled off and hit .288 with 29 homers in 95 games on the season at Burlington, but he was rewarded with a late-season call-up to West Palm Beach, where he hit .288 with four homers over the final 38 games. That was plenty of time for Felipe Alou, the West Palm Beach manager, to get his first extended look at the young slugger.

"If he keeps improving the way he has the last 12 months,” Alou said, “there's no telling what he could do. Anybody who can hit a fastball the way he can, can make a lot of money in this game. You have a kid with his kind of potential, they don't last long in the minor leagues. I know being from Canada, the Expos would like for him to make it up to the big leagues quick. He would be quite an attraction.”

Even as Walker struck out a combined 144 times in his first full season in the minors, there was little real concern among Expos officials or scouts. They raved about his textbook swing and acknowledged that he actually made good contact when he didn’t try and drive balls 500 feet, as was often his wont. Moreover, with his first full pro season under his belt, Walker had made so much progress as a hitter that he was no longer helpless against left-handed pitching or when facing a steady diet of breaking balls.

The next aspect of his game that needed refining was his outfield play and Walker was right back in instructional league in the fall of 1986 on a mission to refine that area. By all indications, he succeeded.

“His outfield work improved during instructional league almost as much as his hitting did last year,” said Junior Miner, who managed Walker at Burlington and served as an instructor at the West Palm Beach camp. “He proved to everyone that he’ll be able to at least play left field.”

With the strides he made, Miner believed Walker might eventually become a candidate one day for right field, or even centre field.

“Considering he never really had any instruction before (signing),” Miner said, “he was really surprisingly good. But he’s a great athlete and was one of the best pupils we had.”

In time, Walker would evolve into one of the game’s best defensive outfielders and many of the more-subtle aspects of outfield play that he excelled at, like decoying runners, positioning, charging balls and getting rid of them quickly, were learned on the back fields in West Palm Beach, in the anonymity of instructional-league camp.

Walker continued to make steady progress in 1987, in his inevitable climb to Montreal, by hitting .287 with 26 homers and 83 RBIs, while also stealing 24 bases at double-A Jacksonville. He was selected to the Southern League all-star team while also being named the recipient of the Tip O’Neill Award, presented annually by the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame to the top Canadian in professional baseball. It’s an award he went on to win on nine occasions.

By then, Walker, 20, was coming to grips with his rising fame among Canadian baseball fans, though he did his part to downplay the frenzy.

“I don’t think it matters where you come from,” he responded, “as long as you can do the job. But I’ve still got a long way to go. It just takes time. Sometimes I’m trying so hard to hit a home run I’m swinging from my feet. The way I’m hoping, I’ll be in the majors by the time I’m 24.”

That winter Walker’s blossoming career suffered a serious setback, causing him to revise his expectations, if not wonder what his future held for him altogether.

While playing winter ball for Hermosillo of the Mexican Pacific League, Walker tried to score from second base on a single, but he slipped on home plate. His right knee locked up, causing him to somersault awkwardly. Instead of attending his first major league spring-training camp a month later, he underwent major reconstructive surgery to repair damage to all three main cartilages in his knee. He then endured a gruelling seven-month rehab program that not only caused him to miss the 1988 season but called into question whether the injury might significantly impact his career.

“I thought to myself,” Walker said. “I’m done. My career might be over. It was a big setback to overcome. Coming off the good year I had in 1987, I felt good about myself. I felt I was a pretty good ballplayer. Then when I slipped on home plate, I wondered, ‘What am I going to do now? Be a garbageman?’ ”

The injury was so serious that even in Walker’s 17th and final year of his big-league career, while then a member of the St. Louis Cardinals, the knee still bothered him.

By 1989, Walker was healthy enough to be assigned to triple-A Indianapolis to begin the season. But it was apparent from the start that he was rusty from a year of inactivity. He was slow to regain his strength and skills, while being forced to wear a bulky brace on his surgery-repaired knee. He eventually rebounded to hit .270 with 12 homers, but perhaps most encouraging, he also stole 36 bases. Scouts, though, said that was more a testament to Walker’s penchant for stealing bases with reckless abandon, bad knee and all, than it was about his speed returning to its pre-surgery form.

On Aug. 16 that year, Walker was rewarded for his efforts by being called up by the Expos. He debuted in a 4-2 win over the San Francisco Giants. He went 1-for-1 with three walks at the plate, while also stationed in right field.

As just the seventh native Canadian ever to play for the Expos, he was hailed in Montreal as the team’s first potential superstar to come from the home country—basically, a public relations dream come true. He also quickly positioned himself to become a role model for thousands of young Canadian baseball players.

Over the balance of the 1989 season for the Expos, Walker did little to live up to the hype as he played sparingly and hit just .170 with no homers and four RBIs in 20 games. Though his lacklustre performance caused some heartburn among Dave Dombrowski, the team’s new general manager, and other Expos officials, the Montreal fan base embraced him as a conquering hero, believing he would soon become one in a succession of Hall of Fame outfielders groomed by the organization that included Andre Dawson and Tim Raines, and eventually Vladimir Guerrero, though Walker would end up playing less time for the Montreal faithful than any of them.

“At first, I just wanted to play baseball,” Walker said. “It didn’t matter what team I played for. Eventually, playing in Montreal meant something. Just being a Canadian in the big leagues was a rarity, let alone to play with a Canadian team.”

*

As the 1990s approached, the Expos, to Walker’s misfortune, were a franchise in flux. The vaunted team of the ’80s was pretty much gone by the time Walker arrived, attendance at Olympic Stadium was lagging and the declining value of the Canadian dollar was putting an increasing strain on the ability of the team to compete. Even as the franchise was put up for sale by owner Charles Bronfman, there were no takers. Not even the heralded arrival of a potential home-grown saviour like Walker could reverse the franchise’s fortunes.

That winter, Walker’s own future in Montreal came squarely into focus as he was mysteriously dropped from the Expos’ 40-man roster, stemming from his indifferent showing over the final seven weeks of the 1989 season, as well as lingering concerns among club officials over the long-term effect of his damaged knee. In order for Walker to be outrighted to triple-A, he had to clear waivers first, meaning he conceivably could have been claimed by any big-league team willing to cough up the $20,000 waiver price. No club bit, but the move angered Walker, even as he was back up with the Expos to start the 1990 season and was a fixture as the team’s regular right fielder for five seasons.

The Expos remained in transition throughout the early-90s, but by 1994, a young, rejuvenated Expos team, now under Alou’s direction, was in the midst of a transcendent season. Walker himself was enjoying his best season in an Expos uniform, hitting .322 with a league-best 44 doubles, along with 19 homers and 86 RBIs.

But everything came to a screeching halt on Aug. 12—in what became the darkest day in the checkered history of the Expos franchise. A players’ strike not only wiped out the remainder of the ’94 season but marked the beginning of the end for baseball in Montreal, for all intents and purposes. The Expos were both precluded from capitalizing on their stunning success as baseball’s best team or able to overcome the financial fallout that occurred in the wake of the devastating strike. Regrettably, Walker, in the prime of his career, never played another game for the Expos.

With the club in dire financial straits on the eve of a compromised 1995 season, and forced to drastically slash payroll, most of the team’s cavalcade of young stars was dealt away in a dizzying 72-hour purge. Furthermore, the Expos also declined to offer arbitration rights to Walker—their Great Canadian Hope—paving the way for his departure, too, as a free agent.

Almost immediately, Walker signed a lucrative four-year, $22.5 million deal with the Rockies, leaving stunned Expos fans to always wonder what might have been had Walker played out his entire big-league career in Montreal—or Canadians, generally, how he might help to increase the profile of the sport in a hockey-mad country.

Even Walker was left somewhat embittered by his ugly, untimely departure from Montreal.

“I was welcomed (in Denver) with open arms,” he said. “If I’d go out for dinner or go shopping, people would say, ‘welcome to Denver.’ That’s something I didn’t get in Montreal. There wasn’t the same warm response, which is strange, since it was my country.”

While Walker developed into a major-league superstar south of the border, he still retained a greater natural affinity for Canada’s national pastime. He always empathized with hockey players because their sport had more physical demands and fewer financial rewards than baseball.

Although Walker never achieved the fame playing in Canada that was predicted for him, his influence in the country and native B.C. was still far-reaching.

“He was the standard for the height of baseball in Canada,” said Jeff Francis, a University of British Columbia product who was coincidentally drafted in the first round by Colorado in 2002 and played briefly alongside Walker with the Rockies in 2004. “If you went to a provincial championship, his picture was on your T-shirt. Or if you went to play in Maple Ridge, you were playing at Larry Walker Field. The fact that he played for the Montreal Expos helped, too, so even people who weren't baseball fans knew who he was. He was that unreachable dream for kids who let you know it was reachable, that a Canadian could go do it.”

Walker’s career year with the Rockies came in 1997, when he hit .366 with 143 runs scored, 208 hits, 49 home runs and 130 RBIs, while also stealing 33 bases and posting a .720 slugging percentage. He was selected the National League’s Most Valuable Player, becoming the first Canadian player to be so honoured. With his rare combination of speed and power, he not only became a member of the distinguished 30-30 club but was the only player in major-league history to reach at least 30 stolen bases and a slugging percentage of .700 in the same season.

Even as he was largely able to maintain his astonishing productivity over his career, despite his assortment of injuries, Walker’s Hall of Fame candidacy was called into question for years by voters who believed the numbers he assembled were artificially enhanced by playing in the light air synonymous with Denver. In his 10th and final year on the ballot, he finally garnered the necessary support for election as voters came to develop a greater appreciation for Walker’s all-around game, the injuries he endured and even his unlikely upbringing.

It wasn’t overlooked that Walker accomplished much of what he did in the game by concentrating his efforts on baseball much later than almost all his peers, which once prompted Sports Illustrated to dub him as “The Accidental Ballplayer” in a 1993 expose.

In the end, even as Walker had to painstakingly wait his turn to be elected to the Hall of Fame, and then had to wait again to get his proper due in Cooperstown on Sept. 8 because of COVID protocols, it all added up, appropriately in Walker’s situation, to a classic case of better late than never.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Simpson, like Walker, grew up in British Columbia—Kelowna, more specifically. Though they never crossed paths because Simpson left B.C. in 1983—a year before Walker began his rise to prominence—to pursue greener pastures in his role as the founder of Baseball America, Walker became a staple of the magazine’s coverage throughout his career. Like Walker, Simpson is a member of the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame.