November 29, 2023

By Mark Whicker

Canadian Baseball Network

John Madden believed that, when they turned off the lights at the Football Hall of Fame, the busts started talking to each other.

If they ever put Gary Sheffield’s plaque in the National Baseball Hall of Fame, those would be some interesting nights.

Would Sheffield demand to be moved to a wall with shortstops? Would he ask to be traded to the World Golf Hall of Fame? Or maybe he’d pick a fight with executives or pitchers he didn’t like. Beyond that, maybe they could put a dab of “cream” on the side of the plaque, to indicate that Sheffield admitted he sampled BALCO products.

Sheffield’s combustible history will not help him get the required 75 percent of the vote in the current Hall of Fame election, conducted among the Baseball Writers Association of America. That’s what you need to get in. He jumped from 40.2% to 55 in the most recent vote. But this is Sheffield’s 10th and final year of eligibility. If he doesn’t reach 75, his fate is turned over to the Veterans Committee, which is likely to take a dimmer view than the working voters will.

Dick Allen is still in Hall of Fame purgatory, unable to convince the writers during 15 elections. The 16-person Veterans Committee rejects him annually. Allen also had a reputation for spoiling the milk, particularly when he was a kid in Philadelphia. And, like Sheffield, Allen made a few stops along the way. But there’s little question that Allen’s bat did enough to get him to Cooperstown. If you’re in Allen’s corner, and a lot of folks are, you must like Sheffield, too.

All Hall of Fame hitters were respected. Sheffield and Allen were feared. Both came along before “exit velocity” became a thing, but their bats sounded like firecrackers. Sheffield never spent more than six years in any of his eight locations, and he never won an MVP award, although he did win a batting title in San Diego and was the National League’s on-base percentage and OPS leader with Florida in 1996. Thus it comes as a surprise, to some, to see just what Sheffield wrought in his 22 seasons.

He was both a slugger and a batsman. He had 2,689 hits. He also had 509 home runs, which is 28th all time. His career slugging percentage was .514 and his OPS was .907, less than .001 below the OPSs of Mike Schmidt and Ken Griffey Jr.

But Sheffield also prized contact. Beginning in 1999, when he was 30, Sheffield hit .300 or better six consecutive times. He never struck out 100 times in a season. When he was batting champion for San Diego in 1992, he struck out 40 times.

For his career Sheffield walked 304 more times than he struck out. Huh? How do you explain that such a thing is possible, especially to today’s players, like Mickey Moniak of the Angels, who walked nine times and struck out 113 in 85 games?

Only five players were active in the 21st century and had more walks than strikeouts while equalling or bettering Sheffield’s OPS: Barry Bonds, Frank Thomas, Chipper Jones, Edgar Martinez and Todd Helton. The first four are in the Hall of Fame, and Helton is on the current ballot.

More instructive is the OPS-plus stat, which measures players against contemporaries. If you’re at 100, you matched the OPS average. Sheffield is at 140, which is the same as Alex Rodriguez (also on the current ballot), Vladimir Guerrero, Miguel Cabrera and Duke Snider. It surpasses Griffey, Reggie Jackson and George Brett, and ranks 44th in MLB history.

In 1997, the Marlins won the World Series and Sheffield hit .292 against Cleveland. In the Division Series he went 5-for-9 in a three-game sweep of San Francisco. The Yankees coughed up a 3-0 lead to Boston in the AL championship Series of 2004, but Sheffield was 10-for-30 and had a .978 OPS in those seven games.

Opportunistic? Sheffield had a .978 OPS with runners in scoring position for his career, in 3,082 plate appearances, and a .310 average.

Consistent? These are Sheffield’s on-base percentages by month, beginning with April, again for his career: .391, .400, .393, .399, .387 and .386.

Durable? Sheffield drove in 132 runs for Atlanta in 2003. He drove in 121 for the Yankees in 2004, and 123 the next year, when he was 36 years old. He was third in MVP voting in ‘03, second in ‘04.

So, if there were no such thing as defence or deportment, Sheffield’s plaque would be talking trash in the gallery right now.

Sheffield came up as a shortstop and was attached to the position, but not always to the ball. He made 12 errors in 70 games his rookie season. He moved to third and made 25 in 125 games, although he later admitted some of his wild throws were in protest of the move, which put Bill Spiers at shortstop. He also said he airmailed a few throws in order to show the official scorer what an error really was. He didn’t whistle while he worked in Milwaukee, at least not often. “His mad-at-the-world phase,” said Tony Muser, his manager.

Various teams plugged him into the outfield and figured he would outscore whatever disasters he caused. The National League didn’t have a designated hitter then. Sheffield came to the Yankees in 2004 but never was a full-time DH until he got to Detroit in 2007, at age 38.

More critically, there was hardly ever a stopover in which Sheffield seemed happy. He grew up in an inhospitable section of Tampa, but amid a lode of future major leaguers. Including his uncle, Dwight Gooden.

Sheffield said the neighborhood was actually strong. If his mother saw Derek Bell acting the fool, she would just as soon give him a whipping as she would Gary. People looked out for each other, and Hillsborough High coach Billy Reed would just tune out Sheffield’s tantrums until they subsided.

There was a lot of smoke surrounding Sheffield in those days, but not much fire. He was charged with driving recklessly when he was 18 and got probation. He was charged with it again, but the charges were dropped. There were restraining orders and rumors of drugs on team planes, and Sheffield’s shoulder was grazed by a bullet, while he was stopped at a light in Tampa. He wasn’t convicted of any of that. Indeed, he was considered a leader on several of his teams, including the Dodgers, who traded Mike Piazza to get him. That was sort of like trading the Hollywood sign, but Sheffield won over the fans, one double at a time.

He was good in the community, too. He visited a children’s hospital in Tampa so regularly that he got to know the patients on a first name basis. He heard, from a friend, about a Tampa man who needed a liver transplant but didn’t have the money, not until he got a $100,000 check from Sheffield, no questions asked.

Some scouts were put off by Hillsborough High’s surroundings. When a couple of them came to a game, Reed apologetically told them Sheffield wasn’t playing that day, but they could come the next night to see him play a practice game. Sheffield hit two home runs and the scouts were pretty much convinced they were coming back. He became the sixth pick in the first round, by the Brewers, who bought him out of an offer from the U. of Miami.

After the game was over, the 17-year-old Sheffield approached the scouts and thanked them for coming back to see him. “I’m not sure I’d ever heard that before,” said Joe Klein, one of those scouts.

The BBWAA has been hard to read lately, with its misunderstanding of what the “V” means in MVP, and its sudden embrace of group-think in awards voting. It still has a puritanical streak that will work against Sheffield. But when it comes to who did what, between “Play ball” and the 27th out, Sheffield is an obvious Hall of Famer.

You take Sheffield, Bonds, Allen, Dave Parker, Pete Rose, Roger Clemens and Fernando Valenzuela, and you can start building a pretty competitive Hall-Mart, down the road somewhere.