18. That's the number of hitters currently enshrined in the Hall Of Fame with a higher career OPS than Carlos Delgado's career mark of .929.


118. That's the number of hitters in the Hall Of Fame with a lower career OPS than Carlos Delgado. (Leading off the list, at .928, is Hank Aaron.)

Carlos Delgado was never a great defensive player, or a speed demon. He was a pure slugger, and at his peak with the Blue Jays from 1997-2004, very few could slug like him.


In 2000, he played in all 162 games for the Jays, hitting a Herculean .344/.470/.664 with 41 HR, leading the league in doubles and total bases. (He lost the MVP to Jason Giambi.) In 2003, he hit .302/.426/.593 with 42 HR, leading the league in OPS and RBI. (He probably should have won AL MVP, but they gave it to A-Rod.)

For that seven-year window from 1997-2004 where he was the heart and soul of a very hit-and-miss Blue Jays team, Delgado put up a 145 wRC+. That's better than A-Rod, Sammy Sosa, Mike Piazza and Frank Thomas.


Carlos Delgado was a great hitter. The one thing his career didn't have (well, other than a World Series) was length.

Delgado retired at age 37 after a slew of injuries, playing out his twilight years with the Mets - if he hadn't retired young, he'd surely have eclipsed 500 home runs. (He retired with 473 HR and 1,512 RBI.) He made the playoffs with the Mets just once, in 2006, where he hit .351/.442/.757 before bowing out in the NLCS.


His 2009 retirement announcement brought little fanfare. To everyone outside of Toronto and a handful of Mets fans, Carlos Delgado was an afterthought. But before we bring up the bloated zombie corpse that is the BBWAA Hall Of Fame ballot, let's just sit back and truly appreciate Carlos Delgado as a player for a second.

Let me take you back to September, 2003, when Carlos Delgado hit the 300th home run of his career. Then, in his next three at-bats in that game, his 301st, 302nd and 303rd. He remains the only player in MLB history to hit four home runs in four at-bats in the same game.

Carlos Delgado was my childhood, and although I try to care as very little as possible about a shadowy cabal of elderly sportwriters' opinions on what plaques belong in a museum in upstate New York, it's still a bit of a shame that Carlos Delgado will never make it into the Hall Of Fame.


Today, it was revealed that Carlos Delgado received a 3.8% share of Hall Of Fame votes. Since that falls short of the mandated floor of 5%, he'll fall off the ballot for next year. Delgado's Hall Of Fame case was over before it ever started.

Look, I know that Carlos Delgado has always been a Hall Of Fame long-shot. He played first base, and he didn't even play it particularly well. He played almost his whole career in Toronto in the late 90s and early 00s, at a time where the Jays were mostly terrible and very few American sportswriters ever watched him play. He also played in the greatest offensive period in baseball history. He has a lot of things going against him.


But to go down like this, with barely a whimper? That's sad. Carlos deserved better.


More than anything, Delgado's a victim of his era. He put up great numbers in a time where his colleagues were putting up cartoonishly insane numbers.

It's telling that despite his offensive totals (out of the 13 seasons where he was an everyday player, he hit 30+ home runs 11 times, and 40+ home runs 3 times) he was only a two-time All-Star. There were just so many good hitters in the late 90s and early 00s, especially in the AL, that there was no room for Delgado.


Even as a kid who grew up taking the subway to the SkyDome and buying tickets off scalpers so I could watch Delgado hammer the ball into the half-empty stands, do I think he was actually a Hall Of Famer? On this current ballot, no. You only get to vote for 10 players, and a 75% majority is required for election - and on this stacked of a ballot, with these ridiculous outdated voting rules, I can see why there just isn't room for him.

I just think it's a shame that, with only 3.8% of votes cast, he won't even get a chance to be discussed seriously. Carlos Delgado deserves better than to be forgotten. That's part of what makes the Hall Of Fame such a rotten, antiquated institution. All of these players were great parts of our collective baseball memories, and all of them deserve to be enshrined in a museum about baseball history, regardless of what the 90-year-old sportswriter of the Palookavilla Press thinks of "tainted eras" or whatever the hell.


Carlos Delgado, as the Toronto Blue Jays' franchise leader in home runs, RBI, runs scores, doubles, slugging percentage, and OPS, is a part of baseball history. And even if he'll never get a bronze plaque in Cooperstown - even if, based on the era in which he played and his defense and everything else, he never really deserved to be enshrined - I hope there's at least room at the Hall Of Fame tucked away in a Blue Jays display for a picture that says "Carlos Delgado was one of the great hitters of his era."