When Edgar Martinez takes the podium to speak at the National Baseball Hall of Fame on Sunday, it’s certain he’ll thank many Mariners teammates from his 18-year major-league career. Ken Griffey Jr., whom Martinez plated with the most memorable hit in club history and who stumped for Martinez in his own induction speech three years ago, will likely top that list. And there will be others — Randy Johnson, Jay Buhner, Mike Blowers, Dan Wilson, Joey Cora — whose names will conjure memories of better days when Seattle simply refused to lose.
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There are other teammates whose names won’t immediately register with Mariners fans, but each of whom played a significant role in helping Martinez achieve baseball immortality.
For more than a decade, a Mariners communications team led by Randy Adamack and Tim Hevly waged a campaign to keep Martinez at the forefront of Hall of Fame voters’ minds. They weren’t the first team to advocate for their star’s enshrinement, but the tenacity and spirit behind the effort speak to the feelings that those inside the club still cherish for the most beloved player in franchise history.
“There’s been times where different organizations or different individuals have kind of put campaigns together, but I don’t know if any of them did it with as much energy or as much commitment as the Mariners people did,” said longtime baseball writer Tracy Ringolsby, a former president of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America (BBWA) and a Hall of Fame voter since 1985. “They didn’t just do it because he was a Mariner. I think they truly believed in what they did.”
Adamack joined the Mariners in 1978, their second year of existence, as the club’s director of public relations. By the time Martinez made his Seattle debut as a 24-year-old in 1987, Adamack had been elevated to Seattle’s senior director of communications. He remembered a conversation with former assistant general manager Lee Pelekoudas early in Martinez’s career when Pelekoudas looked over at Adamack and said, “This guy can hit.”
Boy, could he.
Over a career that spanned nearly two decades, Martinez slashed .312/.418/.515. He won two batting titles, made seven All-Star appearances and was widely regarded as one of the most dangerous right-handed hitters of his generation.
He was also ahead of his time; a tireless worker who didn’t mind taking a walk (he earned 1,283 over the course of his career) and did everything he could to maximize his talent and overcome an eye condition that occasionally distorted his depth perception. Hevly, Seattle’s current VP of communications who joined the team as an intern in 1990, got to see Martinez’s determination up close.
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“Every time I saw him, he was on his way to somewhere to work — to the weight room, to the cages, sitting in front of his locker weighing a bat,” Hevly said. “You never really felt like he was ever sitting around in pregame, postgame, anytime. He was always on his way to work.”
Martinez’s production, penchant for performing in the clutch — see Corey Brock’s history of “The Double” — and kind, gentle persona off the field made him a superstar with nearly unanimous approval for fans of a club that didn’t have much to cheer about over the first couple of decades of its existence (and hasn’t since Martinez helped the 2001 squad to a major-league record 116 wins).
Lifelong Mariners fan Jeff Evans was a senior at Peninsula High School in Gig Harbor when Martinez’s double knocked off the Yankees in the 1995 ALDS and got to see one of his heroes up close as Seattle’s assistant director of baseball information from 2007 to 2015.
“He’s kind of calm personally,” Evans said of Martinez. “The world’s most interesting man, like the Dos Equis commercial.”
After injuries forced Martinez’s retirement following the 2004 season, Adamack, Hevly, Evans and the rest of the Mariners PR team — which included baseball information managers Kelly Munro and Fernando Alcalá — knew they’d witnessed a Hall of Fame career. The problem was they were going to have to convince a bunch of voters of the same.
Unlike Griffey, whose 630 home runs made him a shoo-in for Cooperstown, Martinez hadn’t reached the 3,000-hit or 500-home-run milestones that made enshrinement all but a foregone conclusion. Plus, some voters held it against Martinez that he became a designated hitter after injuries limited him to 131 games from 1993 to 1994. His numbers made a persuasive argument for serious consideration, but the fact he played his entire career in a town that many considered a baseball backwater meant Martinez had largely flown under the radar.
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“The Mariners didn’t get a lot of national attention,” Hevly said. “We thought that Edgar has put a resume together worthy of a hall of fame, and part of our job was just to help make sure people saw it.”
Adamack consulted with several prominent writers around the league and spoke to longtime Red Sox PR man Dick Bresciani, who had overseen a successful campaign for former Boston great Jim Rice, about how Seattle might approach a Martinez Hall of Fame effort.
“They were all very specific,” Adamack said. “‘You need to present this in a very matter-of-fact or factual way and not be purely lobbying or selling something that people may not want to buy right away.’
“We wanted to make sure that we did it the right way … and wanted it to be a positive thing.”
With that guidance, the team went to work.
It had 15 years to drive in Martinez.
Its efforts began in earnest in 2009, the year before Martinez appeared on the ballot for the first time. After a meeting in which Adamack and Hevly told their staff about the plan, they compiled a Microsoft Word document with statistics and charts that would help Martinez’s case — then added to it every offseason.
The Mariners noted that Martinez was one of only 18 major-leaguers with a lifetime batting average over .300, a lifetime on-base percentage over .400 and a lifetime slugging percentage over .500. Instead of focusing on traditional counting stats like hits, home runs and RBI, the team leaned heavily on sabermetrics — Michael Lewis published “Moneyball” in 2003 — highlighting Martinez’s .418 career on-base percentage and .932 career OPS, numbers that put him among baseball royalty.
“It was fun to find a new stat that put him with names like Ted Williams,” Evans said. “Once I started diving in, he was way better than I thought. Way better.”
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They collected quotes from teammates and opponents, mailed out packets to writers and came armed with printed copies to share at baseball’s Winter Meetings. Baseball information manager Ryan Hueter redesigned the packets after Evans left in 2015 to become the director of athletic communications at Western Washington University, and as Twitter emerged as a social media giant, the club took its message public, debuting the #EdgarHOF hashtag — which would become ubiquitous among Mariners fans every winter afterward — on New Year’s Day in 2011.
Happy New Year! Let's get 2011 started! #mlb #edgarHOF
— Seattle Mariners (@Mariners) January 1, 2011
Every year when Hall of Fame ballots went out, digital marketing manager Nathan Rauschenberg — a Seattle-area native who grew up with “a kind of an unhealthy obsession” with the club before joining the Mariners in 2012 — teamed up with digital marketing coordinator Colin O’Keefe for social media campaigns that touted Martinez’s accomplishments.
“November and December is kind of #EdgarHOF mode,” Rauschenberg said. “That’s something that is not only important, but something that our fans are passionate about and excited about. So, it’s kind of twofold: Of course, we want to do everything that we can to support him, but regardless of how much of an impact it does or doesn’t make, it’s still a celebration of Edgar, and it’s still a worthwhile initiative of ours.”
The club retweeted articles from writers who supported Martinez’s case, like ESPN’s Jayson Stark and Jay Jaffe of Baseball Prospectus and Sports Illustrated. “He had some staunch supporters and we had to make sure we were amplifying their voice and their reasoning,” said Kevin Martinez, Seattle’s senior vice president of marketing and communications (and no relation to Edgar).
Jaffe, the inventor of the JAWS system that uses wins above replacement (WAR) to compare players of different eras, noticed the bump whenever he wrote about Martinez.
“If I would tweet out an Edgar Martinez article, it would just get a huge volume of retweets and likes or favorites and would be heavily circulated, especially in the first 48 hours after I would publish,” he said. “The Mariners’ PR and social media would always give that a push.”
The team even resorted to guerilla tactics, going so far as to change its press box Wi-Fi password to a declaration of Martinez’s worthiness for enshrinement (which we would share, except that it remains the Wi-Fi password and will do so through the end of this season).
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“I remember going down there Opening Day the first year they put it there, and I’m like, ‘That is brilliant. That is just wonderful,’” Kevin Martinez said. “Any member of the media that sat down in their quiet moment as they were logging on to the Wi-Fi had to just chuckle to themselves.”
(Courtesy of the Seattle Mariners)
Despite the Mariners’ best efforts, Edgar’s place in the Hall seemed like a long shot, at least outside the organization. His name appeared on 36.2 percent of voters’ ballots in 2010, his first year of eligibility, garnering less than half of the 75 percent of votes needed for enshrinement. He failed to crack 36.5 percent in each of his first four years on the ballot, and in 2014, with a loaded class that saw first-ballot entries for Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and Frank Thomas, Martinez fell to a new low of 25.2 percent.
Things got worse from there.
In 2014, the Hall changed its rules, allowing retired players a maximum of just 10 years on the ballot instead of 15. It was the first major change in election policy since 1991, and it cut Martinez’s window by a third.
Still, the team didn’t panic.
“When we sat in that first meeting, we were assuming we had 15 years to run that arc,” Hevly said. “So it was very much thought of as, ‘This is a long-term play. This isn’t something that we’re going to do for a month this first year and then be done with it.’”
Five fewer years wasn’t ideal, but it wasn’t going to change their approach. And through it all, club officials kept things upbeat, strictly adhering to Adamack’s vision of positivity.
“I don’t think I ever told a writer he was wrong who didn’t vote for Edgar,” Hevly said. “I told several that I disagreed and my reasons why, but I totally respect people. I think it’s a hard job to vote for the Hall of Fame. I have a lot of respect for the voter and for the work they do, so we wanted to always make sure that that was the tone we struck, and I think we did that fairly successfully.”
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Then, in 2015, Martinez finally caught a break. The Hall announced major changes to the balloting system, requiring voters to be active BBWA members, which drastically reduced the number of ballots cast. In 2015, 549 votes were tallied. In 2016, that number dropped to 440, a decrease of nearly 20 percent.
“It meant that you’ve got people that are actually paying attention to that conversation about player value,” Rauschenberg said. “You just have a younger group, as well, that’s going to think a little bit differently about the DH position.”
Twelve years after Martinez last swung a bat in anger — or perhaps in polite indignation — his numbers leaped. He received 43.4 percent of the vote in 2016, then 58.6 a year later. In 2018, his second-to-last year of eligibility, Martinez came agonizingly close to election after being named on 70.4 percent of the ballots.
Even though they were disappointed, his teammates knew he was all but assured of a spot in 2019. Plus, there was something poetic about the process taking so long. “His whole career is based on patience,” Rauschenberg said. “Waiting for the right pitch to hit and not panicking when you’re down to two strikes.”
Still, when it came time for the Hall’s class of 2019 to be announced Jan. 22, there were some nerves around the office. Kevin Martinez, self-admittedly superstitious, wore his lucky socks. Just in case.
“They’re worn-through in the heel, but I break them out whenever we really need it,” he said. “And I wasn’t going to leave anything to chance on that day.”
He needn’t have worried. Edgar was elected with 85.4 percent of the vote.
The news was met with jubilation in Seattle.
Griffey, the team’s first Hall of Fame inductee, had been such a big star that not even the city’s remote perch could contain him. In many ways, Griffey belonged to baseball fans everywhere. Martinez, on the other hand, was understated and workmanlike, not to mention loyal. He spent his entire career with a franchise that had given its fans more heartbreak than triumph, and he stayed in town well after that career drew to a close.
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Evans watched the announcement from his office on the WWU campus in Bellingham, just up the road from where Martinez played his first year of professional baseball after signing with the Mariners in 1983.
Hevly was in a Manhattan hotel room with Martinez and his family when Edgar got the call.
“One of the coolest moments of my career going away was to get to be in the room when he had the call,” Hevly said. “And one of the coolest moments of my career was getting to email a lot of people who had worked on it a long time to share that information with them.”
Some 2,400 miles away, Adamack reflected on the moment.
“He’s definitely kind of ours up here in the Pacific Northwest,” Adamack said. “He’s been here the entire time — humble, quiet, let his accomplishments and who he is as a person speak for itself. So it’s really cool to know that this is our guy.
“I’m an only child, but he’s like a brother.”
Both Adamack and Hevly will be in Cooperstown for the induction ceremony this weekend, and while they and the rest of the Mariners’ PR staff are loath to take credit — “Edgar got Edgar elected to the Hall of Fame,” Hevly said repeatedly — it’s certain each of them will take at least a little pride in being one of the teammates who helped drive Martinez home after so many years.
(2015 photo of Fernando Alcalá, Jeff Evans, Tim Hevly, Randy Adamack and Kelly Munro courtesy of the Seattle Mariners)
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