Underrated Will Clark Deserves to Be Elected to Baseball Hall of Fame

The San Francisco Giants have announced they will retire Will Clark's No. 22 next year, honoring his time spent with the team.

Hopefully, this gesture also gets the ball rolling on a wider scale nationally, creating a different conversation.

With the announcement of his jersey retirement comes the necessary debate: the perpetually underrated Clark absolutely deserves to be sent to the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, especially after the recent inductees we've seen.

Clark rarely, if ever, gets the credit he deserves. He was an offensive machine for his entire 15-year career, finishing a season with an OPS below .800 only once, his rookie year.

A six-time All-Star first baseman who finished in the top five in MVP voting four times, Clark posted an impressive .303/.384/.497 career slash line with 284 home runs and 1,205 runs batted in.

In sum, he finished his time in the majors with 56.5 bWAR, a mark higher than Hall of Famers such as Kirby Puckett, Orlando Cepeda and Jim Rice.

Unfortunately, he was never elected. In fact, he fell off of the ballot after his first year of eligibility in 2006. He came in with just 4.4% of the vote, falling just short of the minimum 5% to stay on.

The bottom line is, Clark deserves more recognition for his performance. Way more. He was a model of consistency for his entire career, and just because he wasn't a statistical compiler who hung on long beyond his prime to accrue more counting numbers while fighting injury, that shouldn't be held against him. Hopefully someday he can find his way to Cooperstown via alternative selection methods and the Veterans Committee, because he absolutely deserves to be immortalized for his achievements.