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Baseball fans, sentimental as they can be, have an overwhelming tendency to dissect. So it’s not surprising, in the wake of Edgar Martinez’s retirement announcement on Monday, that speculation has already begun about whether the man is worthy of the Hall of Fame.

The popular debate is likely to focus on a single topic: whether a player who spent the bulk of his career as a designated hitter ought to be considered for the Hall, and if so, just how much of a discount should be placed upon Martinez’s value.

Since Martinez will be the first DH to emerge as a borderline Hall candidate – Paul Molitor hit so many statistical milestones that voters had no choice but to let him in – some will use his candidacy to take a philosophical stand against the “position.”

That, of course, is absurd. Granted, we need to discount Martinez’s value some.The question is, how much? Whatever principled stand the anti-DH crew might take, it’s entirely possible to quantify how much value Martinez failed to provide his team by not having a defensive position.

Martinez’s career OPS, entering play yesterday, was .939, which ranks him 34th on the all-time list. Of the players ranked ahead of him, 15 are still active, and one other (Mark McGwire) retired too recently to be eligible for Hall consideration. Another, Joe Jackson, was banned from the game for non-performance reasons. Every other man is in the Hall. If Martinez is denied entry to Cooperstown, he will probably be the most talented hitter to be excluded from its ranks.

OPS is not a perfect measure, of course; it doesn’t consider factors such as the impact of a player’s home park, or his performance relative to other players at his position and in his league. To accomplish that, we need a metric like Wins Above Replacement Level (WARP), a proprietary Baseball Prospectus tool that quantifies a player’s contributions in terms of wins contributed above and beyond a “freely available” player who could be picked up on the waiver wire – Karim Garcia, for example.

We’ll compare Martinez’s performance in this department against a series of players who are contemporaries of his in some way or another.The list includes five recent Hall inductees (Paul Molitor, Dave Winfield, Eddie Murray, Kirby Puckett, and Ozzie Smith); three who are eligible for the Hall but have not been deemed worthy of enshrinement (Ron Santo, Andre Dawson, and Jim Rice); and three players (Harold Baines, Albert Belle, and Jose Canseco) who are not yet eligible for consideration, but like Martinez derived almost all of their value from their offense. Finally, it includes Rafael Palmeiro, Frank Thomas, and Fred McGriff, who are nearing the end of their careers and have spent most of their careers at first base or DH.

Martinez fares well according to offensive WARP. With a lifetime total of 103.5 wins above replacement level contributed with his bat, he ranks behind only Molitor, Palmeiro, Murray, and Thomas; two of those men are already in the Hall and the other two almost certainly will be.

Martinez’s offensive contributions rank ahead of Winfield and well ahead of Puckett and Smith. He holds a substantial lead over borderline cases like Rice, Santo, and Dawson.

What if fielding is also taken into account? As it happens, the full version of WARP considers fielding as well as batting performance. As with the value a player generates at the plate, these fielding wins are measured in terms of contribution above and beyond that of a ‘replacement-level’ defensive player (Jason Giambi, say).

The fielding portion of WARP is calculated by measuring the number of balls a defender fields, compared to his replacement-level counterpart. Those balls fielded are then converted into runs. From there, the fielding component of WARP is calculated in the same way as offensive WARP, with 10 runs equaling one win above replacement level.

By using the full version of WARP – offense and defense included – we arrive at a convenient solution for dealing with the designated hitter problem.We can simply establish Martinez’s defensive value at zero for those years when he did not take the field.

Martinez, it should be remembered, did play a few seasons at third base, and managed to accumulate about 5.3 wins above replacement level during his tenure as a fielder, which is better than Thomas or McGriff (both of whom have turned in a below-replacement fielding performance). On the opposite end of the spectrum, Ozzie Smith contributed 80.4 wins with his defense, which rendered him a more valuable player than Martinez over the course of his career, even though Martinez was a far superior hitter.

Truth be told, however, Martinez falls exactly in that middle ground with folks like Santo and Dawson. He is likely to have his case debated for years, perhaps having to wait for the Veteran’s Committee for enshrinement, and perhaps never entering Cooperstown at all.

There are also several factors that sportswriters consider as tiebreakers when dealing with borderline Hall of Fame cases. Martinez’s lack of postseason experience is likely to work against him, while his community involvement is likely to work for him. If we had considered peak value rather than cumulative value, Martinez would also rank a little higher.

It would be a shame, however, if Martinez’s case were summarily dismissed. Even after appropriate punishment is exacted for his lack of defensive value, he merits strong consideration. If Baseball Prospectus had a vote, Martinez would get it.