Having won their division two of the last three years — and having failed to do so last year only because the Colorado Rockies unaccountably won every game they played for two weeks in September — the San Diego Padres were not supposed to have the worst record in baseball this year. So they do, though, and there even have been consequences. Last Friday, at a cost of $5 million, they released their 38-year-old center fielder, who hit .178 with three extra-base hits and 10 walks in 26 games. He might not ever take the field again.

If this is the end for Jim Edmonds, though, the real shame isn’t that it’s over — time runs out even on the best ballplayers — but that his career was reduced to a bit of agate in the Saturday papers, when he deserves quite a lot more. Edmonds likely won’t ever be elected to the Hall of Fame, but probably should be. He was an incredible player, even when you account for the frosted tips and the nagging suspicion that there was more showmanship than athleticism in his circus-trick outfield style.

Edmonds’s case starts with the number 363, which is how many home runs he’s hit in his career. Just five center fielders — Willie Mays, Ken Griffey Jr., Mickey Mantle, Duke Snider, and Andruw Jones — have ever done better. (Joe DiMaggio would have done so if he hadn’t lost prime years to World War II.) Three hundred and sixty-three is over 100 more than Hall of Famers Earle Combs, Edd Roush, Richie Ashburn, Max Carey, and Lloyd Waner hit combined.

You can hand wave this away by pointing out that Edmonds played in a power era, but it hardly diminishes the achievement. Center fielders who can hit with this kind of power are, and always have been, incredibly rare. Edmonds topped a .600 slugging average twice. The only other center fielders ever to do that are Mays, Griffey, Mantle, Snider, DiMaggio, and Hack Wilson. And he wasn’t just a power hitter: Among modern center fielders with at least 7,000 career plate appearances, he’s 10th in on-base average, with a fine .377 mark.

What makes all this especially remarkable is that the man made his reputation with defense, at a glamour position. For what it’s worth (which is not much), Mays, Griffey, and Jones are the only center fielders to win more Gold Glove awards. This overrates Edmonds, an excellent but not transcendent defender who was a bit over-appreciated even in his prime, because he specialized in robbing home runs and in coming from up against the fence to snare dying quails behind the shortstop. But it’s awfully hard to win eight Gold Gloves without being a terrific defender.

In a line, there’s the case for Edmonds: “Hit 363 home runs, won eight Gold Gloves in center field.” It’s a good case, especially as he was a key player on a St. Louis Cardinals team that won six division titles, two pennants, and a World Series. The case against him is basically that he never led the league in an important category, and that he had a short career for a Hall of Famer, with just 1,840 games played and 7,410 plate appearances. Among the 15 modern major league center fielders honored in Cooperstown, Edmonds would rank 10th in games, 12th in plate appearances, and 13th in seasons, with at least 500 plate appearances. It should also be noted in arguing against Edmonds that his OPS+ — on-base plus slugging averages, normalized for park and league effects on a scale where 100 is average — of 132 would rank 10th. Edmonds may have hit more home runs than Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker combined, but there’s more to hitting than home runs.

All of this being so, it really isn’t disqualifying. Edmonds rates solidly in the middle among Hall of Fame center fielders, who — excluding Negro League and 19th-century players for the sake of convenience — break down into three tiers. First is the top class, players such as Mantle and Speaker: Edmonds obviously doesn’t belong there. Then there is a bottom class of players who were nowhere near as good as he was. Hack Wilson was basically Edmonds with a much shorter career and lousy defense; Max Carey and Lloyd Waner were, at best, Kenny Lofton-type players, and Earle Combs and Kirby Puckett deserve to be Hall of Famers about as much as, if not less than, Carlos Beltran would if he retired tomorrow.

Between the Mays class and the Combs class, though, is a group of players Edmonds resembles pretty well, such as Snider, Larry Doby (who was of course elected partly because of his role as a pioneer in the integration of the sport), Edd Roush, and Earl Averill. These players tend to have relatively short careers, high peaks, and career OPS+ marks around 130, which is very good for a position where defense is crucial. It’s the rank-and-file level of the Hall of Fame.

What makes Edmonds stand out among this group is his peak. Going by OPS+, for instance, his five best years rated at 170, 160, 158, 149, and 146. His third-best year is as good as the best years Doby, Roush, and Averill ever had. Edmonds’s best comparison among this group might actually be (and I know this courts accusations of blasphemy) Snider. His five best years rate at 171, 170, 166, 155, and 143; that’s better than Edmonds, but it’s close, and the Duke of Flatbush didn’t earn his title in the field, nor did he have an especially long career himself.

If Edmonds doesn’t deserve election to the Hall, it’s less because he isn’t qualified (at least according to prevailing standards established by who is actually in the Hall of Fame) than because he should get in line behind Jimmy Wynn, Fred Lynn, and Bernie Williams, all of whom had basically the same type of career. These players, and Edmonds, may not immediately strike you as worthy of immortality — but consider that other than Puckett, not a single center fielder in Cooperstown made his major league debut after 1951. I wouldn’t propose that we need an affirmative action program for center fielders, but rather that we might be holding them to an unrealistic standard, that of Mays and DiMaggio rather than that of Snider and Averill. Edmonds may not have been as good as Tris Speaker. But he was one of the dozen or so best to ever play his position, and if there’s any justice in baseball — which there isn’t — he’ll one day have a bronze plaque to show for his efforts.

tmarchman@nysun.com