Perfect Palmer Now Has to Live With the Fact He’s Immortal

The vote is in, so now they will make a bust of Jim Palmer and put it where people can see it forever. But putting Palmer in the Hall of Fame is practically redundant.

This is a guy who had already set a rather disturbing standard for the rest of us. He was perfect. So now he is immortal too.

We used to wonder what Jim Palmer could not do. He was gorgeous, of course, even in his underwear, or maybe especially in his underwear. He was smart, too. And he must have lost games sometime, but who can remember when?

There wasn’t any sport he couldn’t play, including the one that ended with his getting Earl Weaver’s goat. Always, dependably. And when he took questions Tuesday night, the greatest pitcher in Baltimore Orioles history was asked to consider seriously how great an outfielder he might have been. Why not?

Joe Morgan and Palmer became the 20th and 21st players to be elected to the Hall of the Fame on the first ballot. Palmer missed on only 33 of 444 votes cast. That is almost perfect, almost good enough for Palmer.

“The first thing I asked,” he said, “was, ‘Who were those 33 other guys?’ ”

He was joking. Kind of.

The first day he ever thought about the Hall of Fame, he said, was the day he was released, which may have been the saddest day of his life. To that point, he had been consumed by being the greatest pitcher he could be, which is to say nearly as great as any pitcher who ever stared a batter down.

“I remember that two days before I was released--it was in the air--Sammy Stewart asked me what I was going to do when the day came,” Palmer was saying. “I told him I’d get into announcing, spend some time with my family.

“He said, ‘Cakes, you’ll be up there in the booth, and the first thing you’ll do is say how you could be pitching better than the guys out there.’ But I couldn’t settle for just doing it as well as somebody out there. I had to do it as well as Jim Palmer.”

The Palmer standard applied to everyone, including Jim Palmer. And, now, five years after the 268 wins are in, and the 2.86 lifetime ERA and the eight 20-win seasons and the 2,212 strikeouts, the standard of greatness is official. But wasn’t it always so? Wasn’t he the kid who beat Sandy Koufax? Wasn’t he to Orioles pitching what Frank Robinson was to hitting and Brooks Robinson was to fielding? He set the standard, all right.

And, Tuesday night, there was time for Palmer to appreciate what it all meant. Friends, including former teammate Mike Flanagan, gathered at a local restaurant to share the moment. The media were there in force, of course. And when the lights went on and the questions began, Palmer was fairly overcome. He answered the questions in Palmer style, but his eyes were red and moist. He may be immortal, but he is human too.

Being human, he would always seem to wander away from the moments of wonder in his career to the time when his career was no more. Those who know Palmer wonder if he ever was able to reconcile the ending with the rest of his career, which closed when the club released him in 1984.

“Part of being in the major leagues is standing in the outfield and wondering, ‘Is that guy going to be here next week?’ ” Palmer said. “You know it happens to everyone, but you never think it’s going to happen to you.

“The Orioles did what they had to do. When you’re there at 19 and you’re there at 38, they have a tendency to remember you at 19.”

Do you remember Palmer then? He threw hard and, almost from the beginning, he knew how to pitch. He had arguments, of course, with Weaver on that topic and others, but to watch him, at 19 and even at 38, was to watch with awe. He pitched a shutout in the World Series when he was 20. He won games in four different World Series. He was the winning pitcher in the Orioles’ first four pennant-clinching games. And, as if he needed more, he had style. The Palmer-Weaver debates will live on at least as long as there is breath in either.

Palmer could not say often enough Tuesday night how important it was to a pitcher to play on a great team, and he played on good to great teams for his entire career. And, in those 19 years, he pitched with some of the best in the game. But the Orioles were never better than when Palmer was on the mound, no matter who was winning the Cy Young that year.

If you need any evidence, look to this year’s vote. Only one pitcher in history ever drew a higher percentage, and he was only Bob Feller. Palmer easily outpolled Gaylord Perry and Ferguson Jenkins, two great pitchers who weren’t voted in again this year. He easily outdistanced Morgan. Morgan, in the view of many, was the greatest second baseman of all time, but he did not match Palmer. How do you match perfection?