One player is a lock. Then the 2019 Baseball Hall of Fame vote gets tricky.

Walker finished his career with only 2,160 hits and 383 home runs, the result of myriad injuries. He also played at hitter-friendly Coors Field for 597 games over 11 seasons.

But Walker had an .865 OPS on the road and a career adjusted OPS of 141. Per Baseball-Reference.com, he had 72.7 WAR. Those are Hall-worthy numbers.

Walker reminds of Mike Mussina, whom I have voted for because his value was reflected in ways other than 20-win seasons or Cy Young Awards.

Mussina, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Edgar Martinez, Scott Rolen, and Curt Schilling were holdovers from previous seasons and remained on my ballot.

Rolen received only 10.2 percent of the vote last season but deserves a longer look. He is statistically among the top dozen third basemen in history and was a superb defender.

I have always voted for Schilling and will until he falls off the ballot. His accomplishments on the mound are what matters, not his habit of making loathsome comments.

As for Bonds and Clemens, I do not see it as the job of voters to retroactively punish them for using PEDs when Hall of Fame commissioner Bud Selig looked the other way for years, as did the MLB Players Association.

Drug use was part of the game. Excluding Bonds and Clemens won’t change that; it will only deepen the hypocrisy.

Two newcomers — the late Roy Halladay and Mariano Rivera — were easy choices.

Halladay’s career had a dramatic peak from 2002-11 when he had a 2.97 ERA and 1.11 WHIP. He had an uncanny ability to get hitters to offer at the pitches he wanted and make harmless outs.

Rivera was simply the best reliever in baseball history. It’s also worth noting that he faced 527 batters in the postseason and 11 scored.

Rivera should be a unanimous selection. But among an electorate of 400-plus voters, unanimity is impossible. There will always be a few lunkheads or attention-seekers in such a large group.

I voted for two infielders — Jeff Kent and Omar Vizquel — because offensively in Kent’s case and defensively in Vizquel’s case there were none better. Kent won an MVP, is the all-time leader in home runs for a second baseman (351), and since the expansion era (1961), he’s first in slugging, OPS, and RBIs among second basemen. Enough said.

In addition to 11 Gold Gloves, Vizquel had 2,877 hits. In my opinion, he was the American League version of Ozzie Smith, a magnificent player to watch year after year on the defensive side who managed to hit .272 for his career.

Edgar Martinez likely will get in on his final year of eligibility. I feel badly for Fred McGriff. I truly hope he gets voted in by a veterans committee, which saw fit to vote in Harold Baines.

The reason I didn’t vote for Martinez until this point was that I always believed his career numbers in hits and home runs were borderline to low for someone who played in some of the best lineups in baseball history with the Mariners.

Martinez would always be in my top 12 or 13. But this time he was in my top 10. And no, I had no DH bias. I think David Ortiz is a first-ballot Hall of Famer, and I thought the same about Frank Thomas.

I have regrets about not voting for Larry Walker, who will be on my ballot at some point as he inches closer and voters put aside the Coors Field factor.

As for my mainstays, Barry Bonds is the best hitter I ever saw. Roger Clemens is the best pitcher I ever saw. Mike Mussina amassed great numbers pitching in the AL East all of his career. Curt Schilling was a big-game pitcher. That Gary Sheffield doesn’t get more votes is crazy to me. Look at his numbers.

But now, thanks to a mystifying act of charity by the Hall’s small, awkwardly named Today’s Game Era Committee, Baines is a Hall of Famer.

That, I really don’t get — unless the committee plans to revolutionize the standards for induction. In that case, there may be hope for Damon.

But, really? The lesson I’m taking from the Baines breach is that maybe the Hall standards should be strengthened, not diluted.

In that spirit, I’m done with first-time candidates who are not rock-solid locks for induction. That’s partly why I’m passing this year on first-timer Roy Halladay, the Blue Jays and Phillies starter who died in a 2017 plane crash. Halladay was an elite pitcher and a great guy, and he seems destined to be enshrined this year.

But I don’t believe Halladay was so significantly superior to Curt Schilling, who has fallen short in his first six years of eligibility, and Mike Mussina, who has been shut out in five years on the ballot, that he is a first-time shoo-in.

I’m voting again this year for Schilling and Mussina, along with DH extraordinaire Edgar Martinez in his final year of eligibility. Pedro Martinez remembers Edgar Martinez as the toughest hitter he faced.

I’m passing, however, on a bunch of candidates whose credentials are praiseworthy but don’t scream Cooperstown, including Omar Vizquel, Larry Walker, Gary Sheffield, Fred McGriff, Todd Helton, Andy Pettitte, Scott Rolen, and Lance Berkman. Chalk it up to a Baines backlash.

I also continue to bypass Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Manny Ramirez, and others I strongly suspect of having cheated with steroids while countless others played clean.

That leaves me voting for only one first-timer this year: Mariano Rivera, the vaunted Yankees closer who is a no-doubter for his greatness on and off the field.

That’s it for me: Rivera, Schilling, Mussina, and Martinez.

A tip of the cap, though, to two first-time candidates, former Sox champions Derek Lowe and Kevin Youkilis, whose lengthy service — 17 years in the majors for Lowe, 10 for Youkilis — earned them the distinction of appearing on a Hall of Fame ballot, if only for a year.

Maybe a special committee one day will find a place for them and Damon in Cooperstown — in the Baines corner.

• 2. Todd Helton

  162-game average: .316, 27 HRs, 101 RBIs, .953 OPS. Yes, he was a career Rockie, and thus a beneficiary of Coors Field, but his home/road splits aren’t that bad. His Top 10 Similarity scores include four current Hall of Famers, plus Edgar Martinez and Miguel Cabrera.

• 3. Edgar Martinez

  I think his ship will finally come in. The DH antipathy some still harbor has kept a man who was totally admired in his prime from being enshrined. I maintain he was for a decade the most respected righthanded hitter in the AL.
• He had a .312 lifetime average, a .418 on-base percentage, and a career .933 OPS. A doubles machine, he had back-to-back 50-two-bagger seasons in ’95-96. Am hoping my fellow voters Do The Right Thing and get Edgar in.

• 4. Mike Mussina

  270 wins ain’t half-bad, especially when you lose only 153 (that’s .638, folks). He won 15 or more 11 times, including his incredible 20-9 farewell at age 39. Bet you didn’t know he also won seven Gold Gloves. Did it all in the AL East, too. How about that?

• 5. Mariano Rivera

  Duh.

• 6. Curt Schilling

  Oh boy. What a mess. I can only hope the reason someone shuns him is technical and not philosophical. Forget politics. This guy was not only great — I said “great,” not “good” — but great when he was hurt. He K’d 300 three times. Twice he was the WHIP leader. And the icing is his 11-2, 2.23 postseason record. He was the embodiment of a Big Game Pitcher. To me, this is an absolute no-brainer.

• 7. Omar Vizquel

  This is my quixotic, tilting-against-the-windmill choice. He was a true defensive wizard, and defense is usually not valued enough. I mean, come on, 11 Gold Gloves? Part of perhaps the greatest (certainly the most acrobatic) DP duo ever with Robbie Alomar. And he sneaked in 2,877 hits when you weren’t looking. That’s 2,877. No misprint. His career bumped up against Jeter, A-Rod, and Nomah, which doesn’t help his cause.

• 8. Larry Walker

  What a stupid I was, withholding my Walker vote until this year. 162-game average: 31 HRs, 107 RBIs, .313 BA, .965 OPS. Three batting titles, and are you ready? Only .363, .379, and .350. Had 409 total bases in ’97. Oops, almost forgot. Throw in seven Gold Gloves. Larry, mea culpa for not grasping all this sooner.

These “committees” annually evaluate players who were passed over on the writers’ ballot. Last year, they put Alan Trammell and Jack Morris in the Hall. Swell. Both had stronger cases than Baines.

The Baines selection was a bag job from start to finish. Reinsdorf, Tony La Russa, and Pat Gillick, all former bosses of Baines, strong-armed the committee (eight Hall of Fame players, five executives, and three media members) and got 12 of 16 votes required to whisk Baines into Cooperstown.

Now Baines forever will be the bane of my Hall of Fame voting process.

Baines was a career .289 hitter who never finished in the top eight in MVP voting. He was a DH for much of his career. He made only six All-Star teams in 22 years. He compiled a lot of numbers, but was never a dominant player.

When he appeared on the writers’ Hall of Fame ballot, he never received more than 6.1 percent of the vote (75 percent is required for admission). His induction will galvanize fans of Dwight Evans, Dick Allen, Tony Oliva, Dale Murphy, Don Mattingly, and dozens of other players who were better than Baines but never sniffed Cooperstown.

While we’re at it, why not start a campaign for J.D. Drew?

Regarding this year’s ballot, the Baines Effect has pushed me away from the table of inclusion. I’ve thought long and hard about the merits of Edgar Martinez (he will be elected this year), Mike Mussina, Roy Halladay, Curt Schilling, Omar Vizquel, and Fred McGriff, but the induction of Baines makes me push back.

Oh, and then we have Club PED, where players such as Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, and Manny Ramirez fail to earn the vote because of their association with performance enhancers.

Today is not the day to debate the steroid guys, but the Baines Effect has me choosing the single player on this ballot who is clearly Hall-worthy and appears not to have cheated the game.

The ever-regal Rivera was clutch and dominant — the best of all time at his position.

Mo.

The one and only on this year’s ballot.