Vizquel clearly worthy of Hall of Fame
As I write this, my 2017 baseball Hall of Fame ballot is zooming back east at the speed of snail mail. We used to fax them, but it’s getting harder to find spare parts for these machines.
I could reveal my entire ballot online as more than 100 of my colleagues have done, but I’ll wait until the Hall releases it in January. Why not get a few more weeks of peace before I learn from the Twitterati why I’m an idiot who should have his voting privileges revoked?
However, I will reveal one box I checked: Omar Vizquel. He is a first-ballot Hall of Famer, not that he will get to Cooperstown on the first ballot, or any ballot.
According to Oakland’s Ryan Thibodaux, who created an online vote tracker, Vizquel appeared on 28 percent of the first 104 ballots made public.
That should stun people who watched Vizquel play an almost magical brand of shortstop during a major-league career that began the year the A’s won the earthquake World Series (1989) and ended the year the San Francisco Giants won their second Series title (2012). He was with the Giants from 2005- through ’08.
But it doesn’t surprise me, even though 28 of the 31 players who had at least 2,877 hits — Vizquel’s career total — are in the Hall. The other three are Pete Rose (who has not appeared on a ballot), Barry Bonds and Rafael Palmeiro (both wearing the scarlet steroid letter). Bonds also is the only player to match or surpass Vizquel in hits and steals (404) who is not enshrined.
I’m not surprised because more Hall voters, particularly younger ones, devalue defense to the point they almost deny it exists, and face it, Vizquel was his generation’s Ozzie Smith, or the closest facsimile. Many voters also use “compiler” as a sort of epithet for a player like Vizquel.
Sure, he nearly had 3,000 hits, but do you see how many years it took him to get there? The proper response? Do you know how hard it is to last 24 seasons in the bigs?
Stats are important, and newer metrics that better compare players through different eras are valuable. But they are the sum of a player’s career. If you use numbers alone to shunt Vizquel into that mythical Hall of the Very Good, it’s a fair bet you did not see him play.
Sometimes a man is a Hall of Famer because, well, he just is.