Not even his family thinks that. He got 100% just because, finally, there weren’t any idiots who wanted to draw attention to themselves by not voting for an obvious choice.
It is possible of course that some writers vote strategically, casting votes to help players they feel need it more than the slam dunks. I cannot necessarily fault someone for that, because the system they use kind of makes you want to do that in years where it’s a busy ballot. The year Hank Aaron was elected there were a lot of good candidates; aside from the two men elected (Aaron and Frank Robinson) there were twelve other players who would eventually get in, and a few other popular candidates like Tony Oliva, Roger Maris, and Gil Hodges. I can understand someone feeling more than ten men deserve it and deciding to drop Aaron’s name, who would get in anyway, to try to get Thurman Munson in.
I personally don’t like strategic voting; my point is just I can see the logic, and so far as I am aware, no asshole wrote a Look At Me column about not voting for Aaron. Many, many Look At Me columns have been written about other candidates, though, such as the asshole who didn’t vote for Mike Schmidt because Schmidt allegedly didn’t sign enough autographs, the asshole who didn’t vote for Greg Maddux because he refused to vote for any player who ever played at any time PEDs might have been used by any other player, and the asshole who didn’t vote for Tom Glavine because he felt Glavine was cheating by convincing the umps to call strikes on pitches out of the strike zone.
Mind you, still a lot of idiocy in the balloting. Just not on the unanimity issue.
What major league baseball team do you think the Worcester Telegram covers? Hint: not the team that plays in Pittsburgh. It’s perfectly reasonable to describe Ballou as a Boston writer. After all, if not for Boston and its pro sports teams, he’d be reduced to covering the Holy Cross swimming and diving team.
More than that, Worcester has been a part of the Boston MSA since approximately forever. So it’s a legit description on that count too.
(RickJay doesn’t actually live in California, by the way, or anywhere nearby. I swear, New Englanders have the world’s worst sense of geography…)
I get that relievers don’t throw as many innings as starters, but when Rivera came into the game, he was often asked to perform in high-pressure situations. If a reliever has a bad inning, there’s rarely an opportunity to settle into the game next inning. It’s usually finish the game with a win, or get blamed for wasting an entire team’s 8-innings of effort. Being a closer isn’t like being a field goal kicker or coming off the bench to take the last shot in the NBA. It’s one guy having to face three or more individuals, having to out-think them, having to pitch to the situation. A reliever can do a lot of things right and still fail.
And Mariano did fail. Spectacularly. More than once. He failed in the ALDS against Cleveland in 1997. He failed against the Arizona Diamondbacks in 2001. He failed twice in 24 hours against Boston and 2004. What makes Rivera so remarkable is that he had the mental toughness to recover from these epic embarrassments and remain an elite pitcher. After giving up a mammoth home run to Albert Pujols in the NLCS (which the Astros still won), it took Brad Lidge nearly 3 years before he returned to post-season dominance. There are other examples of athletes failing on the biggest stage in other sports and never really returning to what they were before. Rivera’s arm was elite, but his mental toughness, his resilience was his greatest weapon.
An ESPN writer (Christina Kahrl) explains why she almost left Mariano Rivera off her ballot:
“Probably the most controversial thing I considered was dropping Mariano Rivera – he’s a slam-dunk Hall of Famer who didn’t need my vote to get in, and I would rather have guaranteed that guys like Sosa, Sheffield and Andruw Jones were on the ballot in the years to come. Because of the rule of 10, any vote for someone hurts everyone you don’t vote for, risking their elimination. But I also didn’t want to deal with the inevitable “You didn’t vote for Mo!” hysteria, since that’s what people would have gotten hung up on, not the continuing problem of limiting voters’ ballots to 10 names.”
I’ve visited California, but can’t say I live there.
You know what’s funny? I’ve also visited Worcester, and happen to know it’s darned close to Boston and is Red Sox country all the way. It’s what, just under an hour to Fenway Park if the traffic isn’t too awful? Let’s get serious here. Bill Ballou covers the Boston Red Sox. He is a Red Sox beat writer. He wrote a BOOK about the Red Sox. Of course I looked into the guy before describing him as a Boston writer, and in the context of discussing MLB, it is surely obvious that description means “a writer who primarily covers the team in Boston.”
I live in Oakville, Ontario (not California, btw) which is distinctly not the same municipality as Toronto. It doesn’t even border Toronto. It is, however, quite obviously in the market of the Toronto Blue Jays, and if I wrote columns about the Blue Jays and wrote a book about them, calling me a Toronto writer with respect to baseball would make quite a lot of sense.