I was fishing around on YouTube for something else, and found a link to this, for those who haven’t seen it.
Off Warren Spahn, too!
It’s a good thing it was a home run. With his speed on the base paths, he’d have been out at first on a ball into the left field corner.
Well, he may have been slowed down by some old aches and pains. 
I got it.
Not saying he’s a top 10, but Cecil Travis should be on the ballot. I can’t stand how MLB has this love affair with the military, yet he is forgotten. Him and several others should have been put in HoF years ago for service in WW2.
I do agree that Travis’ shot at the Hall was hurt by WWII. If he had come back at or near the same level, giving him war credit would have been reasonable. But it is too much of a stretch to say that he would have been guaranteed to have played at his prior level during those missing years-there simply isn’t enough of a career there for any war credit to put him over the line.
That would make an interesting exhibit in the Hall, if it doesn’t already exist. It obviously affected the careers of many players. Phil Rizzuto might have gone into the Hall on a writers ballot if he hadn’t spent three years of his prime to the Navy. Even a guy like Ted Williams lost quite a bit; had he played those three years, he would almost certainly have reached some major milestones, like 3000 hits, 2000 runs, 2000 rbi and 600 home runs.
You may vote for any person who has ever played shortstop in the history of the major leagues or major Negro League play.
The lists are purely a courtesy.
Please do vote, and by all means vote for Travis if you wish, or any other shortstop ever, unless they’ve already been elected (Honus Wagner.)
Alex Rodriguez
Cal Ripken Jr.
Robin Yount
Arky Vaughan
Ozzie Smith
Alan Trammel
Barry Larkin
Ernie Banks
Derek Jeter
Luke Appling
- Alex Rodriguez
- Pops Lloyd
- Arky Vaughan
- Cal Ripken
- Robin Yount
- Ernie Banks
- Alan Trammell
- Barry Larkin
- Luke Appling
- Ozzie Smith barely over Jeter
Time for someone to tally the votes up?
I’m waiting for more people to realize that the soul of a shortstop is in defensive play, and that leaving off the best defensive shortstop of the last 20 years (cough cough Omar Vizquel) is a travesty.
I’ll give it until Thursday morning, unless there are any objections. Perhaps this bump will get a few of our voters from earlier rounds to look in and cast a ballot.
His poor offense isn’t enough to offset his very good, but not stellar, defensive work. Oz has him beat on both ends pretty decisively. I’d simply rather have Vaughn’s bat or Appling’s on-base skills (he was probably the best batter in history when it came to spoiling good pitches with foul balls).
The best defensive ss in the last 20 years is Andrelton Simmons.
- Arod
- Cal Ripken
- Robin Yount
- Derek Jeter
- Ernie Banks
- Arky Vaughan
- Ozzie Smith
- George Davis
- Luke Appling
- Barry Larkin
Guy hit a career .273 with over 2800 hits. That’s nothing impressive by itself, but he wasn’t an offensive liability, unless you’re relying on your shortstop for extra base hitting. In every category but stolen bases, though, Vizquel beat Smith. Neither could hit for extra bases, Smith’s lifetime BA was ten points lower, and their OPS+ was pretty close to identical.
I said 20 years and not 30, because obviously Ozzie Smith is the greatest defensive shortstop ever. But even Ozzie didn’t have Omar’s .985 career fielding percentage over 24 years. Andrelton Simmons does look very impressive, I’ll give you that, but 5 years really isn’t enough time to determine what sort of player he is.
Andrelton Simmons only has four full seasons in the books so we’ll see. I admit I find his extraordinarily high defensive WAR to be… well, it’s kind of weird. His raw numbers are not superficially outstanding. Is there some illusion here?
Anyway, as to Omar Vizquel, I left him off my ballot too. Vizquel is a really interesting case, in that he has a lot of HOF markers;
- He played for a really long time
- He won a lot of Gold Gloves
- He was on many very good teams
The shots against him of course are simply that the stats say he was not a truly great player; his career WAR is about 46, which is well under the rough standard, and he only really had one season that even approached MVP-type. Vizquel WAS a great fielder, rated by B-Ref as the tenth most valuable defensive player of all time.
In an effort to try to take the discussion somewhere other than arguing over numbers, why don’t we try a Keltner List? We haven’t done that yet, have we? I have my own modified version of the Keltner List for the purpose of the SDMB Hall of Fame project:
- Was Omar Vizquel ever the best player in baseball or commonly said or argued to be the best player in baseball?
No. He wasn’t and no one ever seriously said he was.
- Was Omar Vizquel the best player on his team?
No. He was not. Vizquel has some damn good teammates, of course, and it’s no insult to not be as good as Manny Ramirez, but he was never the best player on any team he was on. In his very best season, 1999, he was not the best middle infielder on his team.
- Was he the best player at his position, either in baseball or in his league?
No. This is a bit of an unfair question because Omar was a contemporary of a lot of great shortstops, but he was pretty obviously not the equal of A-Rod, Jeter, or, when he was healthy, Nomar. There were usually always several other guys who were just as good, too.
- Did he have an impact on a number of pennant races and playoff series?
To some extent, yes. Omar played on many Indians teams that reached the playoffs, and I think one has to consider just what a remarkable concept that was at the time. There were no seasons where Omar made the difference between making the playoffs and not, but he has to be given credit for helping a moribund franchise become a really good one. Omar didn’t play especially well or especially badly in the playoffs. He did not play well in either World Series he was in, for what that’s worth.
- Was Omar good enough to play regularly after he passed his prime?
Yes, obviously. Most of his value came after the age of 30.
- Did the writers of this player’s time give him MVP Awards, or a lot of MVP votes? How did he generally fare in MVP voting?
No. Vizquel only once got any MVP votes at all, in 1999, his best season, when he got 3 points total. Whatever else the BBWAA thought of him they did not consider him a serious MVP candidate. Billy Koch got more MVP votes than Omar Vizquel did.
- How about All-Star Games? Was this player in a lot of All-Star games?
Nope. Vizquel was in three All-Star games, a very low total for someone being proposed for the Hall of Fame. It’s not impossible - Robin Yount was only in three All Star Games. It is unusual, though.
- Are most comparable players in the real Hall of Fame?
There aren’t actually a lot of statistically comparable players at all (itself a bit of a point in Vizquel’s favor.) The most similar are Luis Aparicio, Rabbit Maranville, Ozzie Smith, Bill Dahlen and Dave Concepcion, in that order; after that the comparisons aren’t really very similar. The first three are in the Hall of Fame; Dahlen and Concepcion aren’t.
With regards to Aparicio and Maranville, both are pretty marginal Hall of Famers, to be honest. So let’s talk about the obvious comparison everyone makes, which is Ozzie Smith.
Ozzie Smith was a WAY greater player than Omar Vizquel. I mean no insult to Omar Vizquel, but there is a huge gulf of difference in value between them. B-R puts Smith at 75 WAR and Vizquel at 45 and I honestly think it’s that big a difference. The two players do look superficially similar. Both were light-hitting glove wizards, both got late starts and had their very best years in their 30s, both were bad hitters when they started but got better, and both had long careers for a shortstop.
But Smith was clearly he better player when you consider context. Ozzie Smith had his prime in the National League in the 1980s and early 90s, when the average team scored about 680, 700 runs a season. Vizquel’s prime came at the height of the steroid era, when offensive levels were incredibly high and teams were scoring 800 runs a season quite regularly. When you filter their numbers through the lens of context, Smith was consistently a more valuable offensive player. Boozahol’s claim that their OBPs are “essentially identical” is not really true; Smith’s OBP is measurably more impressive. When Smith was in his prime the average league OBP was about .320. When Vizquel was in his it was about .340. That’s a big difference.
As to defense; the numbers happen to agree with my honest opinion, which is that Omar Vizquel was a really, really good fielder for a very long time, but Ozzie Smith was the greatest fielder at any position in the history of baseball. It’s like comparing Fred McGriff’s bat, which was awfully damn good, to Ted Williams.
- If this player was the best player on his team,. is it likely that team would win a pennant?
The average Omar Vizquel season in his prime run was about, I dunno, a 3.9 WAR. I doubt any team whose BEST player had a 3.9 WAR could even have a winning record.
- Is there anything special or different about this player, outside of his pure value as a baseball player, that merits consideration?
Not that I can think of.
That’s a lot of “no” answers.
There were a lot of great candidates for this position, and I’m not surpised to see a much wider field of “others receiving votes” here relative to our number of voters. As with catchers, the pull between defensive and offensive skills for the position really gives you some great choices here. All that being said, there was a huge dividing line between the players who got in, and the also-rans.
Turned the Double Play:
Cal Ripken, Jr. (16)
Ozzie Smith (16)
Robin Yount (16)
Ernie Banks (15)
Arky Vaughn (15)
Luke Appling (14)
Alex Rodriguez (13)
Barry Larkin (11)
Derek Jeter (11)
Alan Trammel (9)
Dropped the Ball:
Luis Aparicio, Lou Boudreau (4)
Pop Lloyd, George Davis (3)
Dave Concepcion, Joe Sewell, Omar Vizquel (2)
Joe Cronin, Peewee Reese, Phil Rizzuto, Troy Tulowitzki (1)
I’ll throw up a thread for left fielders in a bit.
I believe it’s the first one that matches my ballot exactly. The only also-ran I even considered for a moment was Omar.
Just rub it in a little.