2021 Hall of Fame thread

[shadow_operative 15932]

also, lol at the idea that Bonds should have been "a unanimous vote without question". if anyone should spaz out over an opinion in this thread it's that one. 

[shadow_operative 15932]

Just now, Lobo said:

No, almost everybody knows (including my wife) that you have to be out of the game for awhile before you're eligible to be voted upon.

can anyone here explain to me why this keeps being brought up? when did i ever say otherwise? i mean jesus, is that the entire genesis of Trey's childish temper tantrum? the fact that he got upset about something that nobody ever said? christ, i feel like i'm on the football board right now. FIRE TOM HERMAN.

[Guest Lobo]

I don't think we conjugate verbs the same way in my portion of the time-space continuum, so I'll just say I hope things are better for humanity in the future.  

Tip your hat to Mike Trout in Cooperstown tomorrow for me.  

[shadow_operative 15932]

you know that if Mo hadn't already been voted in unanimously that i would have said, "i think that Ichiro should be..." as opposed to "I think Ichiro should have been", right? right? 

[Guest Lobo]

Look man, I didn't minor in Spanish at the great University of Texas to conjugate no hall of fame future imperfect preterite.  I have Dominicans do that for me.  

Edited December 3, 2020 by Lobo

[Trey3216 15452]

53 minutes ago, Lobo said:

No, almost everybody knows (including my wife) that you have to be out of the game for awhile before you're eligible to be voted upon.  Ichiro certainly deserves to be a first ballot guy, but not unanimous.  If that's the debate you're looking for.  

Also, is Trey3216---the poster formerly known as Derka?  I can't keep up with current poster names, how the hell do y'all know who certain posters used to be?  Mind bottled...

Lol.  Isn’t shadow_operative  Derka?   

[Trey3216 15452]

54 minutes ago, shadow_operative said:

also, lol at the idea that Bonds should have been "a unanimous vote without question". if anyone should spaz out over an opinion in this thread it's that one. 

Bonds & Griffey were the best players in the game, for a long while.  Bonds had 3 MVP’s before the steroid era ever existed.  He already had over 400 HR’s by that time. Dude was a sure fire pick for HOF and shot up because he hated seeing jokers that weren’t half the player he was like Sosa and McGwire take the limelight.   He’s so much better than them.  Go look at how many actual swings he actually took during a few of those years.  It’s comical how much better he was than the other roiders. It’s because he was that much better beforehand 

[shadow_operative 15932]

you know that if Mo hadn't already been voted in unanimously that i would have said, "i think that Ichiro should be..." as opposed to "I think Ichiro should have been", right? right? 

[Beau Vine 55859]

17 minutes ago, shadow_operative said:

you know that if Mo hadn't already been voted in unanimously that i would have said, "i think that Ichiro should be..." as opposed to "I think Ichiro should have been", right? right? 

Look man, I didn't minor in Spanish at the great University of Texas to conjugate no hall of fame future imperfect preterite.  I have Dominicans do that for me.

[Guest Lobo]

Man, I am freaking out right now.  The snozzberries taste like snozzberries.  

[Beau Vine 55859]

18 minutes ago, Lobo said:

Man, I am freaking out right now.  The snozzberries taste like snozzberries.  

https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/little-known-sci-fi-fact-incredibly-filthy-joke-hidden-willy-wonka

[shadow_operative 15932]

5 hours ago, Trey3216 said:

Bonds & Griffey were the best players in the game, for a long while.  Bonds had 3 MVP’s before the steroid era ever existed.  He already had over 400 HR’s by that time. Dude was a sure fire pick for HOF and shot up because he hated seeing jokers that weren’t half the player he was like Sosa and McGwire take the limelight.   He’s so much better than them.  Go look at how many actual swings he actually took during a few of those years.  It’s comical how much better he was than the other roiders. It’s because he was that much better beforehand 

you don't need to explain to me how good Barry Bonds was, just like i shouldn't have to explain to you that a guy who was a cheating steroid user, a liar, an asshole, a racist, and oh yeah, a stupid, lying, asshole, racist cheater, is a terrible choice for someone who should "without argument" be a unanimous HoFer when there is zero precedent for that distinction. 

Griffey was the obvious choice to be the first guy to go in unanimously, but once he makes it in without a unanimous vote the precedent has been set: Ken Griffey Jr "was not worthy" of unanimous induction. ipso facto the first guy to be unanimous should be some kind of otherworldly talent + the right personality (whether you like it or not this has always played a factor in the voting), so obviously worthy that everyone can agree on him unanimously. Ipso facto the greats from the steroid era are out of the discussion on principle alone. There will never be a unanimous consensus on steroid era players and The Hall. period. ipso facto the term "unanimous" is off the table for a guy like Barry Bonds, even if he'd had the personality of Sean Casey.

Now, if it ended up that the first guy to be unanimously voted in (not that someone greater than KGJ was just going to come along in the first place) had been Ichiro, Pujols, Mike Trout, or someone like that, then sure, those guys check all of the boxes for "unanimous HoFer". Who would seriously cause a fuss over it being one of those guys? Hopefully nobody. However, *in my opinion*, neither a steroid-using cheater nor a fucking closer even approaches meeting the criteria for "first ever unanimous HoFer". try not to freak out over that opinion. 

Edited December 4, 2020 by shadow_operative

[Trey3216 15452]

4 minutes ago, shadow_operative said:

you don't need to explain to me how good Barry Bonds was, just like i shouldn't have to explain to you that a guy who was a cheating steroid user, a liar, an asshole, a racist, and oh yeah, a stupid, lying, asshole, racist cheater, is a terrible choice for someone who should "without argument" be a unanimous HoFer when there is zero precedent for that distinction. 

Griffey was the obvious choice to be the first guy to go in unanimously, but once he makes it in without a unanimous vote the precedent has been set: Ken Griffey Jr "was not worthy" of unanimous induction. ipso facto the first guy to be unanimous should be some kind of otherworldly talent, so obviously worthy that everyone can agree on him unanimously. Ipso facto the greats from the steroid era are out of the discussion on principle alone. There will never be a unanimous consensus on steroid era players and The Hall. period. ipso facto the term "unanimous" is off the table for a guy like Barry Bonds, even if he'd had the personality of Sean Casey.

Now, if it ended up that the first guy to be unanimously voted in (not that someone greater than KGJ was just going to come along in the first place) had been Ichiro, Pujols, Mike Trout, or someone like that, then sure, those guys check all of the boxes for "unanimous HoFer". Who would seriously cause a fuss over it being one of those guys? However, *in my opinion*, neither a steroid-using cheater nor a fucking closer even approaches meeting the criteria for "first ever unanimous HoFer". try not to freak out over that opinion. 

How many more times do you feel the need to use the term ipso facto?    One who overuses the term ipso facto may very well be a fucking cunttastic cock-gobbler, ipso facto.   
 

 

[shadow_operative 15932]

 

[Trey3216 15452]

32 minutes ago, shadow_operative said:

 

By way of your regarded aggression, and inability to even partially reason, you are ipso facto, regarded.   You’re arguing with yourself about a non-sequitur of your own creation.  

[Trey3216 15452]

6 hours ago, shadow_operative said:

you know that if Mo hadn't already been voted in unanimously that i would have said, "i think that Ichiro should be..." as opposed to "I think Ichiro should have been", right? right? 

Right. Right.  But Mo was and Ichiro won’t, and Ichiro isn’t up for another 4 years.  Your argument is dogshit, and it’s dogshit that dogs won’t even eat when they choose to eat their own shit.   It’s the shut they take while on a walk and kick it all over the place to spread around.   Marking your territory with shit is a shitass way to go.   Have fun with it.  

[shadow_operative 15932]

lol ok. even i can't wrap my head around getting this upset over such an innocuous comment. THIS MOTHERFUCKER THINKS ICHIRO SHOULD BE UNANIMOUS!!! buena suerte hermano. buena suerte. 

Edited December 4, 2020 by shadow_operative

[Trey3216 15452]

12 hours ago, shadow_operative said:

you know that if Mo hadn't already been voted in unanimously that i would have said, "i think that Ichiro should be..." as opposed to "I think Ichiro should have been", right? right? 

Somehow had a necro double post

Edited December 4, 2020 by Trey3216

[Trey3216 15452]

6 hours ago, shadow_operative said:

lol ok. even i can't wrap my head around getting this upset over such an innocuous comment. THIS MOTHERFUCKER THINKS ICHIRO SHOULD BE UNANIMOUS!!! buena suerte hermano. buena suerte. 

I’m not upset at all.  You are the one talking in circles of obscurity.  

[dcar00 14947]

To be clear if Williams, Mays and Aaron weren't unanimous then no one should be. I used Griffey because he is the most obvious non steroid user that came close to them.

[Beau Vine 55859]

talking in circles of obscurity.  

Motto-worthy, IMO

[Guest Lobo]

On 12/4/2020 at 3:23 PM, dcar00 said:

To be clear if Williams, Mays and Aaron weren't unanimous then no one should be. I used Griffey because he is the most obvious non steroid user that came close to them.

After all these years, I still can't believe Aaron wasn't the first unanimous player.  At the time of his first ballot appearance, he was the career leader in HR's, 2nd on the list of career base hits (for all his power, he managed to hit above .300 in 14 different seasons with two titles to show), he was 2nd on the list of career runs scored, 1st on the list of career RBI, 1st in total bases (keep in mind stats like this were far more important to the writers/voters of the day), and did all this while averaging LESS than 70 strikeouts per season.  

But 10 voters looked at all that and thought, "Nah, he was good but he wasn't Roger Maris good" (Maris would receive 69 votes that year, including 9 of the guys who didn't vote for Aaron).  Not picking on Maris, but Aaron wasn't just the home-run king, he stole 240 bases, multiple gold gloves, and a .305 career hitter. He and Mays are the best all-around players from the entire second half of the 20th century.  I'm sure race played a factor in the voting.  I always felt like if Aaron didn't get the first unanimous honor, then nobody should ever get it.  Nothing against Rivera, but 16 seasons as a dominant closer isn't the same to me as being the best all-around player at your entire sport for nearly a quarter-century.  /rant

Of course, if Ted Williams doesn't spend 5 seasons (of peak ages) heading off to bomb Japan and Korea, this is all probably for naught and he's the first unanimous player in the HOF and the honor probably holds for perpetuity.  

If the Hall and its writer-voters feel that it's unfair to compare ballot voting from one era to the next, they should take a cue from themselves.  Their Veterans Committees deal with not only different eras, but the early era (1870's-1910's), the Negro Leagues, steroid era, etc.  As such, I submit there's a citizen oversight committee that looks at the different eras of HOF Voters.  The ancient era when they were voting on guys based solely on their mustaches, the racist era, the golden era, the era of voters who refused to acknowledge DH and Reliever are permanent and important parts of the game, the era of voters who put too much fucking emphasis on Relievers (I'm looking at you Hoyt Wilehm/Bruce Sutter fuckers), the era when everybody who won more than a couple Yankee World Series gets 50% of the vote automatically, the era where not enough attention was paid to guys who used steroids, the era where too much voter attention was paid to guys who used steroids, our new era where way too many goofy sabremetric numbers are also making it tough compare decade to decade, etc.  The way those guys look at different times for the game (and I applaud that), so should we take a look at different times for the writers of the game.  We're at a time already where some player tweets you back with some insult, and a few years later...you don't vote for him.  Time was, a reporter felt snubbed, he'd shut up about it lest Ted Williams take a bat to his fucking head.  That was the way it was back then, and we liked it, and we loved it.  

 

[Beau Vine 55859]

I don't understand why people get so hung up on this unanimous bullshit.  Who cares?  If you're in, you're in.

And as usual, JoePos had the best examination of this:

Quote

“Mariano Rivera is tied with Robin Ventura for career wins above replacement. He’s pitched 24% of the innings Greg Maddux pitched in his career. The notion he’s a unanimous Hall of Famer is insane.”

— Tweet from Michael Needham, Chief of Staff for Marco Rubio

Let’s go back to the beginning, to the last week of January, 1936, when the committee in charge of the very first Baseball Hall of Fame vote was doing the official count. It was exciting. There were 226 baseball writer votes to count, and the committee members knew that any player on the 51-person ballot who got 75 percent of the vote was going to the be inducted into this Hall of Fame that was being built for baseball’s centennial celebration.

Who would get in? Christy Mathewson? Tris Speaker? Cy Young?

There were two players everyone knew would get in. And so, inside the room, there was a side bet on those two: Who would get more votes — Ty Cobb or Babe Ruth?

As the first 100 votes were counted, that bet seemed pointless: Cobb and Ruth were named on all 100 ballots. They were unanimous. Well, of course they were. Ruth had only just retired but he was one of those rare players who was a legend in his own time. Come on: 714 home runs? Who could vote against that? And Cobb? He hit .366 for his career! He hit .400 three different times! The baseball literati of the age believed that Cobb, not Ruth, was the greatest player of them all.

So things were going along as expected.

Then it happened: A ballot was counted that did not have Babe Ruth on it.

“The committee was amazed,” the Associated Press reported. “Vote counting stopped momentarily for a discussion on how anyone could leave the Great Ruth off of the list of immortals.”

Well, the committee members thought, it could have been an oversight. There would be many oversights in the years and votes ahead. But soon after the first non-Ruth ballot, they counted a second one. Then a third.

Still, Cobb’s vote record remained clean. And then it happened: They came across a ballot without Ty Cobb’s name. The committee stopped counting again. They tried to make sense of it again. Finally, they went on.

They would see quite a few more quirks as they counted, including one ballot that did not have Ruth or Cobb on it (or Tris Speaker, for that matter). But by then, the committee members had stopped being surprised.

In the end, four people did not vote for Ty Cobb.

Eleven did not vote for Babe Ruth or Honus Wagner.

Twenty-one did not vote for Christy Mathewson.

An astonishing 37 did not vote for Walter Johnson.

The shock quickly moved on to celebration. These five were not elected unanimously, no, but they were elected convincingly, by acclamation, and they were the first class of the Baseball Hall of Fame. People cheered across America. And the four people who failed to vote for Ty Cobb were forgotten.

But those four writers set the stage for the perpetual play that never ends.

No one has ever been elected unanimously to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

The inaugural Hall of Fame class. Front row: Eddie Collins, Babe Ruth, Connie Mack, Cy Young; rear row, Hans Wagner, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Tris Speaker, Napoleon Lajoie, George Sisler and Walter Johnson. (AP Photo / File)
OK, well, wait a minute. That last sentence, you know, that “No one has ever been elected unanimously to the Baseball Hall of Fame” sentence, it isn’t quite true. Lots of people have been elected unanimously. Heck, Lee Smith was elected unanimously this year. Yes, that was a veteran’s committee ballot, and — no exaggeration — dozens and dozens of people have been elected unanimously on veteran’s ballots, from Joe Torre (as manager) to Josh Gibson to Kenesaw Mountain Landis. So we need to define our terms here.

So maybe it is more right to say that no player has ever been elected unanimously by the Baseball Writers Association of America.

Except … that’s not exactly true either. In 1939, just months after Lou Gehrig played his last game and then pronounced himself the luckiest man on the face of the earth, the Baseball Writers voted unanimously to suspend the rules and just place Gehrig in the Hall of Fame without an election. It wasn’t exactly a vote, but it was unanimous.

Anyway, at that point, nobody cared at all about a player getting voted in “unanimously.” That wasn’t even a thing. The Hall of Fame was so new, the voting so haphazard and confusing, that unanimity wasn’t on anybody’s radar.

So when did Hall of Fame unanimity become an issue? Well, it has been an evolution. It was a pebble rolled down a mountain in 1936 by that first schmo who left Ty Cobb off his ballot, probably by accident. Then it rolled and rolled, getting bigger and bigger, until it became so large that it makes Senate Chiefs of Staff fret about Hall of Fame injustice.

1953: The (non-)election of Joe DiMaggio.

After Gehrig’s special election, there wasn’t a player who could realistically garner unanimous support … until Joe DiMaggio retired in 1951. Oh, did the New York writers idolize Joe D. He was, to them, the ideal player — stoic, graceful, silent and (as they often told you) he never once missed a cutoff man or threw to the wrong base. He hit in 56 consecutive games in 1941, and believe it or not there was some talk in that moment of inducting him into the Hall of Fame automatically just for that achievement.

There have been many efforts, at different times in baseball history, to create a “Go Directly to Cooperstown, Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect $200” card. This really came to a head in 1953 when the influential writer Joe Williams pushed a proposal that anyone who hit .400 in a season or threw a perfect game would automatically be put into the Hall of Fame. The proposal was approved and promoted by Commissioner Ford Frick himself. It was eventually spurned by the writers, but it was a real thing for a while there.

Anyway, in 1953, DiMaggio had been retired for about a year, and some of the New York writers had this notion that the Yankee Clipper, like Gehrig, ought to go in into the Hall of Fame unanimously. There was no possibility of a Gehrig-like special election — DiMaggio was quite healthy and, at the time, together with Marilyn Monroe — so instead the New Yorkers badgered their fellow writers incessantly. It backfired. DiMaggio got just 44.3 percent of the vote.

The post-election fireworks were something to see.

“Maybe Marilyn Monroe has more admirers in the BBWAA than she suspects,” wrote the New York Mirror’s Dan Parker, suggesting that jealousy cost DiMaggio.

“Had not the sportswriters in New York taken the stump on behalf of DiMag there’s a slim possibility he might have made it,” St. Louis writer Robert L. Burnets wrote. “The writers in New York will speed his entrance into the Hall if they’d just quit telling the rest of us how we should vote.”

“What it amounted to,” New York World-Telegram’s Bill Roeder said, “was the baseball writers told Joe DiMaggio to wait at the doorstep until they’re good and ready to let him in.”

Here’s the thing: If the current rules had been in place so that DiMaggio did not appear on the Hall of Fame ballot until he had been retired for five years, there’s a chance that he would have been elected unanimously. It’s not likely, but there’s a chance.

But the five-year rule didn’t come into effect until after the DiMaggio mess — it’s basically the Joe DiMaggio rule — and so this whole thing became a fiasco. DiMaggio should not even have been on the next year’s ballot, but he was grandfathered in and again failed to get elected.

The embarrassed writers finally put him in in 1955, setting up the “Hey, if Joe DiMaggio wasn’t good enough to get elected unanimously…” argument that would be repeated again and again for more than 50 years.

1962: Feller falls 10 votes short; Robinson barely makes it.

The Hall of Fame class of 1962 — Bob Feller and Jackie Robinson — is remarkable for many reasons. Many people at the time thought Feller had the stuff to become the first unanimous inductee into the Hall.

The aforementioned Joe Williams made the case:

“Feller’s credentials are so overpowering, his election to the upstate pantheon should be unanimous. The Cleveland fireballer was incontestably the greatest pitcher of his generation. If the war hadn’t taken four prime years off his career, chances are he would have upped his 266 total by another 90 to 100 victories.”

Feller didn’t quite get there. He fell 10 votes short, which probably didn’t make the writers feel too bad considering that on the day of the announcement, Feller’s story lambasting the Hall of Fame was printed in the Saturday Evening Post.*

*Feller’s big argument was that the Hall of Fame voters didn’t respect modern players enough, but he also spent a lot of time focusing on Satchel Paige. Feller lived an interesting and contradictory life; he spent the last 25 years of it sort of being the living embodiment of the “Hey kids, get off my lawn” guy.

But say this: He was an absolute one-man wrecking crew for trying to get Satchel Paige elected to the Hall of Fame. Ted Williams gets a lot of (deserved) credit for using part of his 1966 Hall of Fame speech to make a Hall plea for Paige and Josh Gibson and other great Negro Leagues players. But credit where credit is due — Feller was doing it earlier. He didn’t just write about it in the Saturday Evening Post at that moment when he had the stage, he gave dozens of interviews after he was elected where he talked as much about Paige’s greatness as his own.

Then there was Jackie Robinson. If the vote were held now, Robinson undoubtedly would be elected unanimously. But in 1962, there was no chance at all. “Too many people don’t like me,” Robinson said. Joe Williams, in the column referenced above, made it clear that Robinson might make it but in large part because of sentimentality and the desire not to be called a racist.

“There are other eligibles who rate ahead of Robinson, Allie Reynolds, Red Ruffing, Marty Marion, Luke Appling to name names that quickly come to mind,” he wrote. “But since he does qualify on merit, substantial if not superlative, failure to elect him would almost certainly be attributed to unwholesome motives.”

Imagine someone thinking Marty Marion was a better player than Jackie Robinson.

(Musial: Focus on Sport / Getty Images)
1966 and 1969: Williams and Musial

Before the election results were revealed in 1966, The Sporting News sent out a query asking Hall of Fame voters to anonymously reveal their ballots (they were kind of an early-day Ryan Thibodaux.) They got 26 responses.

Twenty-five of them voted for Ted Williams.

One did not.

“The one writer who bypassed Williams in the poll,” The Sporting News explained, “did so because of a personal grudge that he will never forget.”

The funny thing is that in 1966, nobody seemed to blame that writer. Nobody thought that Williams, who had warred with reporters all his career, had any shot at being named unanimously. After Williams received 93.4 percent of the vote (only 20 writers didn’t vote for Williams), there was story after story about the magnanimousness of the writers for looking past their personal feelings and still voting for the man.

“This is a wonderful day for me,” Williams said. “I can’t think of anything a ballplayer would want more.”

While nobody thought Williams would be elected unanimously, lots of people thought Stan Musial might be. In many ways, 1969 is the watershed moment of our story. If anyone was going to get elected unanimously, it was baseball’s Perfect Knight, the most beloved player of his time and the National League hit leader, Stan the Man.

When the year began, Red Smith himself — the most beloved and persuasive sportswriter of his or perhaps any time — made the case that Musial deserved to be the first unanimous choice. He was probably the first to make a big deal out of the character issue. He wrote that Cobb and Ruth fell short of unanimity because of their flaws as people:

“Since it is inconceivable that Cobb or Ruth could have been passed up by oversight, chances are there were voters in 1936 who felt that the Hall of Fame should not be a memorial to a man who got into fistfights and carried a knife, and others who disqualified Ruth because he was a glutton who drank whiskey and used naughty words.”

And then Smith made the point that Musial had none of these shortcomings.

“This is a more permissive age, yet even by the puritanical standards of 1936, Musial would qualify,” Smith wrote. “He has always been trustworthy, loyal, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. Furthermore, he hit more baseballs safely than any man except Ty Cobb.

“If he isn’t chosen unanimously, it will recall the case of the football coach who, dangerously ill, received a message reading: ‘By a vote of 4-3, the faculty board of athletics wishes you a speedy recovery.’”

Smith started a trend. A couple of days later, the AP wrote a story that said, “More than 200 veteran members of the BBWAA figure to make Stan Musial their unanimous choice to be enshrined in the game’s Hall of Fame.” The New York Times’ Arthur Daley dedicated a full column to the subject.

“It’s unthinkable that any of the Lodge Brothers would be so derelict in his duty and so blind to the obvious that he would fail to include Musial on his ballot,” Daley wrote. “But there are rock-heads and dopes in every organization.”

Yes. There are indeed rock-heads and dopes. Not only did Musial not get in unanimously, 23 writers left him off their ballots — more misses then Ted Williams. Musial took it in stride, as you would expect: “I wasn’t worried about that,” he said happily. “In this country the majority rules. And that’s a great thing.”

Mantle and Mays

In 1974, Mickey Mantle missed by 43 votes. The Sporting News was apoplectic.

“The Mick’s credentials are so overwhelming,” they wrote in an editorial, “that it’s hard to understand why 43 writers failed to include his name on their ballots. … More likely, there are some writers who are dead set against anyone being named to Cooperstown unanimously.”

They then pointed out the obvious: The longer this went on, the less likely it would be for any player to become the first unanimous selection.

“It’s appalling,” they continued, “that some people feel what has not happened before should not be accomplished now. That kind of thinking would take us back to the horse-and-buggy days. … Certainly, it’s deplorable that Cobb and Ruth were not named on every ballot in 1936, but the sins of the writers of that period should not be repeated by other BBWAA members.”

But they were repeated. Again and again. In 1979, Willie Mays came up for election. Who in the world would not vote for Willie Mays? The familiar headlines appeared in newspapers: “Will Mays be a Unanimous Choice?”

But by now, everyone knew the answer before the election even began.

“Could anyone in any election today get a unanimous vote?” asked Jack Lang, the BBWAA’s longtime secretary. “There are always the dissidents.”

There were 23 dissidents on Willie Mays, same as for Musial (though Mays had a higher percentage because there were more voters). Three of the four writers who covered Mays in New York did not vote for him, though one later said, pathetically, that he simply had forgotten to put Mays on his ballot.

“If Jesus Christ was a candidate for the Hall of Fame,” Lang grumbled, “I don’t believe he’d get a unanimous vote from the 12 Apostles — if they were writers.”

No, it wasn’t a great look. The Sporting News went for blood by putting a box in its “Voice of the Fan” section:

“We realize that nobody has ever been a unanimous selection in Hall of Fame balloting. However, we offer space in Voice of the Fan to any of the 23 writers who would like to explain their reasons for ignoring Mays. Letters, though, should be limited to approximately 100 words.”

It goes without saying that no one took up the offer.

Aaron at bat just before his 714th home run at Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati, Ohio. (Bettmann via Getty Images)
Henry Aaron and others

There was something different about Henry Aaron’s case for unanimity: He openly went for it. The other players had (publicly) said that it didn’t matter if they were chosen unanimously, that it was just an honor to get elected, and all the right political words. But Aaron, who had endured so much on his way to 755 home runs and the all-time record in total bases, who carried himself with such dignity, didn’t see it that way.

He didn’t campaign for himself, or anything like that. But in his mind, someone had to be elected unanimously. And he didn’t see why it shouldn’t be him.

“If you talk about what happens between the white lines, I broke records,” he said. “I don’t see how anyone could not vote for me. If a player deserves to be in by unanimous vote, he should be accorded that honor.”

Aaron came closer than anyone had since the first ballot. He fell nine votes short. The BBWAA hid the identities of the nine who didn’t vote for him — but in a rather pitiful effort to show that it wasn’t pure racism that drove those votes, they released one non-Aaron ballot that did check off African-American great Frank Robinson.

They didn’t even try to explain what sort of logic it would take for someone to vote for Frank Robinson and not vote for Hank Aaron.

After Willie Mays and Hank Aaron fall short of unanimity, what’s even left? Sixteen people didn’t vote for Cincinnati Reds great Johny Bench, which led his old teammate Pete Rose to say: “I ask myself, ‘How could someone not vote for him?’ They’ll say, ‘Well even Babe Ruth wasn’t unanimous.’ But that don’t make it right.”

A lot of people speculated at the time that it would actually be Rose who would be the first unanimous choice. As you know, that didn’t quite work out. But Rose does play a fairly big role in our story. In 1992, Tom Seaver was up for election. And that was the same year that Rose was supposed to be on the ballot but was pulled by the Hall of Fame, enraging the BBWAA.

Seaver was more or less the perfect candidate. He was the pitcher of his time, a 300-game winner, a three-time Cy Young Award winner, the star of the storied Miracle Mets, one of the biggest stars across all sports in the 1970s. There wasn’t a knock on him. And he came so close to doing it. He got 425 out of 430 votes, 98.8 percent, the highest percentage in BBWAA Hall of Fame history up to that point.

The five misses? Well, that’s where Pete Rose came in. Three of the misses came from Paul Hagen, Bob Hertzel and Bob Hunter, who sent in blank ballots to protest the fact that Pete Rose was left off the ballot. If you send in a blank ballot, it’s like voting no on everybody.

The other two misses? Pure BBWAA madness. One was from an old New York Times writer named Deane McGowan, already retired, who left off Seaver because he refused to vote for any player on the first ballot.

The other was a writer named Bud Tucker, who had just gotten out of open heart surgery when he filled out his ballot and simply overlooked Seaver’s name.

I want you to think about these voters the next time anyone writes about the sanctity of the BBWAA never voting in a player unanimously.

On and on it went. Steve Carlton then finished 20 votes shy. Mike Schmidt in 1996 fell 16 votes short, one of those from a writer who enthusiastically wrote about his belief that Schmidt was a jerk who treated kids and teammates badly.

In 1999, Nolan Ryan fell six votes shy and George Brett nine votes shy.

And then came Cal Ripken.

Present day: Ripken to Mariano

So who should have been elected unanimously? If you look through the 20th century at the players who sparked conversations about unanimity, you come up with 15 names (not counting Gehrig and Roberto Clemente, who were both elected by special ballot).

The fifteen, as mentioned throughout this piece, are:

Ty Cobb
Babe Ruth
Joe DiMaggio
Bob Feller
Ted Williams
Stan Musial
Mickey Mantle
Willie Mays
Henry Aaron
Johnny Bench
Pete Rose (with an asterisk)
Tom Seaver
Mike Schmidt
Nolan Ryan
George Brett
Then came a new century, and in 2008 the candidate was Ripken. Nobody could think of a single reason to not vote for Cal. Lookit: He broke Gehrig’s record. Two-time MVP. Gold Glove shortstop. Plus there were those crediting him for saving baseball after the 1994 strike.

“He’s got a shot,” Brooks Robinson said of Ripken being unanimous.

“I don’t know what criteria you could use to decide not to vote for him,” Ripken’s old teammate Mike Flanagan said.

“If anybody has a chance — or close to it — I think it’s Cal Ripken,” writer Peter Schmuck said.

It wasn’t Ripken. There wasn’t even any suspense about it. A day before the election came out, a writer named Paul Ladewski went public with the fact that he sent in a blank ballot because he didn’t have enough information to consider the merits of players from the steroid era. He insisted that he didn’t suspect Ripken of using, but, hey, he couldn’t be sure.

Ladewski wasn’t the only one. Ripken fell eight votes short.

Lately, the unanimous candidates have been pouring in, fast and furious. In 2014, Greg Maddux seemed to have a shot. He fell 16 votes short. This time the writer who broke the ice before the vote was even announced was MLB.com’s Ken Gurnick, who sent in a ballot with only Jack Morris because Morris was the only player he felt absolutely sure didn’t use steroids.

The next year, Randy Johnson felt 15 votes short in 2015.

The next year, Ken Griffey just about did it. By 2016, the aforementioned Ryan Thibodaux had long been posting his popular Hall of Fame ballot spreadsheet. For the first time, people could follow Hall of Fame voting in real time. And that meant people could see that Griffey had a real chance. Every single person who publicly revealed a ballot voted for Griffey.

But Griffey didn’t quite get there. He fell three votes short. Three … anonymous … votes … short.

That got a little bit ugly. Numerous people demanded that the three come forward and explain their vote. The BBWAA made a strong pitch to make all votes public (a pitch the Hall of Fame itself denied). But perhaps the least appetizing part of it all was that what should have been a joyful Griffey Hall of Fame celebration moment was tempered a bit because nobody could quite make sense of those three who left him off the ballot.

Thing is, if you look at the history of it all: It isn’t surprising that Griffey fell short. The surprising part is that he got so close. What did Griffey have that Maddux, Ripken, Johnson and other recent immortals lacked?

Part of it was his charisma, sure, the joy he inspired, the coolness factor.

But I think another part of it is this: Many people (most people?) are sick of this non-unanimous garbage. You look back on it now: It’s embarrassing. Four schmoes don’t vote for Cobb? The BBWAA screws up the DiMaggio vote? A few writers for odd, unknown, probably petty reasons don’t vote for Musial, Mays or Aaron, Ripken, Griffey or Maddux?

This isn’t a tradition. No, it’s an accident of randomness, negligence, stupidity and personal vendettas.

It is a sham. And more and more people seem to know it.

All of this finally brings us back around to the top quote from Michael Needham about Mariano Rivera that got the Twitterverse worked up for a while. Needham doesn’t seem to be saying Rivera should not go to the Hall. His later tweets suggest that while he thinks including closers in the Hall is dubious, Rivera should be an exception because he was so great.

What Needham (and plenty of others) have questioned is this: Should Rivera as a closer be the first to be unanimous?

One answer to that question is no, of course he shouldn’t be first. As stated: Ty Cobb should have been first. Joe DiMaggio should have been first. Ted Williams … Stan Musial … Willie Mays … Henry Aaron … Jackie Robinson … Tom Seaver … Cal Ripken … Greg Maddux … Ken Griffey … all of those guys and more should have been first. But they weren’t.

And there’s no going back to get any of that right.

Rivera did his job better than anyone in baseball history. He has the best ERA+ of any pitcher in baseball history. He has the most saves, if you care about saves. He’s fifth all-time in Win Probability added — right between Warren Spahn and Tom Seaver — and his postseason pitching record is an absurdity, 141 innings, a 0.759 WHIP, a 0.70 ERA, and so on.

Is his Hall of Fame case as good as Maddux’s? As Seaver’s? As Johnson’s? As Martinez’s? As Gibson’s? No, not to me.

But maybe it’s better to think of it this way: Nobody closed out a game better. Nobody. In that way, maybe nobody is better suited to close out this ridiculous streak of the greatest players not getting elected unanimously.

 

[shadow_operative 15932]

meh. there were still plenty of every day players who would have been much better choices than Mo. Mo is not a defensible choice for the first ever unanimous inductee i tj the Baseball HoF. 

[Guest Lobo]

9 hours ago, Beau Vine said:

I don't understand why people get so hung up on this unanimous bullshit.  Who cares?  If you're in, you're in.

 

I don’t think we are being ‘hung up on it.’  It’s a thread about hall of fame voting, so people are gonna discuss the nuances of hall of fame voting.  Cooperstown is the most unique and special hall of fame in all of sports.  Fans of multiple eras are gonna discuss those nuances, it’s as much a part of the game as tobacco or whether or not hitting for the cycle in order is more special than out of order.
 

That was a good article, thanks for posting.  The part about the Pete Rose protest ballots was eye-opening, I never knew that. I knew most of that stuff about the steroid protests.  It’ll be 20 more years before we get everything from that era straightened out in Cooperstown.  

[Beau Vine 55859]

1 hour ago, Lobo said:

I don’t think we are being ‘hung up on it.’  It’s a thread about hall of fame voting, so people are gonna discuss the nuances of hall of fame voting.

As of now, more than half of the thread is about who should be unanimous, so I'd say that fits the bill for being hung up on it.  Of course, that may be because no one is going to get elected this year.

[Guest Lobo]

Yeah, in years where there's nobody from a team I loved or some longtime legend from childhood going on the Veterans Committee ballot, it's hard to give a shit and so I dive back into past sins of the Writer-Voters. 

We're seeing some of the last remnants of the steroid era superstars.  I'm curious to see how that goes, I'm only vested in Clemens because he'd be the first Longhorn enshrined.  I'd like to see Schilling go as well simply for nostalgia.  Watching him pitch (albeit on TV) in the 2004 post-season was literally the last baseball memory I have of my dad who would die a couple months later.  In awe of Curt was literally one of the last conversations we ever had.  But I certainly acknowledge Schilling's entire body of work is really only borderline HOF material.  The rest of 'em, I won't lose any sleep one way or the other. 

It'll die down for a few years after Manny or Sheffield are either in or off the ballot.  And we'll move on past that debate until the VC guys take up whoever doesn't get in for the next few years, about a decade from now and we'll hash out the same battles all over again.  And we'll talk about whether or not Helton gets in because of Coors Field, whether we're just gonna start electing any closer with more than 350 saves, when does Pete Rose get a new look, etc.  Those kinds of trivialities always emerge in years where there's no definitive and widely-celebrated class.  This is one of those years, so yeah---gonna continue to be stumped by Aaron, Rivera, Seaver, et. al.  

2022 will be intrigue-filled on all fronts though.  10th year for some big names.  Ortiz going in as first ballot guy for sure.  How does the drama unfold for A-Rod?  He was a guy who used steroids in a career that was already hall worthy.  Unlike most of the other players though, he paid the price though-suspensions and tens of millions of dollars, curious what premium the voters put on that (if any).   Other guys from that ballot year that'll make it further down the road-Jimmy Rollins, Papelbon, and Joe Nathan.  Those last two are relievers who won't get first ballot, but IMO---if so many other closers get in, these two should get in before too long.  They were as dominant as any closer in the game ever, save for maybe 3 or 4 others.  

Boston would lose its fucking mind though if stars aligned in 2022 and you see Schilling, Clements, Papelbon, and Ortiz all go in as Red Sox.  Still, 2 outta 4 ain't a bad day in beantown.  Likely to lead to some drunken riots.  

Edited December 7, 2020 by Lobo

[shadow_operative 15932]

there was always going to be plenty of discussion once a freaking closer became the first unanimous HoF inductee. Think about it:

Mariano Rivera is fooling around during a bullpen session one day, where he serendipitously makes the ball cut late and hard. His pitching coach says, "do that again." he does it again, and again it has a hard, late, cut. He's got something here.

Now then - this pitch becomes his only pitch, and the man himself only gets called into the game with three outs remaining and his team in the lead. So, he only throws one pitch, that he himself admits isn't 100% under his own control, he only comes in to record three outs, and only when his team is already winning. and THAT's the first guy who was unanimously inducted into The Hall. Give me a break. i could make a better case for Big Papi to be unanimous than Mo, and that's really saying something.

I mean how huge is the disconnect here where people debate whether or not a DH should even be voted into the Hall period, yet these same people have no problem unanimously voting in a closer. what a joke. 

Edited December 7, 2020 by shadow_operative

[Guest Lobo]

I'll have you know Mariano Rivera pitched an average of 1.07 innings per appearance, thank you very much.  That adds up to an extra 1/3rd of an inning per month sometimes!   

But yeah, well put.  The same people ringing their hands over a DH getting in, have no issue with a 100.0 voter rate for a guy that worked twice a week for 10 minutes.  I think River deserved a first year induction though, don't get me wrong.  But let's be honest, the other huge reason he got unanimous induction was the Yankee Stripes.  

And we've really only had one true DH get in-Edgar.  Baines played 1000 games in the OF.  Molitor only DH's for 8 of his 21 seasons, Frank Thomas actually played more DH than any other HOF outside of Martinez.  Then followed by Thome I think, but we'll always think of those two big guys at the first bag.  Baseball purists tend to forget that Reggie Jackson played nearly 700 games at DH. 

Anyway, Ortiz is going in first ballot DH.  I'm fine with that.  It'll have been in effect for 50 fucking years next ballot...time to accept it and move on.  Most of those writers never even saw an AL game without the DH in their entire lifetimes, let alone during their writing careers.  The 1-inning closer role gives guys like Eckersley and Smoltz a shot at immortality, you let Big Papi take his place in the hall for skipping out on the grueling endurance test that is 8 innings of first base work.  Gimme a break.  

 

Edited December 7, 2020 by Lobo

[Beau Vine 55859]

This won't help Omar:

Quote

Blanca Vizquel’s right hand rests on Omar Vizquel’s chest and her left hand is draped over his shoulder as the couple pose for a poolside photograph during a vacation to the Dominican Republic almost five years ago. Hair pulled back in a sleek ponytail, Blanca is beaming. Omar, her husband, dressed in a striped button-down shirt, grins. The couple appears rested, happy.

Underneath the photo, posted on Jan. 7, 2016, on Omar’s Instagram account, reads the caption: “Felicitaciones a mi polli preciosa en su Cumpleanos. Q sigas tan linda como siempre. Eres mi rayito de sol y campanera incondicional te amo.”

“Congratulations to my precious little chicken (Omar’s nickname for Blanca) on her birthday. Stay as cute as ever. You are my ray of sunshine and unconditional partner, I love you.”

Ten days after that was posted, Omar was led out of the couple’s home in Sammamish, Washington, in handcuffs and ushered into a police car. Blanca remained inside the house, in her room, shaking and fearful, calling friends, distraught over what had occurred, concerned about what would come next.

“It’s devastating because the person you love is supposed to protect you, and when (he’s) the one who’s hurting you  … it’s like slow motion and you’re scared and then the police are there, and you know you can’t take it back,” Blanca told The Athletic.

For years, Blanca remained mostly quiet about the abuse she endured. But in August, after six years of marriage and after what she described as one last volatile interaction with Omar, she fled their home in Arizona, spent time in a women’s shelter and then, less than a week later, initiated divorce proceedings. In an Instagram live video posted on Oct. 7, she announced in Spanish that “no one deserves to have violence against them.”

Blanca, 36, also detailed her experience with Omar in an interview for the Spanish-language program “Un Nueva Dia” on Telemundo. Omar responded to Blanca’s allegations by saying in an interview aired by Venezuelan outlet El Pitaza: “I never hit her. I never hit Blanca…. She made the decision to leave me. She made that decision on her own and not because of any domestic violence.”

Though the allegations have made headlines in the pair’s native Venezuela, they have received scant coverage in the United States, where Blanca and Omar reside and where Omar spent 24 years playing professional baseball.

However, Major League Baseball is investigating Omar Vizquel. MLB has interviewed Blanca and, as recently as last week, members of her family. Additionally, MLB probed an incident from 2019 when Vizquel was managing the Double-A Birmingham Barons, a minor league affiliate within the Chicago White Sox organization. The incident, which involved a male team employee, led to Vizquel being dismissed as manager of the team in the month before his one-year contract expired, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the situation. Though Vizquel is not currently employed by an MLB team, any disciplinary action assessed by MLB would follow Vizquel should he seek employment within the league in the future.

“While Omar Vizquel has not been employed by a Major League organization for some time, we are aware of the allegations and will continue to look into them,” MLB said in a statement.

Vizquel, 53, a former All-Star shortstop and Venezuelan legend who is entering his fourth season of candidacy for baseball’s Hall of Fame, said last week that he was not aware of any investigation. When asked generally about Blanca’s domestic violence allegations, he said:

“I don’t have anything to say. This is a divorce and I know she’s really pissed off. There is a lot of things (being said) out there about things supposedly happening behind closed doors, you know. I don’t have anything to say about that, either. It’s just a divorce.”

When presented with a list of questions regarding specific allegations, an attorney for Vizquel said that Vizquel “flatly denies any allegations of domestic violence.”

Additionally, a representative of Vizquel reached out to The Athletic to provide “a brief presentation with some of the background on the allegations against Mr. Vizquel.” That 11-page PDF document is titled “The facts on the smear campaign against Omar Vizquel.” It includes bullet points that note, among other things, that “Vizquel was accused of fourth-degree assault, the least serious level.” The “conclusions” section of the presentation highlights that Vizquel is a finalist for the Hall of Fame. 

The incident in 2016 began with an argument, Blanca said, and it quickly escalated. Blanca retreated to her bedroom and placed dumbbells against her door to keep Vizquel from entering, she said, but he barged into the room, screamed at her and pushed her, forcing her to fall, injuring her shin and breaking off multiple nails. 

Blanca said she grabbed her phone, ran into her bathroom, locked herself inside and called a neighbor who befriended the couple when they moved into the suburban Seattle neighborhood in 2014. The neighbor answered his cell phone while at his child’s basketball tournament.

“She was crying and talking quietly. She said that Omar had beat her and she locked herself in her room and he’s outside of the room and (she) didn’t know what to do,” the neighbor said.

The neighbor, who asked to not be publicly identified, called his wife at home to alert her to the situation. He then called the King County Sheriff’s Office. According to dispatch reports, law enforcement arrived at the scene just before 1 p.m.

Blanca and Omar had been fighting over the previous five days because of “compiling circumstances,” according to a summary report of the incident. The report summarizes that: “Blanca said Omar said to her, ‘Why are you treating me like shit?’ then he pushed her with both of his hands to her body so hard that it knocked her over backwards to the floor causing her to hit her left shin on the corner of the bed and break her nails trying to catch her fall.” 

Blanca’s injuries were photographed and a probable cause statement noted a laceration on her leg where she struck the bed frame. Omar, who told police that Blanca had tripped, was booked for fourth-degree domestic assault and transported to a jail in nearby Issaquah.

Vizquel was never prosecuted for assault. In a letter to the Sammamish prosecuting attorney, Blanca asked the prosecutor to drop the charges. In the letter, she refuted the official record of what happened that night, explained that she loved her husband deeply, and said she wanted to work through the pair’s marital problems through counseling. The Athletic reviewed that letter, which Blanca said Omar pressured her to sign, threatening her with financial ruin and to kick her out of the house if she disclosed what occurred in their marriage. Vizquel, in at least one interview with Venezuelan news outlet La Patilla, denied attempting to coerce Blanca into signing this letter.

“People are scared and I was, too,” Blanca said. “I was scared for these moments for a long time. And I stayed because of that.”

Blanca and Omar met more than a decade ago, on Nov. 17, 2008, in their native Venezuela. He approached her and her group of friends at a fair in her hometown of Maracaibo. She wasn’t a baseball fan and didn’t know he was one of the country’s most famous athletes. The two began communicating via email and by the end of 2009 she had left her job at Chevron to move in with her sister, who was already living in the United States.

The courtship continued for years  — Blanca would often go visit him where he was playing — and the two married on July 31, 2014. Outwardly, they appeared to be happy newlyweds, doting and affectionate. But according to Blanca, there were issues within their relationship for years prior to their marriage. The two fought frequently about his infidelity, she said, and her family members harbored concerns about the way Vizquel treated her in private. Blanca’s sister Nelly Metler, who lived with the pair for almost nine months in Washington, said she witnessed Vizquel routinely denigrating Blanca, belittling her intelligence and lack of independence. He’d criticize her cooking and mock her ideas for trips she tried to plan for the pair. He’d say he couldn’t believe she had held down a job back in Venezuela, Metler said.

Publicly, Vizquel was outgoing, friendly, and charismatic. In private, his behavior toward her sister and their family was “horrible” and “traumatizing,” Metler said.

“He’s not the person that you see,” she added.

One night in December 2011, when Blanca and Omar were visiting Metler’s family in Alabama for the holidays, Metler was awoken by the sound of her sister screaming. Metler said she emerged from her room, ran into the room where Blanca and Omar were staying and saw Omar on top of Blanca, strangling her. Metler began screaming, which prompted Omar to stop and retreat to the living room.

“We saw him on top of her, his elbow on her throat, her arms pin (sic) down on bed, she was screaming, telling him to let me go,”  Metler wrote in a witness statement from that night. In that statement, which is included in court records, Metler said Vizquel admitted to both hitting Blanca and pulling her hair.

Another witness statement recorded from the incident corroborated that Vizquel was holding down Blanca, adding that he was trying to retrieve his wallet and ID from her.

Metler said Omar called the police and said Blanca had scratched him, a claim Blanca denies.

“I felt like I had to fight back. I had to help myself. It got out of hand,” Blanca said of the incident. “He was stronger obviously, stronger than me, I tried to get him off.”

The argument began, Blanca said, when she looked through Omar’s phone to view photos of a baptism he had attended in Venezuela. She said she discovered intimate photos of Omar and another woman on the phone and confronted him, and he became enraged.

Vizquel, when asked about this incident, said: “We had a discussion and she started screaming at me and kind of hitting me a little bit and I had to call the police. Back then, when I called the police, the police made us stop and we had to both be in a detention thing. So that was it. No charges pressed. They called it a ‘cool-down’ time.”

In affidavits signed individually by Omar and Blanca, each acknowledged a verbal disagreement and said “we lost control of ourselves which resulted in physical contact between us.” Both said in the affidavits that they did not want the incident to be the basis of criminal charges against the other. Court documents show that they filed a joint motion to dismiss any charges stemming from the incident, and the motion was granted.

Metler said her sister’s personality changed during the course of her relationship to Omar. Blanca became increasingly withdrawn; she seemed diminished, subdued and skittish. When Blanca would visit, she was constantly fretting that she’d miss a call from Omar and anger him: “Blanca lived in fear. I don’t remember my sister ever smiling, ever (after the Alabama incident),” Metler said.

For the span of a year, the two sisters even stopped talking; Metler struggled to accept that Blanca wouldn’t leave Omar.

Said Metler: “I understand when you’re so in love you try to fix (the situation), put the pieces together to make it right, to do whatever you can but there’s a point where you can’t.”

The neighbor in Sammamish, who helped collect mail and take in deliveries when the Vizquels were out of town, said Blanca often seemed sad and depressed. When Omar was around, Blanca would avoid eye contact and quickly step inside if the neighbor approached the two of them in the driveway. It struck him as odd, since Blanca was engaging when Omar was on the road with the team. (Blanca later told the neighbor that Omar instructed her not to speak with him.)

Haily Barwick, another friend of Blanca’s in the Seattle area, spoke to her immediately following the 2016 arrest. Barwick said she went over to the house to find Blanca shaking and in a state of shock:  “She could not believe that it was happening. (She was) shaking, she was trembling a lot. She was crying, (sounding) lost and trying to explain.”

At the time, Omar was working for the Tigers as a first base coach. The Tigers declined to say whether they were aware of the incident.

MLB began investigating the December 2016 arrest in 2017 and during the course of that probe an investigator with the commissioner’s office, Christopher Ramos, called the neighbor. The neighbor said he did not speak to MLB investigators because he feared what the implications would be for both Blanca and Omar, and he did not want to endanger Blanca. Around that time, the neighbor said he got a call from Omar.

“He told me everything’s good between him and Blanca, that nothing bad happened and it was an argument like all couples have. He told me Blanca was mentally ill, paranoid, afraid of everything and that she makes everything up in her head,” the neighbor said. “He told me, ‘That’s what you should tell MLB if they call back.’”

Vizquel managed the Birmingham Barons in 2019. (Michael Wade / Getty Images)
Omar and Blanca moved to Birmingham, Alabama, when Vizquel was named manager of the Double-A Barons for the 2019 season. His tenure with that White Sox farm team, however, lasted only one season.

 Toward the end of the season, the organization learned of an alleged incident involving Vizquel and a male clubhouse worker. The team suspended Vizquel with pay while probing the incident then terminated him in mid-September, after the season ended. 

When reached by The Athletic, the clubhouse worker, who is no longer with the team, said: “I have to stay silent about this.”

Vizquel, when asked about the situation, said: “I can’t really say anything about that because it really — nothing happened.”

The White Sox declined to answer questions about the incident, Vizquel’s exit or any response by the organization to what occurred. The team also would not disclose whether it was aware of the incidents in 2011 and 2016 when he was hired to manage the Barons. 

As part of the MLB investigation prompted by the 2016 arrest, Vizquel was placed on a “treatment plan” and instructed to “cease and desist from any hostile or threatening contact” with Blanca, according to a letter outlining his treatment plan. The letter instructs Vizquel to abstain from any other behavior prohibited by the Domestic Violence, Sexual Assault and Child Abuse Policy, which was jointly implemented by the MLB and MLBPA in 2015.

Vizquel’s first wife, Nicole, with whom he shares two children and remains close, has spoken publicly in defense of her ex-husband. She told The Athletic she was not contacted by MLB in the course of the investigation and that “Omar was never violent towards me. Omar was never violent towards his children.”

Blanca said Vizquel’s behavior briefly improved following the 2016 arrest but gradually deteriorated as tensions resurfaced between the couple. Said Metler: “My husband always told my sister, ‘If you ever fear for your life, just run.’”

One morning in August 2020, following a heated argument, Blanca finally left. She and her mother collected some belongings (her passport, and a pair of jeans), corralled her Boston terrier, and left the couple’s shared home in Arizona while Vizquel was sleeping.

“I made a decision to leave the house and not come back,” Blanca said. “I didn’t want to feel that feeling where you didn’t know if you’re gonna be safe.”

Blanca called a domestic violence hotline, drove 10 hours and eventually reached a women’s shelter in Texas. Within a few days, Vizquel removed her name from their bank accounts and froze her credit cards. She was unemployed and feared what Vizquel had always warned her about: that she would be in financial peril if she ever spoke about their marriage. But she decided she could live with that risk.

In recent months she said she has been in therapy, and that has helped some. She still can’t sleep well despite trying music and meditation apps. Her disclosures were met with skepticism and hostility by Vizquel’s fans, associates and legal representatives.

Blanca said she knew online hate and campaigns of intimidation would be a reality if she came forward (“I was silent for a long time because I knew this was coming.”) but did not anticipate the level of vitriol she received. Blanca also said some of Vizquel’s fans posted nasty messages on her Instagram page, including suggestions that she kill herself.

“I think that people would rather see my sister laying in a morgue and have their precious hero intact,” Metler said. 

Said Blanca: “I got so much hate from his fans (who thought) I was destroying him and his career, and I couldn’t believe these people were thinking about someone’s career before the life of a person. I was talking about something that happened to me. What he did was his choice and it wasn’t mine. If that’s going to destroy him, I’m sorry; that’s not my intention.

“I think it’s necessary for other people to know this can happen and people don’t say anything. It’s so freaking sad this happens so much and people do nothing about it.”

Where she is currently staying, she checks the locks on all the doors before she climbs into bed, and then braces for another restless night, fear and anxiety coming at her in waves. 

“All I want is peace, to be able to sleep a good night without being afraid.”

 

[patrickdrinksbeer 820]

On 12/7/2020 at 11:07 AM, Lobo said:

Other guys from that ballot year that'll make it further down the road-Jimmy Rollins, Papelbon, and Joe Nathan.  Those last two are relievers who won't get first ballot, but IMO---if so many other closers get in, these two should get in before too long.  They were as dominant as any closer in the game ever, save for maybe 3 or 4 others.  

Boston would lose its fucking mind though if stars aligned in 2022 and you see Schilling, Clements, Papelbon, and Ortiz all go in as Red Sox.  Still, 2 outta 4 ain't a bad day in beantown.  Likely to lead to some drunken riots.  

How on Earth did you stumble upon this website, Mrs. Papelbon?

[Guest Lobo]

Ha.  Fair question.  Not a Papelbon fan per se...but as we've discussed on this thread and on previous years' HOF threads...the Writer-Voters are begging the question.  Their voting patterns are insisting that eras be compared to one another.  And I get it.  And they themselves frame certain votes as "how does this guy at this position or this role compare against other players at that position or in that role from other times?"  

My only point about Papelbon is that if fucking Sutter, Gossage, and Fingers get in...he deserves to get in.  I know it's not that cut 'n dry with these guys, but either embrace the truly dominating half dozen or so closers of the last generation or shut the fucking Hall down for relievers until decades from now.  Fucking Hoyt Wilhelm?  C'mon.  Either take the elite Top 5-10 or so in the next decade or two of voting or just cut them outta the hall.  Same thing with the DH.  Fucking thing has been around for 50 fucking years, probably time to stop pretending like it's this affront to the game.  I mean, it is...but they need to quit acting it's this phenomenon they need years to wrap their minds around before they can vote appropriately.  /rantagain

[cafe society 2903]

On 12/16/2020 at 9:56 PM, Lobo said:

Ha.  Fair question.  Not a Papelbon fan per se...but as we've discussed on this thread and on previous years' HOF threads...the Writer-Voters are begging the question.  Their voting patterns are insisting that eras be compared to one another.  And I get it.  And they themselves frame certain votes as "how does this guy at this position or this role compare against other players at that position or in that role from other times?"  

My only point about Papelbon is that if fucking Sutter, Gossage, and Fingers get in...he deserves to get in.  I know it's not that cut 'n dry with these guys, but either embrace the truly dominating half dozen or so closers of the last generation or shut the fucking Hall down for relievers until decades from now.  Fucking Hoyt Wilhelm?  C'mon.  Either take the elite Top 5-10 or so in the next decade or two of voting or just cut them outta the hall.  Same thing with the DH.  Fucking thing has been around for 50 fucking years, probably time to stop pretending like it's this affront to the game.  I mean, it is...but they need to quit acting it's this phenomenon they need years to wrap their minds around before they can vote appropriately.  /rantagain

You really need to visit Baseball-Reference.com.  Papelbon doesn't merit one second's consideration.  No Cy Youngs.  I don't believe Sutter belongs in the hall, but he has a Cy and 4x Rolaids Reliever of the Year.  Gossage has 41 WAR compared to Papelbon's  23.3.  Fingers has an MVP, Cy Young, World Series MVP and 4x Rolaids Reliever of the Year.   Hoyt Wilhelm has 46.8 WAR.  

[Guest Lobo]

Didn't realize Wilhelm's WAR was that high.  That's impressive.  Hoyt did have a late start to his career due to military service which I'm sure factored (and rightfully so) into the decision by the Voters.  He doesn't throw his first MLB pitch until he's 29.  In his two full seasons as a starting pitcher, he made the All-Star team which makes you wonder.  And then he goes on to pitch until he's 49 years old, making the All-Star team again at age 47.  I'll stop my campaign against Ol' Sarge.    

Not strongly advocating for Papelbon, just that he deserves his spot as much as Sutter's 24.0 WAR or Fingers' 25.6.  I need to finally just show my therapist where on the baseball bat, Bruce Sutter touched me.  I just don't him getting in over so many better pitchers.  

 

[NOMAAA 1700]

On 12/3/2020 at 2:51 PM, Lobo said:

No, almost everybody knows (including my wife) that you have to be out of the game for awhile before you're eligible to be voted upon.  Ichiro certainly deserves to be a first ballot guy, but not unanimous.  If that's the debate you're looking for.  

Also, is Trey3216---the poster formerly known as Derka?  I can't keep up with current poster names, how the hell do y'all know who certain posters used to be?  Mind bottled...

why not unanimous?

[Guest Lobo]

They tend to lean toward not making the #96 all time leader in batting average the first unanimous position player.   Not a judgement, just a whacky hunch 

[Hank Chinaski 6348]

The unanimous entry thing is dumb because baseball has a long history of sanctimonious writers, some of whom decided not to vote for any player on his first ballot. Its irrational and stupid and defies reason. Rivera was unanimous because this mindset is largely washed out across voters. More guys will be unanimous in the future (Pujols and quite possibly guys like Trout and Betts). 

The beauty of baseball is that we have really good, objective ways to evaluate how good a player is/was. We don't need to rely on the often-idiotic unwritten rules of clowns to tell us who the best players really are. You know - like the writers that railed against "analytics" because they don't want you to form opinions based on objective data, they want you to form opinions based on their opinions. There are still a few of these, but thankfully they're smaller in number. 

But yeah - if Aaron, Mays, Mantle or Ted fucking Williams weren't unanimous, then being unanimous doesn't mean a damn thing. 

[shadow_operative 15932]

On 12/22/2020 at 4:35 PM, Lobo said:

They tend to lean toward not making the #96 all time leader in batting average the first unanimous position player.   Not a judgement, just a whacky hunch 

name another player who was irrefutably the best player in Major League Baseball on opening day of his rookie year. i'll wait. he's one of the greatest hitters of all time, and he was outstandingly the base paths and as a fielder as well. he joined the Majors at 27 years old and finished with 3100 hits. he's as much of a no-brainer as Pujols or Trout. and that's really what a unanimous vote boils down to- if the guy is a no-brainer HOFer then there's no reason he shouldn't be unanimous. 

so as i was saying earlier in the thread before that water head retard went off the rails for who-knows-what, Griffey clearly should have been unanimous. so should a whole bunch of other people who came before him, obviously. however, since none of them were unanimously voted in, and because there's no way any player from the steroid era was going to be the first unanimous vote, then i personally felt that Ichiro would have been deserving of the honor- a five tool player with zero hint of scandal or off the field issues, who happened to retire before Pujols did. either one of those guys would have been a better choice than Mo to be the first guy to break that mold. 

[Guest Lobo]

Most Hall of Famer position players probably start out full-time at what........23 years old or so?  I mean, to your point about being 27 as Ichiro and still getting 3,100 hits?  So Suzuki missed out on the equivalent of 5 seasons?  I mean, I now he was kicking ass in Japan and maybe one day they'll pay the proper creedence to that like they did with the Negro Leagues.  But you're saying Ichiro was already awesome when he starts out at 27, having missed out on ~5 full seasons?  

[Pato del Muerto 53451]

4 minutes ago, Lobo said:

Most Hall of Famer position players probably start out full-time at what........23 years old or so?  I mean, to your point about being 27 as Ichiro and still getting 3,100 hits?  So Suzuki missed out on the equivalent of 5 seasons?  I mean, I now he was kicking ass in Japan and maybe one day they'll pay the proper creedence to that like they did with the Negro Leagues.  But you're saying Ichiro was already awesome when he starts out at 27, having missed out on ~5 full seasons?  

Yes. Those years he was busy being the best player in the Japanese league.  He’s probably a 4000 mlb hit player if he comes over at 22.  

[Guest Lobo]

And the contention to which I replied was "why can't be unanimous?"  I have no issue with him being in the HOF, probably as a first ballot member.  But if you read, somebody said "why can't be unanimous."  And I brought up a couple of facts.  If somebody missed 5 full seasons in MLB play because of other obligations in the Pacific, that's worthy of consideration.  But if 5 full seasons not hitting the MLB stats made you miss out on certain benchmarks, then let's see who else missed out on that before we decide you are worthy of unanimous induction.  

Ichiro should be in the hall.  1st ballot, probably.  Never fucking said he shouldn't.  Read the fucking posts above mine.  If he could have done more with those 5 missed seasons due to Pacific service...think real long and hard about who else missed out on certain benchmarks because of Pacific service who also missed out on unanimous balloting.  It's impossible you guys are this obtuse.

Edited December 24, 2020 by Lobo

[Hank Chinaski 6348]

1 hour ago, shadow_operative said:

irrefutably the best player in Major League Baseball on opening day of his rookie year. 

Ichiro? In 2001? Irrefutably? 

I assume you are not counting Bonds and Sosa and A-Rod and Giambi because of PEDs (Bonds was undoubtedly the best player in baseball at that time; A-Rod was probably second). And I assume you aren't counting pitchers (Randy Johnson was winning his 3rd of 4 straight CY awards in '01, Pedro was still dominant, etc). But even if you take those guys out, you still have guys like Pujols and Larry Walker and Chipper Jones and others. 

I loved Ichiro, so much fun to watch, so stylistically refreshing during the PED era, an obvious HOFer. But he was never the best player in baseball. 

[shadow_operative 15932]

yeah that's my bad, i meant to say "irrefutably the best hitter in baseball from day one." 

and yeah, fuck Bonds. 

[NOMAAA 1700]

11 hours ago, Lobo said:

And the contention to which I replied was "why can't be unanimous?"  I have no issue with him being in the HOF, probably as a first ballot member.  But if you read, somebody said "why can't be unanimous."  And I brought up a couple of facts.  If somebody missed 5 full seasons in MLB play because of other obligations in the Pacific, that's worthy of consideration.  But if 5 full seasons not hitting the MLB stats made you miss out on certain benchmarks, then let's see who else missed out on that before we decide you are worthy of unanimous induction.  

Ichiro should be in the hall.  1st ballot, probably.  Never fucking said he shouldn't.  Read the fucking posts above mine.  If he could have done more with those 5 missed seasons due to Pacific service...think real long and hard about who else missed out on certain benchmarks because of Pacific service who also missed out on unanimous balloting.  It's impossible you guys are this obtuse.

First ballot....probably? Really?? First ballot no doubter. 

[Guest Lobo]

Yes, he'll be a first ballot HOF'er.  And rightfully so.  "Probably" literally means "almost certainly" according to the dictionary I'm looking at right this fucking minute.  So yeah, there are no guarantees with the HOF as we've exhaustively discussed above, but he's a 99%, or a mathematical "almost certain" lock for 1st ballot induction status.  My only fucking point of contention was with the suggestion he be unanimous........which was your fucking question.  Fucking-A.  Nevermind.   You asked why not unanimous and I answered.  .311 hitter doesn't get in with that extra perk of unanimity.  Guess who else didn't get in with unanimity because he also spent 5 years in the Pacific?  Ted Williams.  

You're a first ballot Cunt, congrats.  And I speak from experience.  

[NOMAAA 1700]

right on.

[Beau Vine 55859]

14 hours ago, shadow_operative said:

irrefutably the best player in Major League Baseball on opening day of his rookie year.

[Had Enough 2111]

I was curious about Ichiros numbers based on this discussion. In looking at them I'm not sure he's a first ballot guy. But that's lacking a little context on other first ballot guys.

His claim to fame is the traditional batting average and hits. Yes he stole bases and defended. But for a singles hitter, his OBP was modest at .355. His doubles total was modest with a career high of 34 especially considering he had so many ABs. He led the league in official ABs 8 times but only led in plate appearances 4 times. He hit .308 with runners in scoring position. Yep, lots of gold gloves but not certain that wasn't as much a popularity contest back then. Baseball Reference.com puts him tied for 190 in WAR.

Yes he missed on some early years but the flip side is that he came on as a fully mature player unlike some who have 2 or 3 modest years of development and stats while at the major league level.

[Beau Vine 55859]

1 hour ago, Had Enough said:

I was curious about Ichiros numbers based on this discussion. In looking at them I'm not sure he's a first ballot guy. But that's lacking a little context on other first ballot guys.

His claim to fame is the traditional batting average and hits. Yes he stole bases and defended. But for a singles hitter, his OBP was modest at .355. His doubles total was modest with a career high of 34 especially considering he had so many ABs. He led the league in official ABs 8 times but only led in plate appearances 4 times. He hit .308 with runners in scoring position. Yep, lots of gold gloves but not certain that wasn't as much a popularity contest back then. Baseball Reference.com puts him tied for 190 in WAR.

Yes, but don't forget that he could have hit many home runs if he had wanted to.

[Had Enough 2111]

Yes, but don't forget that he could have hit many home runs if he had wanted to.

"If I'm allowed to hit .220, I could probably hit 40 (homers), but nobody wants that," Ichiro proclaimed in 2007. That's from The Score Tom Ruminski article from 2019.

And the WAR ranking varied from the baseball reference number. The writer referenced FanGraphs so maybe theirs is a vastly different compilation.

40 Homers and an OBP of .230 isn't going to excite me so not real sure how that quote is supposed to make me feel. I guess Greg Maddux could have struck out twice as many but his ERA would have ballooned to 5.00.