By Louis Addeo-Weiss
Twitter: @addeo_louis00 Instagram: @louritos
Longtime shortstop Omar Vizquel will appear on the ballot for the third time in the voting for election into the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
When the results are announced via the BBWAA (Baseball Writers Association of America) on January 21st, a new class of players will be enshrined as immortals in the pantheon of baseball history.
One thing is for certain, given his 42.8% of the vote received in 2019, Vizquel will not be among the newest inductees, though, with the election of the likes of Jack Morris, Harold Baines, and Lee Smith in recent years, the writing is on the wall of the standards for induction being lowered, which gives many in the voting and viewing community reason to believe we could one day see Vizquel share the stage with the game’s living greats someday in Cooperstown.
In the case of reductive standards for election, Morris’s career 43.4 rWAR (baseball-reference), is where Vizquel most benefits.
The average WAR for starting pitchers in the hall of fame, according to baseball-reference, is 73.2, which clearly notes that Morris is far-below the mean for a hall of fame hurler.
As for shortstops, Vizquel’s 45.6 WAR, too, is well below the average for Cooperstown inductees at his respective position at 67.0.
Now, before delving any deeper into this, I’ll assert that WAR is an approximation, an approximation with a multitude of factors, including ballparks, eras, and respective peer performance, that weigh into its calculation, but it serves as an indicator of how valuable a player was during his career.
By way of using WAR to grade Vizquel’s total output, his 45.6 WAR would rank him 42nd among shortstops.
Of those below him, only two John Montgomery Ward and George Wright, are enshrined in Cooperstown, but it should be noted that their inductions come largely on basis of their place in shaping the way baseball is played and ran from a technical standpoint.
Ward, who, it should be noted, posted a total WAR of 62.3 given his multi-positional abilities, pitching (28.1 WAR, 2.10 ERA) and playing the middle infield (34.3), led the eventual founding of the Players’ Union, which is enough in itself to solidify his spot in Cooperstown.
Wright, on the other hand, was the shortstop on the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings, the first professional team in baseball history, which leaves little else to be said why he’s in the hall.
Now, those two stories aren’t to discount Vizquel in any way but to note the significance they had in where baseball was, went, and currently is.
If there’s one thing a person can grasp when reading the back of Vizquel’s baseball card, it is best stated in the tweet below.
Image courtesy of Twitter user @ShekBo
Don’t look at the Gardner comparison as the be-all-end-all, but the following comment below is what can really best be said in regards to Vizquel – he was a compiler.
Playing in parts of 24 seasons, the slick-fielding shortstop amassed 2,877 hits, which is something many a traditional baseball fan cite as a measure of his offensive ability
Average that out and Vizquel has approximately 120 hits per season, well below the standard of what we’d normally deem a Hall of Famer.
But, for what it’s worth, and what analytics have proven to us, metrics such as batting average, hits, and runs batted in are trivial, and appear to exude a protruding odor of old-school evaluation of worth.
Vizquel’s hit total, appear on the surface, rather impressive, but to me, it reads like saying a surface is clean after merely examining it with the naked eye. We know there are germs there, but we mostly fail to acknowledge their presence.
Omar Vizquel the hitter is that of the supposed clean table. When looking at the peripherals, it is no more evident that he wasn’t a hall of fame caliber talent.
His career OPS+ of 82, is well below the established league average of 100, and only twice did he post a mark above 100 for the duration of a season, doing so in 1999 (111) and 2002 (104).
Among shortstops with at least 1,000 games played, Vizquel ranks 64th in OPS+, 59th in slugging percentage (.352), and 28th in on-base percentage (.336).
According to Fangraphs, a site whose rhetoric prides itself on advanced statistical analysis, of the position player candidates on this year’s ballot, Vizquel’s 42.5 fWAR ranks 13th, and his wRC+ (weighted runs created plus), their version of OPS+, ranks last among the 22 names.
Really, Vizquel’s only saving grace in the analytics community comes via his prowess on defense.
In the panels of baseball history, Vizquel, who won 11 Gold Gloves, is undoubtedly one of the greatest defenders the game has ever seen, drawing numerous comparisons to fellow shortstop Ozzie Smith (13 GG), but even taking the plight of Smith’s offensive output into account shows us he was, collectively, far better than Vizquel ever was.
Despite owning a measly 87 OPS+, Smith still managed 76.9 WAR for his career, well above the established average for HOF SS of 67.
While the 1980s can be seen as a weak offensive era for the position, Smith’s OPS+ of 90 ranked 5th among 11 shortstops with at least 3,000 plate appearances. And while the number may appear feeble, it was Smith’s 52.2 WAR during the decade ranked 2nd among all shortstops, trailing only the Tigers’ Alan Trammell (52.9).
You can make the argument that Vizquel’s defense puts him in a class with the Wizard, but using the metric dWAR (defensive wins above replacement), we see that was Smith a far better defender, with his 44.2 dWAR nearly matching Vizquel’s total output for his career.
Despite the crossover in their respective playing careers, had Vizquel debuted at the same time as Smith, his case for Cooperstown would be a lot more justified, as he would’ve benefited from a weak era for shortstops.
The unfortunate thing to consider is that Vizquel played in what many consider to be a golden age for shortstops, as the rise of the likes of Jeter, Rodriguez, Tejada, and Garciaparra in the latter half of the 1990s seriously hurt Vizquel’s offensive numbers.
From 1991-2004, among shortstops with at least 3,000 plate appearances, his OPS+ of 88 ranked 10th, and his 38.3 WAR ranked 5th.
However, Vizquel only averaged 2.7 WAR per season during this span, which further cements the notion of him as an accumulator of numbers. His longevity is to marvel at, but the total output reads as unimpressive.
Do I see a day where Omar Vizquel received a plaque with his name and likeness replicated onto it? Sure, but this is given what I noted at the outset of this piece – recent inductees have lowered the standards for what we perceive to be a hall of fame worthy player.
Numbers firmly support the notion that Vizquel is far from a Hall of Famer, but if you can convince 75% of the writers who vote on baseball’s highest honor, then welcome to Cooperstown.
