Vizquel didn’t make it during the most recent Hall of Fame voting (January 2025). I’ll keep writing, “He deserves to be in the Hall,” until he is. Here’s what I wrote in 2021.
On January 26, 2021, the Baseball Writers of America Association will announce the results of its 2021 Hall of Fame voting live from Cooperstown on MLB Network. Electees will be inducted during Hall of Fame Weekend on Sunday, July 25, in Cooperstown.
Omar Vizquel of the San Francisco Giants gets ready at shortstop against the Chicago Cubs during a July 3, 2008, game in San Francisco. Courtesy of Jed Jacobsohn, Getty Images
This writer believes former shortstop Omar Vizquel should be making his acceptance speech in July. But he probably won’t, even though he played more games at shortstop than any other man in the history of baseball.
His career spanned four decades and 24 seasons, over which he won 11 Gold Gloves. His career fielding percentage of .9847 is the best for all Major League shortstops. He had 2,877 career hits and a career batting average of .272, ten points better than the .262 of Ozzie Smith, who is in the Hall.
Also, Vizquel was a master at handling the bat. With 256 sacrifice hits (bunts) and 94 sacrifice flies, he has the most combined sacrifices (350) since 1954, the first year Baseball-Reference measured sacrifice flies.
Statistics guru Bill James came up with what he calls a “similarity score.” The players most similar to Vizquel in offensive production are Luis Aparicio, Rabbit Maranville, Smith, Bill Dahlen, Dave Concepcion, Luke Appling, Pee Wee Reese, and Nellie Fox. Only Concepcion and Dahlen are not in the Hall of Fame.
As writer Chris Bodig notes, “Vizquel is on the Hall of Fame ballot for the fourth year and is at the center of the debate between the community of sabermetricians and people who follow their instincts when evaluating a player’s Hall of Fame candidacy… He may run into a sabermetric wall of detractors that keep him under the magic number (75 percent of the votes) and thus force his case to be considered years later by the ‘Today’s Game’ Eras Committee, the modern version of the Veterans Committee.”
Sabermetricians who make the case against Vizquel claim that some defensive metrics don’t back up Vizquel’s reputation as an all-time premier defender. But, as Bodig points out, defense is more difficult to quantify than offense. Vizquel’s detractors point to a statistic called Range Factor, which is computed this way: 9 times (putouts plus assists) divided by innings played. In his career, Vizquel’s range factor per 9 innings was 4.62. The league average over those 24 seasons was 4.61.
The idea behind the Range Factor is that a player involved in many plays must be able to cover a wider portion of the field. But, as an article on pennantchase.com states, “Anyone who has watched a lot of baseball knows that a fielder involved in many plays doesn’t necessarily have good range. Maybe he’s an infielder playing behind a lot of ground-ball pitchers. Maybe he’s an outfielder playing in a large ballpark. One player might accumulate more opportunities for many reasons than his peers.”
Detractors make the case that Vizquel did not help his teams offensively, primarily based on his career Wins Above Replacement (WAR) score. WAR is a difficult statistic to describe. It seeks to answer the question: “If this player got injured and their team had to replace him with a freely available minor leaguer, how much value would the team lose?”
However, WAR is another controversial statistic, so much so that in 2016, the MLB Players Association scheduled a meeting after the MVP and Cy Young winners were announced because they believed WAR was weighted too heavily in the decision-making process. A more meaningful statistic is OPS-plus, which combines on-base and slugging percentages, adjusted for ballparks and seasons. Vizquel’s score of 82 equals that of Hall of Famers Aparicio and Maranville and is just below that of Smith.
So, should Vizquel be in the Hall of Fame? Pudig writes, “Essentially, it’s an eye test vs. a WAR test.” Let’s hear from four baseball writers who saw Vizquel play.
Andrew Baggarly, The Athletic Bay Area: “My small Hall includes Vizquel. Go ahead and torch me for that, but I believe that longevity matters — especially at the most grueling position on the infield — and there aren’t metrics that can adequately assess the transcendent joy he brought to anyone who watched him play.”
Henry Schulman, San Francisco Chronicle: “Face it, Vizquel’s was his generation’s Ozzie Smith or the closest facsimile… Stats are important, and newer metrics that better compare players through different eras are valuable. But they are the sum of a player’s career. If you use numbers alone to shunt Vizquel into that mythical Hall of the Very Good, it’s a fair bet you did not see him play. Sometimes a man is a Hall of Famer because he just is.”
Bill Madden, New York Daily News: “I have two straightforward Hall of Fame criteria: The first is the ‘see’ test. In watching a player for 10 or more years, did I say to myself: ‘I’m looking at a Hall of Famer?’ The four greatest fielding shortstops I ever saw were Vizquel, Ozzie, Luis Aparicio, and Mark Belanger. Ozzie had the flair and the backflips, but Vizquel, for me, was the best. Made every play look easy.”
Bob Ryan, Boston Globe: “A consummate fielder — I said consummate — fielder, and teamed with Hall of Famer Roberto Alomar to form the best DP combo I ever saw. Yes, I am partial to defensive whizzes, and I refuse to apologize for it.”
I agree. Those of us who had the pleasure of watching Vizquel play shortstop knew we were seeing greatness. Here’s hoping that more baseball writers trust their eyes as much as their calculators when they vote next time.
Note: Claims of domestic abuse and sexual harassment (involving different people, separate cases) could play a role in Hall of Fame voting.
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Matt Sieger, now retired, is a former sports reporter and columnist for The Vacaville Reporter, where this article first appeared on July 9, 2021. He is the author of The God Squad: The Born-Again San Francisco Giants of 1978.
