Is Omar Vizquel A Hall Of Famer?

I like to look at what a guy did during his peak, although it’s not always easy to figure out where that peak is. I think it’s fair to say, however, that the best ten consecutive years of Vizquel’s career (offensively, at least) were his age 29 – 38 seasons, 1996 – 2005. During this span, Vizquel hit .284/.354/.381, which translates to an OPS+ of only 92. This is probably not giving him enough credit for his OBP which is pretty good, though not spectacular. In any event, Vizquel got on base often enough to steal 261 bases and score 846 runs. That’s an average of 26 and 85 per year respectively. Again, these are valuable contributions, but nothing that would lead the league.

Baseball Reference gives him 28.5 WAR (3.9 dWAR) for this period, 2.9 per year. Ozzie Smith, by comparison — who also put up his best offensive numbers from ages 29 – 38, IMO — gets 48.6 WAR (14.1 dWAR) for his best ten years stretch. There’s no question that Ozzie is in the Hall because of his defense, and I’d say deservedly so. But he also managed to produce 34.5 oWAR over ten years, which is more than Vizquel’s ENTIRE WAR over his best decade.

Of course, WAR isn’t the end of the discussion, but I think it’s pretty clear that Vizquel pales in comparison to Ozzie Smith, offensively and defensively. And Smith wasn’t even that good offensively, so … how can anyone justify voting for Vizquel? It’s nice that he’s hung around for so long, but even at his best he wasn’t a Hall of Famer.

long answer: no freaking way

Based on defense alone, plus an acceptable level of hitting, he should be in. No one flashed the leather like Omar

Well it seems that most of the reasons to say No to Omar are related to his not excellent offensive performance. Some of us need to consider that this is not the only metric used to consider a player as hall of famer, and that baseball used to be very different from what is has become over the last decades. Several things to point out here in favor of Little O:

1. His accomplishments (some of which are ignored here) clearly demonstrate that he is among the best shortstop’s that have ever played the game:

11 Gold Gloves, including nine straight between 1993-2001. Baseball’s all-time leader among shortstops in games played, double plays and fielding percentage (.984).

2. When Vizquel was at the peak of this career, the SS profile was not was it is today. It used to be that a shortstop needed to be excellent defensively and it was enough with decent offensive skills. He certainly cracked this profile with a superior defense and a better-than average offense. Today, the requirements have shifted towards a heavily offense-influenced profile.

3. It is not fair to use MVP voting to measure the Hall of Fame credentials of a shortstop. MVP is a measure that is highly related to offensive statistics that were not a common feature among SS. I wonder how many MVP awards were won by shortstops prior to the A-Rod era.

4. Even if some did not recognize his value (mostly defensive) at the time because he was not an offensive player (and that was what most people was looking for when rating players back then), that should not mean that he does not deserve to go in. It is dangerous for the game not to award players with unique baseball skills (fielding in this case) just because it was not offensively excellent. Baseball is about hitting and fielding, and I am sure that there are a lot of excellent hitters with poor defensive skills that have made their way into the Hall of Fame, why not Omar?