This blog post is simple: I appreciate the baseball player Omar Vizquel, and sometimes find myself anguishing over his chances of making it into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Those chances are probably next to nothing. He was only 123 hits shy of reaching the mythic milestone of 3,000 hits. That's equivalent to one extra year in his prime. But he was never even close to being considered the best player in the game during any point of his career. Nor was he even considered the best player on those 1995 and 1997 Cleveland Indians World Series teams. He played in an era when Major League Baseball was stock full of power-heavy shortstops, and Vizquel certainly was not a player who hit for power, accumulating only 80 homers for his career.
But it was his glove that impressed the masses. The nine-time gold glover was as good of a two-way player as there was for a certain period of time, playing a defensive position as demanding as any on the field while batting for a decent average (however, it could be argued that he didn't draw as many walks as a two-slot non-power hitter should draw).
I hope that the world of baseball remembers Vizquel as fondly as he deserves to be appreciated. I do not know how to measure his proper worth except to say that it is in the cosmos.
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