If Mariano Rivera is the first unanimously elected member of the baseball Hall of Fame, he can thank Bill Ballou of the Worcester, Mass., Telegram. And Ballou doesn’t even want the legendary Yankees closer in the hall.
Ballou posted a lengthy piece on the Telegram website Saturday evening explaining why Rivera does not belong in the Hall of Fame. The column was published under the troll-baiting headline: “Mariano Rivera not getting this writer’s Hall of Fame vote.”
The implication, of course, is that Ballou intended to leave Rivera off his ballot, thus becoming the first writer to declare publicly he was not voting for the surefire electee.
As of Saturday morning, Rivera had received votes on 100 percent of publicly released ballots and was still in line to become the hall’s first unanimous entrant, an achievement that has become a point of controversy around Hall of Fame time every year.
Nevertheless, Ballou spends nearly 1,500 words denigrating the role of the closer – “The Save … is the lowest-hanging fruit on the game’s statistical tree. Closers are its naked emperors.” – before he finally declares he will not submit a ballot this year. As a result, Ballou gets to have his cake and eat it, too, arguing against Rivera’s Hall of Fame case without suffering the wrath of blowing potential unanimous selection.
As the sports world saw with John Maffei and the lone non-first-place Cy Young vote for Jacob deGrom, that wrath can be vicious and outsized.
It all begs the question why then Ballou felt the need to decry so thoroughly a fundamental part of today’s game if he did not intend to back up his argument with action. He cites Craig Kimbrel’s horrid 2018 postseason, quotes Pedro Martinez and Terry Francona and makes a particularly strange argument about Rivera never winning an ERA title. All true enough, but it’s a long way to go simply not to vote.
Perhaps he was trying to sway still-undecided voters to take the bullet for him and vote “No” on Rivera. Maybe the Boston-area writer couldn’t bring himself to vote for one of the most dominant Yankees of the past 50 years.
Maybe we’ll just let Ballou explain it himself.
“I think I’m right about closers, but not so much that I would deny Rivera a chance to be the first unanimous Hall of Famer,” Ballou writes. “Thus, I’m not voting this year. A submitted blank ballot is ‘no’ vote for every candidate, so I’m doing a Switzerland and not sending one at all.”
Fair enough, but if you have a vote and have not submitted your ballot yet, Ballou has some statistics he’d very much like to share with you.