The Hammock Papers: Unanimous.

19 November 2018

Unanimous.

Tom Seaver couldn't do it. Neither could Nolan Ryan nor Cal Ripken. Ty Cobb came up short, too.

Mariano Rivera?

Why not?

If baseball is ever going to have a unanimous Hall of Fame selection, Rivera ought to be it. This is his last challenge in baseball, the appropriate final touch to a 19-year career defined by greatness.

In 77 years of Hall of Fame balloting, no player has been named on every ballot. Seaver came the closest, getting the votes of 425 of 430 members of the Baseball Writers' Association of America who cast ballots (98.84 percent) in 1992.

Ryan made it onto 491 of 497 ballots (98.79 percent) in 1999, and Ripken, Cobb and George Brett all got better than 98 percent of the vote.

But no one has ever been unanimous.

Could Rivera be the first? Could someone come up with a reason for not voting for him?

CONNECT

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MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL