On January 22nd Rivera is going to be announced as a member of this year’s Hall of Fame class. There’s no doubt about that, the only question is whether or not the vote will be unanimous. If it were up to Bill Ballou of the Worcester, Mass., Telegram, the former Yankees closer would come short of perfection and on Saturday he wrote a 1,500-word column explaining why.
According to Ballou, he doesn’t value the closer position at all. Early on in his column titled Mariano Rivera’s not getting this writer’s Hall of Fame vote, he writes:
The Save — the baseball kind — is the lowest-hanging fruit on the game’s statistical tree.