The Curious Case of Zoilo Versalles

I’ve been thinking about Jack Morris lately. That probably means that the Hall of Fame elections have just happened, or else they’re coming up. I don’t have a strong opinion one way or the other about Morris going into Cooperstown; I put him in a class with Jim Rice, Alan Trammell, Bruce Sutter and Bill Mazeroski—he wouldn’t be out of place, but he wouldn’t be the class of the joint either. Despite being a Twins fan, I probably wouldn’t vote for him. The reason he’s on my mind, though, is because he’s a prime example of a syndrome that seems to be on the rise among baseball folks.

To wit: the discussions about Jack Morris and the HOF, and goodness knows there have been a handful, tend to revolve around what he was , as opposed to what he did . Jack Morris was a big game pitcher. Jack Morris was the dominant pitcher of the 1980s ( not true ). Then, when people do talk about what he did, it’s always in the context of labeling him as one thing or another. No, he wasn’t a big game pitcher—look at the 1992 World Series . That’s what I just did, too, by linking to convenient statistics. The point, though, is that the arguments are always about labels, not players. The more labels a player can accumulate, the more appealing he becomes as a Hall of Famer. Which, of course, is the most prestigious label of all.

As an example, take two Hall of Fame shortstops, Cal Ripken Jr. and Robin Yount. Both were first-ballot choices, and both appear on each other’s baseball-reference comps list, yet Yount has often been unjustly attacked as a weak member of the Hall, while Ripken came as close to unanimous selection as anyone ever has. Why doesn’t Yount get the same respect? Partly because he lacks Ripken’s labels. He’s not the Ironman, not the first modern power-hitting shortstop, not recognized in the same way as an ambassador of the game or a role model for children. That’s not to denigrate his record—no one would do that—it’s just that somehow, his achievements have not translated into labels as well as Ripken’s have.

Now, it’s not really true to call that a new phenomenon. Imprecise labeling has been around since YHWH , at the least. The problem comes when the actual historic record is obscured by the words people write about them. In Morris’ case, that’s the strikeouts, the innings pitched, the team wins and losses. As others have noted, debates about marginal Hall of Famers often end up as impromptu roasts. No one would seriously argue that Morris, Dale Murphy or Dick Allen were any less than outstanding players, but you could be forgiven for drawing that conclusion from reading some of the vitriol about their Hall qualifications.

Of course, this problem is not exclusively a Hall of Fame one, and that brings us to Zoilo Versalles, who is one of the more over-labeled, under-appreciated players around. Zorro, as the good people at Topps called him on his 1961 baseball card , is best known as the 1965 American League MVP. As Bill James has pointed out, this concurrently makes him the league MVP with the lowest Win Share total (32) in history. A great deal has been made about the injustice of Versalles winning the award over Twins teammate Tony Oliva. Compare their lines from that season:

Versalles led the league in extra base hits, total bases, runs and plate appearances. He had a great year. To a 2008 observer, though, Oliva had a demonstrably better season. Unfortunately, the statistics that show it—on-base, slugging, K/BB ratio, Win Shares—were either not yet invented or not yet in vogue in 1965. Oliva’s OPS+ of 141 was substantially higher than Zoilo’s 115, but not has high as Harmon Killebrew’s 145. Other Twins to top Versalles in OPS+ were Earl Battey, Don Mincher, Bob Allison and Jimmie Hall. He won a Gold Glove, yet had a below-average Range Factor per nine innings.

The upshot of all this discussion, which is by no means original, is that Versalles, rather than being labeled as an MVP, is more often labeled as an MVP mistake, much like George Bell and Joe Gordon . This is a doubly distracting dose of hype, and it ends up serving a few different purposes. First, it makes Zoilo’s subsequent decline —he never had another year with an OPS+ of 85— seem much less dramatic. That is, if he was a ‘bad MVP’ in the first place, it’s not as big a deal for him to fall off a cliff in subsequent years. That isn’t true—his fall was truly disasterous for the Twins, regardless of whether he ‘should’ have won the MVP. A healthy Versalles, with Minnesota’s other young veteran talent, could have altered the American League landscape in the late 1960s.

Second, it muddies the question of the key to the Twins’ success in 1965. Were they really a run-and-gun reincarnation of the 1959 White Sox, or was the pennant more thanks to the superb seasons by Oliva and Killebrew? That’s a question that deserves closer scrutiny, and I’ll try to get around to it shortly.

Another label under which Versalles labored was a common one in the 1960s and 1970s—the show-boating, insubstantial, hyper-sensitive Hispanic. That stereotype was most famously applied to Roberto Clemente, but others were frequently painted with the same brush. According to a Sports Illustrated article from October 4, 1965, “Zoilo leads the league in runs scored, is second in hits, first in doubles, second in triples, third in stolen bases, and far ahead of the pack in brooding.” Versalles later attributed much of his behavior to language problems, insecurity, and homesickness, but the knock stayed with him throughout his career, for better or for worse. That in turn led the media towards other common Hispanic stereotypes—flashy defender, reckless on the basepaths—and before his career had hardly begun, his true record disappeared under a mountain of conjecture.

Versalles isn’t the only player to struggle under others’ nomenclatural fancies; far from it. Of crafty left-handers, good-field no-hit middle infielders, LOOGYs and Three True Outcomers, there will never be a shortage. One can only hope that these stock villains, straight from central casting, will at least be accompanied by enough greasy-haired, basement-dwelling stat geeks (oops) to extract some reality from perception.