Ozzie tops ballot for Hall of Fame

On the final weekend of balloting for the baseball Hall of Fame, voters could very well elect a .262 hitter to the shrine in Cooperstown.

The question is which one.

With just 28 home runs and 793 runs batted in over a 19-year career, Ozzie Smith averaged about 1 1/2 home runs and a shade under 41 RBIs a season. But, oh, what he could do with his glove.

Before the annual celebration of offense and home runs, the Wizard of Oz defined defense. He was an acrobat at shortstop, the glue of every St. Louis Cardinals infield during the '80s.

Too often, we are wowed by the long ball and ignore the basics of baseball. Home runs sell tickets. Pitching and defense win games. Ozzie Smith won games, usually with his glove, occasionally with a home run.

In the 1985 National League playoffs, the Cardinals and Los Angeles Dodgers had split the first four games and were tied at 2-2 in the bottom of the ninth inning of a gripping Game 5. This was a simpler time in baseball, when the postseason was limited to one playoff round instead of two. The winner would advance to the World Series so this was serious stuff.

It was in this setting that Smith, a spindly 150 pounds, muscled up against Dodgers reliever Tom Niedenfuer and hit a game-winning home run, the first left-handed home run of his career. The Cards also won Game 6 to clinch the NL pennant.

That was Smith's power year when he hit six of his career home runs, double the number he managed in any other season. Perhaps shocked by that output, he didn't hit another homer for the next two seasons.

The Cardinals never complained. Whatever he hit was a bonus. As long as he brought his glove to the ballpark every day, that was all they cared about.

The best shortstop of his time won 13 straight NL Gold Glove awards and holds five major league fielding records, including 8,375 assists and 1,590 double plays. He led the NL in fielding percentage by a shortstop a record seven times and was on 15 All-Star teams, including 12 in a row from 1981-92.

And he celebrated the start of big games with a mean backflip that stamped those events as something special, just like him. For all that, Smith gets the first check on the Hall of Fame ballot.

No team wins without a closer, and the ballot has two of the best who ever handled that task -- Rich Gossage and Bruce Sutter.

Equipped with a fastball that sizzled past hitters and a Fu Manchu mustache that intimated them, Gossage had 310 saves and a 3.01 earned run average in 1,002 games. There were 1,502 strikeouts in 1,809 innings, including a NL record 151 strikeouts by a relief pitcher in 1977.

Sutter merely revolutionized his craft, introducing the split-fingered fastball, a pitch that bordered on the unhittable and one he threw with uncanny skill. He had 300 saves and a 2.84 earned run average in 661 games, all out of the bullpen.

Mark down Goose and Bruce.

Gossage and Sutter never pitched on any teams with Jack Morris. It's just as well. He wouldn't have needed them.

Morris had 175 complete games, none better than Game 7 of the 1991 World Series when, pitching for Minnesota, he beat the Atlanta Braves with a 10-inning shutout.

He won 254 games, 162 of them during the '80s when he was the winningest pitcher of the decade. There were 133 complete games during that decade, which would have meant little work for Sutter and Gossage. That's worth a vote.

The ballot offers some pop, too. Andre Dawson is available for the first time, equipped with a .279 batting average, 438 home runs and 1,591 RBIs in 21 seasons. Jim Rice is up for the eighth time with a .298 average, 382 home runs and 1,451 RBIs in 16 seasons.

Both are worth a check.

Finish the ballot off with Gary Carter, who was baseball's best catcher in the '80s and missed election a year ago by 53 votes. Carter hit 324 home runs and drove in 1,225 runs.

And he batted .262, just like Ozzie Smith.