Havana Hit-Man

One of the most underrated players in major-league history is a guy by the name of Tony Oliva. For those of you who are too young to remember, Oliva was a star outfielder for the Minnesota Twins, former rookie of the year (1964), and clearly one of the best hitters (and not exactly a bad fielder, either) of the late 60s and early 70s (to this day, in fact, he's still the only player in baseball history to have won the batting title in each of his first two seasons). Unfortunately, Mr. Oliva ended up blewing out his knee in 1971 and, yes, for all intents and purposes his career was over (yes, he did DH for a few seasons after that but he clearly wasn't the same)..................................................................................................But, I'm telling you, if you really want to know how great he was, just get a load of these numbers from his first eight seasons. Mr. Oliva was first in total hits from that era (1455 - Brooks Robinson was second with 1313), tied for first with Yaz in doubles (278), second only to Yaz in runs scored (711 to Yaz's 734), first in total bases (2356 - Yaz was second with 2244), and easily first in batting average (.313 - Frank Robinson was a distant second at .300). The dude went on to make the all-star team all eight years and ended up with a total of three batting titles. Hell, people, he even won a gold-glove (1966)/had one of the best throwing arms of any big-league outfielder............................................................................................................And you have to remember, folks, the 1960s was largely an era in which pitchers dominated (Denny McLain's 31-win season in '68, for example). For Oliva to have batted .313 in that era is phenomenal. Is all of this good enough to get him into the Hall of Fame - as a lot of his contemporaries (Tony Perez, for example) are suggesting? I don't know. There may be some players who played longer who might deserve it first (Gil Hodges, Maury Wills, Ron Santo, to name a few). But, if you're going to give the honor to a player who dominated for X amount of time (a la Sandy Koufax), Oliva could in fact be your man. I'm not going to make a stink if he gets elected.