Carlos Ivan Beltrán Valdés

[Edgy MD]

[Benjamin Grimm]

Does it look like him? 

[Edgy MD]

None of them really do initially to me, but I kind of adapt, realizing that building this kind of compressed 3-D relief from 2-D images is hard.

I like that they recognized his entire post-season career — which was massive and historic — instead of just noting the run with the 2004 Astros.

I had forgotten about his tenure with Texas, which was a bad post-season for him.

[Edgy MD]

Also, the plaque has underscored the terrible challenge of black Mets hats — that they always have to outline the insignia in a border color, either to distinguish it from a New York Giants cap, which it would be if they just transferred the standard orange insignia over, or to keep an alternative blue insignia from getting lost in the black.

So here, rendered in monotone bronze, it just makes the insignia look blurry, which honest is kind of how the Mets insignia almost always looks on black hats.

[Benjamin Grimm]

 

That's interesting. Did they intentionally tarnish the cap to make it look black? If so, they could have just given him a "blue" cap. Here's Seaver's plaque for comparison. Does that look like a Giants cap?

[Marshmallowmilkshake]

Here's Piazza's plaque for comparison. 

I think it's goofy that the Hall feels to need to put common nicknames in quotes. And, it's not even consistent about it. Will anyone really not realize that Michael Piazza and Mike Piazza are the same person? They did it with Jeff Kent's plaque, too., but not with Jeff Bagwell. I get it for people who never used their actual first name, like Sparky Anderson and Yogi Berra.

But for Seaver's plaque, they didn't do it, even though the went by his middle name. And it's not like he didn't have cool nicknames. They could have used "The Franchise" or "Tom Terrific." 

 

[Edgy MD]

9 minutes ago, Benjamin Grimm said:

Did they intentionally tarnish the cap to make it look black? If so, they could have just given him a "blue" cap.

In the monotone bronze, the background colors of the cap look the same to me.  The only thing that makes Beltran's hat "black" is the extra-wide and fuzzy insignia that the black hats are forced to have.

Seaver's hat on his plaque isn't meaningfully different from Bill Terry's or Monte Irvin's, who could each be easily mistaken for Mets by casual visitors.

[Edgy MD]

2 hours ago, Marshmallowmilkshake said:

But for Seaver's plaque, they didn't do it, even though the went by his middle name. And it's not like he didn't have cool nicknames. They could have used "The Franchise" or "Tom Terrific." 

As is often the case with these things, stuff gets more complicated over time.  Elements appear here and there and then suddenly they become necessary.  Fonts narrow and space gets crowded and elements that were mostly indifferently attended to at one point (like hat insigniae) become matters of hair-tearing.

[Benjamin Grimm]

Future generations will ask, who was this Carlos Valdes guy?

[MFS62]

Sadly true.  Even future Spanish speaking fans, who are familiar with multiple last names, won't know which last name he played under.

Later