2025 Classic Baseball Era Committee Candidate: Ken Boyer

The following article is part of a series concerning the 2025 Classic Baseball Era Committee ballot, covering long-retired players, managers, executives, and umpires whose candidacies will be voted upon on December 8. For an introduction to the ballot, see here, and for an introduction to JAWS, see here. Several profiles in this series are adapted from work previously published at SI.com, Baseball Prospectus, and Futility Infielder. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

One of three brothers who spent time in the majors, Ken Boyer spent the bulk of his 15-year career (1955-69) vying with Hall of Famers Eddie Mathews and Ron Santo for recognition as the National League’s top third baseman. An outstanding all-around player with good power, speed, and an excellent glove — but comparatively little flash, for he was all business – Boyer earned All-Star honors in seven seasons and won five Gold Gloves, all of them during his initial 11-year run with the Cardinals. In 1964, he took home NL MVP honors while helping St. Louis to its first championship in 18 years.

Boyer was born on May 20, 1931 in Liberty, Missouri, the third-oldest son in a family of 14 (!) children whose father, Vern Boyer, operated a general store and service station in nearby Alba, where the family lived. Ken was nearly four years younger than Cloyd Boyer, a righty who pitched in the majors from 1949–52 and ’55, and nearly six years older than Clete Boyer, also a third baseman from 1955–57 and ’59–71; four other brothers (Wayne, Lynn, Len, and Ron) played in the minors. As a teen, Ken often competed against a shortstop named Mickey Mantle, who played for the Baxter Springs Whiz Kids, based in Kansas, just across the border from Oklahoma.

At Alba High School, Ken starred in basketball and football as well as baseball, and received scholarship offers from more than a dozen major colleges and universities. The Yankees were interested, but with Boyer’s high school coach, Buford Cooper, serving as a bird dog scout from the Cardinals, he leaned toward St. Louis. In 1949, Cardinals scout Runt Marr recommended him for a special tryout at Sportsman’s Park, and the team liked him enough to sign him as a pitcher, paying him a $6,000 bonus, $1,000 under the limit that would have required him to remain on the major league roster (a “bonus baby”). While Boyer’s pitching results weren’t awful, he took his strong arm to third base when the need presented itself on his Class D Hamilton Cardinals team in 1950; he hit .342, slugged .575, and showed off outstanding defense.

In 1951, the Cardinals committed to Boyer as a full-time third baseman. At A-level Omaha, he overcame a slow start to hit .306/.354/.455, refining his game on both sides of the ball under the tutelage of manager George Kissell, a legendary baseball lifer whose six decades in the St. Louis organization spanned from Stan Musial’s pre-World War II days as a pitcher to Tony La Russa’s tenure as a manager. Boyer’s progress to the majors was interrupted by a two-year stint in the Army during the Korean War; serving overseas in Germany and Africa, he missed the 1952 and ’53 seasons. Upon returning, the 23-year-old Boyer put in a strong season at Double-A Houston in 1954, then made the Cardinals out of spring training the following year, and even homered in his major league debut, a two-run shot off the Cubs’ Paul Minner in a blowout. That was the first of 18 homers Boyer hit as a rookie while batting .264/.311/.425 (94 OPS+); he also stole 22 bases but was caught a league-high 17 times.

Boyer came into his own in 1956, batting .306/.347/.494 (124 OPS+) with 26 homers and making his first All-Star team. According to Sports Illustrated’s Robert Creamer, in the spring, Cardinals manager Fred Hutchinson marveled at his 6-foot-1, 190-pound third baseman. “He’s the kind of player you dream about: terrific speed, brute strength, a great arm. There’s nothing he can’t do,” said Hutchinson. “I think he has the greatest future of any young player in the league.” However, Boyer’s calm in the face of some second-half regression — he didn’t walk or homer at all in August while hitting just .219/.217/.254 — led to criticism from Hutchinson and general manager Frank Lane, as well as a stint on the bench. More via Creamer:

“Lane talked to me,” Boyer said. “He’s talked about drive and aggressiveness. I don’t think I really know what he means. I know that I try, that I give everything I have. I don’t loaf. I know that all my life people have been saying that to me, that I don’t look as if I’m trying. I guess I don’t look as if I’m putting out. But I am.

“I don’t think hustle is something you can see all the time. Like Enos Slaughter. Everybody talks about the way he runs in and off the field between innings. That’s the least important part of Slaughter’s hustle. The thing that counts is the way he runs on the bases and in the outfield. That’s what makes him a hustling ballplayer, not the way he runs off the field.”

Fortunately, Boyer finished the season with a strong September. It was the first year of a nine-season run across which he hit a combined .299/.364/.491 (124 OPS+) while averaging 25 homers and 6.1 WAR. He ranked among the NL’s top 10 in WAR seven times in that span, with five top-10 finishes in both batting average and on-base percentage, and four in slugging percentage. In 1957, the Cardinals took him up on his offer to play center field so as to allow rookie Eddie Kasko to play third base. Boyer fared well at the spot defensively (Total Zone credits him with being eight runs above average in 105 games) but moved back to the hot corner full time in 1958 when the team called up 20-year-old prospect Curt Flood, who had been acquired from the Reds the previous December. In 1959, the Cardinals named Boyer team captain.

Boyer set career highs in home runs (32), slugging percentage (.570) and OPS+ (144) in 1960, then followed that up with highs in WAR (8.0), AVG, and OBP while hitting .329/.397/.533 (136 OPS+) in ’61. He made the All-Star team every year from 1959–64, including the twice-a-summer version of the event in the first four of those seasons.

The Cardinals were not a very good team for the first leg of Boyer’s career; from 1954–59, they cracked .500 just once, going 87-67 in ’57. With Boyer absorbing the lessons of Musial and helping to pass them along to a younger core — Flood, first baseman Bill White, second baseman Julian Javier, and later catcher Tim McCarver — the team began trending in the right direction. The Cardinals went 86-68 in 1960, and continued to improve, particularly as right-hander Bob Gibson emerged as a star.

After going 93-69 and finishing second to the Dodgers in 1963 — a six-game deficit, their smallest since ’49 — they matched that record and won the pennant the following year, spurred by the mid-June acquisition of left fielder Lou Brock. They beat out a Phillies team that closed September with 10 straight losses despite the strong play of rookie Dick Allen, who is also on the ballot and was then known as Richie. Boyer hit .295/.365/.489 (130 OPS+) in 1964 while driving in a league-high 119 runs. In a case of the writers rewarding the top player on a winning team with the MVP award, he took home the trophy, though his 6.1 WAR ranked a modest 10th, well behind Willie Mays (11.0), Santo (8.9), Allen (8.8), and Frank Robinson (7.9), among several others.

Though Boyer hit just .222/.241/.481 in the seven-game World Series against the Yankees and his brother Clete, he came up big by supplying all the scoring in the Cardinals’ 4-3 win in Game 4 with his grand slam off Al Downing. Additionally, he went 3-for-4 with a double and a homer in their 7-5 win in Game 7. Clete also homered in the latter game, to date the only time that brothers have homered in the same World Series game.

Hampered by back problems, Boyer slipped to a 91 OPS and 1.8 WAR in 1965, his age-34 season, after which he was traded to the Mets — whose general manager, Bing Devine, had served as the Cardinals’ GM from late 1957 until August ’64 — for pitcher Al Jackson and third baseman Charley Smith. At the time, it was the biggest trade the Mets had made. Boyer, whom Devine had acquired as much for his veteran leadership as for his playing skills, rebounded to a 101 OPS+ and 2.9 WAR, albeit on a 95-loss team going nowhere. The following July, he was traded to the White Sox, who were running first in what wound up as a thrilling four-team race that went down to the season’s final day. The White Sox were managed by Eddie Stanky, who had been at the helm when Boyer broke in with the Cardinals. Though Boyer didn’t play badly, he appeared in just 67 games for the team before being released in May 1968. He was picked up by the Dodgers and spent the remainder of that season and the next with them in a reserve role.

The Dodgers asked Boyer to return as a coach for 1970, but he instead chose to return to the Cardinals organization so he could manage in the minors. He spent five seasons guiding various Cardinals affiliates in Arkansas, Florida, and Oklahoma, interrupted by a two-year stint (1971–72) as a coach on the big league staff. Bypassed when the Cardinals hired Vern Rapp to succeed Red Schoendienst after the 1976 season, he spent ’77 managing the Orioles’ Triple-A Rochester affiliate, but when the Cardinals fired Rapp after a 6-10 start in ’78, he returned to take over. The team went just 62-82 on his watch, but the next year, Boyer guided the Cardinals to an 86-76 record and a third-place finish.

Alas, when the Cardinals skidded to an 18-33 start in 1980, the team replaced Boyer with Whitey Herzog, whose tenure in St. Louis would include three pennants and a championship. Boyer accepted reassignment into a scouting role, and was slated to manage the team’s Triple-A Louisville affiliate in 1982, but he had to decline the opportunity when he was diagnosed with lung cancer. He was just 52 years old when he died on September 7, 1982. The Cardinals retired his number 14 in 1984, and 40 years later, he’s still the team’s only former player with that honor who’s not in the Hall of Fame.

On that subject, Boyer never got much traction in the BBWAA voting, either before or after his death. From 1975–79, he maxed out at 4.7%, and was bumped off the ballot when the Five Percent rule was put in place in ’80. He was one of 11 players who had his eligibility restored in 1985, and he was among the five players who cleared the bar to stay on the ballot, along with Allen, Flood, Santo, and Vada Pinson. He remained on the ballot through 1994, topping out at a meager 25.5% in ’88, nowhere near enough for election. Neither did he fare well via the expanded Veterans Committee in the 2003, ’05, and ’07 elections, maxing out at 18.8% in the middle of those years. Similarly, on the 2012 and ’15 Golden Era ballots, and the ’22 Golden Days ballot, he didn’t receive enough support to have his actual vote total announced; customarily, the Hall lumps together all of the candidates below a certain (varying) threshold as “receiving fewer than x” votes to avoid embarrassing them (or their descendants) with the news of a shutout.

All of which is to say that once again, Boyer feels more like ballast than a true candidate, here to round out a ballot without having much chance at getting elected. That’s a shame, because he was damn good. For the 1956–64 period, he ranked sixth among all position players in value:

That’s a pretty good group! Of course the comparison is manicured perfectly to Boyer’s best years, but even if I expand the range to cover the full extent of his career, he’s ninth on the list, in similar company (Kaline, Clemente, and Banks pass him), and one spot ahead of Santo. Boyer was a better fielder than Santo (via Total Zone, +73 runs to +20), and a better baserunner (+20 runs to -34, including double play avoidance), though not as good a hitter (116 OPS+ to 125).

Even though he probably would have reached the majors earlier if not for his military service, Boyer ranks 14th among third basemen in JAWS, just 1.8 points below the standard, with a seven-year peak that ranks ninth, 3.0 points above the standard. At a position that’s grossly underrepresented — there are just 17 enshrined third basemen, not including Negro League players, compared to 20 second basemen, 23 shortstops, and 28 right fielders — that should be good enough for Cooperstown.

To these eyes it is. I included Boyer on both my 2015 and ’22 virtual ballots, both of which allowed voters to choose four candidates from among a slate of 10. With the 2022 tweaks to the Era Committee format, voters can now tab just three candidates out of eight, and so for as much as I believe Boyer is worthy, the new math requires a more extensive ballot triage. His past levels of support illustrate that he’s never gotten more than 25% on an Era Committee ballot, suggesting that he’s a long shot. Even though he has a slightly higher career WAR, peak WAR, and JAWS than Allen (58.7/45.9/52.3), the fact that the latter — who endured considerable racism and shabby treatment during his career — has fallen one vote short in back-to-back elections opposite Boyer has already led me to dedicate one of my three spots to him. That leaves me just two to play with. For now, the best I can do is to leave Boyer in play for one of those spots, but I already think I’m leaning away from selecting him for my final ballot.