The 2023 season gave us the most predictable pair of Rookie of the Year races in recent memory. Gunnar Henderson and Corbin Carroll were our top two prospects entering the year and the overwhelming preseason ROY favorites among our staff. At season’s end, they each earned all 30 votes on their respective ballots. It was only the second time in the 21st century that both the AL and NL ROY winners were unanimous decisions (Aaron Judge and Cody Bellinger won unanimously in 2017) and the first time that the clear preseason favorites were also the undisputed victors. By comparison, the 2024 Rookie of the Year races were about as predictable as a toddler’s favorite food.

You don’t want Wyatt Langford? But you loved Wyatt Langford yesterday!

So you either like Paul Skenes or Jackson Merrill, but you won’t tell me which one and if I pick wrong you’ll throw him on the floor and scream? Got it.

AL Rookie of the Year Luis Gil missed most of the 2022 and 2023 seasons recovering from Tommy John surgery. Even before he tore his UCL, a future move to the bullpen seemed possible, and if it weren’t for his strong spring training (15 2/3 IP, 2.87 ERA) and Gerrit Cole’s elbow injury, that’s likely where Gil would have begun the 2024 campaign. Runner-up Colton Cowser was a slightly more promising prospect; he graduated with a 45+ FV to Gil’s 40+. Still, like Gil, his starting role in the majors was not guaranteed until he earned it with a red-hot spring and an equally scorching start to the regular season.

Of the three finalists in the AL, only third-place finisher Austin Wells ranked among our top 100 prospects ahead of the season. And of the five players who earned votes for AL Rookie of the Year as part of our preseason staff predictions exercise (Langford, Evan Carter, Junior Caminero, Holliday, and Colt Keith), only Langford ended up earning so much as a single vote from the BBWAA. He finished seventh with one second-place vote and four third-place selections.

The NL contenders weren’t quite as surprising. All three finalists, Skenes, Merrill, and Jackson Chourio, were among our top 30 prospects entering the season. Meanwhile, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, the most popular NL Rookie of the Year choice in March, only fell out of the race due to a triceps injury that cost him almost half the season. Yet, although the NL field was not so surprising, at least not like the AL field turned out to be, the final results were just as hard to predict. The voting ultimately wasn’t all that close – Skenes earned 23 first-place votes to Merrill’s seven – but those numbers might undersell what a difficult decision all 30 voters had to make. Dan Szymborski did a great job breaking down why it was such a tough choice (and why he ultimately cast his ballot for Merrill).

Merrill showed off all five tools in 2024, the most impressive of which was his center field defense, considering he was a shortstop up until this year. OAA, UZR, and Baseball Prospectus’s DRP loved him in center. Only DRS disagreed (0 DRS), but even a perfectly neutral defensive performance is admirable coming from a 21-year-old playing the position for the first time. Combine that glove with good baserunning, great contact skills, and a surprising amount of power, and you get Merrill’s 5.3 WAR, more than a full run higher than any other rookie in either league. The last rookie to produce more WAR and still lose the ROY was Kenny Lofton (5.8 WAR) in 1992. Thus, the fact that Skenes came out on top is a testament to the dominant season he put together. Over 23 starts and 133 innings, he pitched to a 1.96 ERA and 4.3 WAR. No rookie starter has thrown more innings with a lower ERA in over 50 years. If Skenes had been on the Pirates’ roster on Opening Day, it’s very likely he’d have surpassed Merrill’s 5.3 WAR, and this conversation wouldn’t have been so complicated. But that’s the debate in a nutshell. On the one hand, you can’t blame Skenes for not pitching in the majors sooner. He was clearly ready to make the Pirates’ roster out of camp. On the other hand, you can’t give him credit for innings he didn’t pitch.

Only two more rookies earned votes in the NL, and either of them very well could have won the award outright if they’d played in the opposite league. Chourio wasn’t quite as strong of a hitter as Merrill, but he excelled on both sides of the ball, finishing with 21 homers, 22 steals, 6 OAA, and 3.9 WAR. Meanwhile, fourth-place finisher Shota Imanaga was terrific in the first year of what now looks like an incredibly team-friendly four-year, $53 million deal with the Cubs. His 2.91 ERA ranked third among all qualified NL pitchers. His 3.72 FIP was significantly higher, so his 3.0 WAR ranked just 19th among NL hurlers. Still, among rookie pitchers, it was second only to Skenes.

A trio of NL infielders also deserve some recognition for their strong rookie seasons; any of them might have earned some down-ballot votes in a weaker year. Masyn Winn (3.6 WAR) and Joey Ortiz (3.1 WAR) were strong defenders with roughly league-average bats, while Tyler Fitzgerald (3.0 WAR) put up a .217 ISO and 132 wRC+ over 96 games while looking just capable enough with the glove to be an everyday shortstop.

The AL rookie class didn’t have quite as much top-end talent or mid-tier depth. Gil was a solid, mid-rotation starter who moderately outperformed his peripherals. That’s no knock on the righty, who was a valuable member of the Yankees’ AL pennant-winning roster, but he didn’t have a star-making debut season like Skenes, Imanaga, or Yamamoto. According to WAR (and 14 out of 30 voters), Cowser actually had the more impressive season. Even so, it’s hard to ignore how similar Cowser’s numbers were to those of the NL’s distant third-place finisher Chourio. And considering neither Gil nor Cowser was a slam dunk to win, one might have thought Wells would earn some first-place votes himself. He blossomed into a terrific defensive catcher by anyone’s metrics (13 FRV, 11 DRS, 14.5 DRP), which is quite the accomplishment. Unfortunately, he disappeared at the plate in September (22 wRC+) and may have cost himself the hardware in the process.

Where the AL rookie class really stood out this year was in the bullpen. Two of the top three relievers by WAR were AL rookies: Cade Smith (2.7 WAR) and Mason Miller (2.3 WAR). Miller was the bigger story because of his triple-digit fastball velocity, gaudy strikeout totals, and strong start to the season, but Smith ended up with a lower ERA and FIP in 11 1/3 additional innings. Nonetheless, narrative often prevails in awards voting, and Miller finished ever so slightly ahead of Smith. It probably didn’t help Smith’s case that he was hidden behind Cy Young finalist Emmanuel Clase in the Guardians’ bullpen, whereas Miller racked up 28 saves as the A’s closer.

The other two AL rookies receiving votes were outfielders Wilyer Abreu (3.1 WAR) and Langford (2.9 WAR). The two had similarly valuable seasons; each was above average at the plate, while Abreu was the stronger fielder and Langford the better baserunner. However, Abreu came into the season as a relatively unheralded name, and Langford’s top-prospect reputation preceded him. Thus, compared to Abreu, who looked like a blossoming star, Langford almost seemed to be a disappointment — at least relative to expectations. That could explain why Abreu earned a couple more votes, including a pair of second-place selections from outside the Boston chapter of the BBWAA.

The emergence of star prospects like Skenes and Merrill, the breakouts of less-heralded rookies like Cowser and Gil, and the close ROY races in both leagues highlight what was another banner year for rookies. Overall, they combined for 138.3 WAR in 2024, surpassing the previous record of 134.8 set by last year’s rookie class:

What’s more, this past year’s rookies represented 13.8% of WAR league-wide. That figure isn’t quite record-breaking, but it is the highest percentage of WAR to come from rookies since 1947, fittingly the first season of the ROY award, created for and won by Jackie Robinson. These are the top seasons in history according to percentage of WAR produced by rookies, excluding 1871 (when everyone was a rookie):

Of course, all of this is partly because rookies have seen a steady increase in playing time since the start of the 21st century. When rookies play more, it stands to reason that they’re going to produce more value. Therefore, it’s also relevant to look at the ratio of rookie WAR to rookie playing time, which I’ve calculated by taking the percentage of league-wide WAR produced by rookies and dividing it by the percentage of league-wide plate appearances and batters faced by rookies. Rarely is that ratio going to be higher than 100% (that would mean rookies were outproducing non-rookies on a rate basis), but the closer the number is to 100%, the better rookies have performed compared to the rest of the league.

By this metric, the 2024 season isn’t quite as historic. Still, it was the strongest year for rookies since 2012 and one of the top three seasons of the last 30 years. The graph begins in 1916, when TBF data is first available:

Another metric to consider is the number of rookies who reached a certain WAR threshold. Decimal places of WAR are pretty insignificant, and any WAR threshold I pick is going to be somewhat arbitrary. Still, I think it’s interesting to identify the number of rookies who made a lasting impression in any given season. For instance, 28 players on our rookie leaderboards finished with at least 2.0 WAR this past season. The last time there were more two-win rookies was 1920, which was the first season that any of the Negro Leagues are considered major leagues, and therefore the rookie season of all-time great players like Oscar Charleston and Cristóbal Torriente. Meanwhile, the last time rookies made up such a high percentage of all two-win major leaguers was 1947:

Similarly, the last time there were more three-win rookies on our leaderboards was 1920, and the last time rookies made up a higher percentage of three-win players was 1947.

At this point, I feel compelled to note that due to MLB’s two-pronged rookie eligibility requirements, our leaderboards include a handful of players who have already exhausted rookie status. It’s easy to filter out players who have reached 130 at-bats or 50 innings pitched in the majors; it’s harder to filter out those who have accumulated 45 days on an active major league roster during the championship season (not counting days on the injured list) without reaching either of those other playing time thresholds. For the sake of consistency, the numbers I’ve cited up to this point come directly from our leaderboards. I could have manually extracted the few players who weren’t technically rookies in 2024, but it would be impossible to do that for every season on record. Moreover, I don’t think it’s a grave sin to include a player like Lawrence Butler when I’m looking at general rookie trends; if he had been called up just a week later in 2023, he’d still have been rookie eligible in 2024.

However, in case that makes you skeptical about the greatness of this year’s rookie class, let me ease your troubled mind. Even if I manually correct the 2024 data and remove players like Butler, rookies still made up a higher percentage of all two-win players in 2024 than in any season since 1920 and a higher percentage of all three-win players than in any season since 1984. And keep in mind, that’s without manually correcting the data in any other season.

Some of these rookies will become superstars in the years to come. At least one of them already is. Others may look back on 2024 as the best year of their careers. As their futures unfold in different ways, we may soon forget that all of these players crossed the major league threshold in the same season. Still, for this brief moment in time, all of these players are a unified graduating class. So, let me leave them with the distinctive, touching, and unforgettable words of my high school principal’s graduation speech: “Today is the first day of the rest of your lives.”

Baseball’s awards season is in full swing this week. Tonight, the National League Rookie of the Year award, officially known as the Jackie Robinson award since 1987, was awarded to Paul Skenes, who was impressive enough to also be a finalist in the NL Cy Young award voting. Skenes finished with 23 first-place votes to Jackson Merrill’s seven.

I’m not here to praise or criticize the results. Instead, I’m here to perform what I see as my journalistic duty. I was an NL Rookie of the Year voter this year (my sixth time voting for the award), and I have always felt that it’s important to give a detailed explanation of the reasoning behind my choice. As usual, I spent most of the final weekend of the season agonizing over my choices, because while being asked to vote for one of these awards is admittedly really cool, it’s also a weighty responsibility that demands care as well as candor. Offering a breakdown of my vote hasn’t always been fun — in 2021, my decision to vote for Trevor Rogers over Jonathan India resulted in my social media mentions being inundated with a combination of threats and insults — but I think I owe it to the fans and the players involved to explain myself. (OK, some of the brouhaha in 2021 was fun, like the suggestion that the Cincinnati Reds should fire me, a notion that still amuses me on many levels.) Read the rest of this entry »

Last year was an enjoyable one on the Hall of Fame front. After a three-cycle stretch during which BBWAA voters elected just two candidates (nobody for 2021, David Ortiz for ’22, and Scott Rolen for ’23), they tabbed three for the 2024 ballot, namely first-year candidates Adrian Beltré and Joe Mauer, and holdover Todd Helton. While some of the debates were contentious, the end result felt like a return to the good old days of the 2014–20 stretch, when the writers elected an unprecedented flood of 22 honorees in seven years, an impressive lot that did nothing to dilute the caliber of the players elected. If that’s your idea of fun, I have good news, as the 2025 BBWAA ballot — which was released on Monday — offers another excellent opportunity to elect multiple high-quality candidates, with 3,000 hit club member Ichiro Suzuki and 10th-year holdover Billy Wagner the most likely honorees.

Over the next six weeks, I’ll profile all of the ones likely to wind up on voters’ ballots ahead of the December 31 deadline, with a handful of profiles trickling into January. I’ll be examining their cases in light of my Jaffe WAR Score (JAWS) system, which I’ve used to break down Hall of Fame ballots as part of an annual tradition that by the end of this cycle will be old enough to drink (I did a 20th-anniversary retrospective in January). The series debuted at Baseball Prospectus (2004-12), then moved to SI.com (2013-18), which provided me an opportunity to go into greater depth on each candidate. In 2018, I brought the series to FanGraphs, where my coverage has become even more expansive.

Today I’ll offer a quick look at the biggest questions attached to this year’s election cycle, but first…

The Basics

To be eligible for election to the Hall of Fame via the BBWAA ballot, a candidate must have played in the majors for parts of 10 years (one game is sufficient to be counted as a year in this context), have been out of the majors for five years (the minors or foreign leagues don’t count), and then have been nominated by two members of the BBWAA’s six-member screening committee. Since the balloting is titled with respect to induction year, not the year of release, that means that this year’s newcomers last appeared in the majors in 2019; Suzuki’s eligibility was bumped back a year due to his two-game farewell with the Mariners at the Tokyo Dome. Each new candidate has 10 years of eligibility on the ballot, a reduction from the 15-year period that was in effect for several decades. The last candidate grandfathered into getting the full 15 years was Lee Smith, whose eligibility expired in 2017, while the last candidate who had his eligibility window truncated mid-candidacy was Jeff Kent, who fell off the ballot after the 2023 cycle. Read the rest of this entry »

The best-case scenario for a sports team owner is rare, but clear: A local businessman runs the team as a community institution. Rather than an absentee landlord, the owner should be a community leader. That’s the vision new Orioles owner David Rubenstein is selling. During the playoffs, rather than sequestering himself in a luxury box, Rubenstein sat in the stands, among the people. OK, he was right by the home dugout, so he was among the richest subset of the people, but it’s good optics.

And less than a year into his tenure, Rubenstein is showing himself to be a builder of bridges. Or a tearer-down of walls. Or a mover of walls, at any rate. One of baseball’s most foolishly conceived and widely derided architectural features is on its way out. Mike Elias, the Orioles’ executive vice president and general manager, announced Friday that the left field wall at Oriole Park at Camden Yards is getting a haircut and moving toward the plate.

Glory, glory, hallelujah. Read the rest of this entry »

The team that signs Nick Pivetta this offseason will be getting a veteran starter who, as my colleague Ben Clemens stated in our 2025 Top 50 Free Agents rundown, has “long been a favorite of pitching models.” The team will also be getting someone who believes in pitching to his strengths. The 31-year-old right-hander is studious about his craft, but with a notable exception. Poring over scouting reports isn’t his cup of tea.

“I think about it not as a specific hitter, but more of, ‘Is he a lefty or a righty?,’” explained Pivetta, whose past four-plus seasons have been with the Boston Red Sox. “I have certain sequences that I do against lefties or righties. I do the same sequences against either side, no matter the hitter.”

That’s not to say he totally ignores weaknesses. As Pivetta told me in our last-weekend-of-the-season conversation, there are certain hitters who struggle with a particular pitch and/or location, so he might vary his “same game plan around a certain spot.” But for the most part, he is “doing the exact same thing over and over again, just trying to execute.”

The extent to which that is optimal is open for debate. As his 50 Free Agents blurb spells out, Pivetta’s numbers suggest that he has never reached — and perhaps not even approached — his full potential. The stuff is unquestionably plus, but the consistency has clearly been lacking.

The Victoria, British Columbia native has pitched more than 1,000 innings over eight big-league seasons, so opposing teams have a pretty good idea of what to expect when he takes the mound. Moreover, certain lineups will present, at least on paper, a greater challenge for his pitch mix and standard attack plan. Might adherence to advance reports be a meaningful advantage add? Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Los Angeles Angels. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the fifth year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

On Wednesday, I wrote about one of my favorite topics: The impact of sabermetrics on the practice and analysis of baseball. Specifically, in this case: How MVP voters behave in the post-Fire Joe Morgan era. And for those of you who got to the end of that 2,000-word post and did not feel sated, there’s good news! This was not the question I actually set out to answer when I started kicking the topic around.

Welcome to Part 2.

The very name of the MVP award invites voters to consider the value of a certain player’s contributions. For nearly 100 years, that was a tricky proposition. How do you weigh differences in position, in playing style, park factors, hitting versus pitching versus fielding versus baserunning? It’s enough to boggle the mind. Read the rest of this entry »

“Juan Soto hates swinging.” That’s a takeaway you’re sure to hear if you follow baseball this winter. His free agency is the biggest story of the next few months, and his offensive approach drives fans to distraction. Walks aren’t all that fun, and Soto feasts on them. How could you not bring it up when your team is pursuing him for a record-breaking deal?

From a certain standpoint, it’s true that Soto hates swinging. Of the 101 batters who saw at least 1,500 pitches with zero or one strikes this past season, Soto ranked 99th in swing rate on those pitches. When he isn’t defending the plate with two strikes, he spends a ton of time with the bat on his shoulder.

That’s not a specific enough way of looking at it, though. For an example, let’s chop the strike zone up into pieces. Soto saw 675 pitches that weren’t in the strike zone or even near it – what Baseball Savant defines as the chase and waste zones. He swung at 6.5% of those, 42nd out of the 44 batters who saw 500 or more such pitches. He was almost never fooled into swinging at awful pitches, in other words.

Next consider the edges of the zone – pitches that are either barely strikes or barely balls. There aren’t a lot of good options on these pitches. Hitters don’t generally crush the ball when it’s located on the corners, unless they’re sitting on either a pitch or a location. Sure, if you’re looking high and away, you might tag it, but more likely you’ll swing and miss or make weak contact. Soto swung at 31.3% of these pitches, the second-lowest rate in baseball.

Those pitches in the chase and waste zones? You shouldn’t swing at them. There, Soto’s patience is an obvious asset. The ones on the borderline? It’s less obvious. There are great hitters who take an expansive approach to borderline pitches, like Bobby Witt Jr. and Yordan Alvarez. There are awful hitters who do it too, as you’d expect. Swinging too much at offerings we call “pitcher’s pitches” is pretty clearly not going to pan out every time.

Likewise, discretion is no guarantee of valor. There are great hitters who, like Soto, mostly let these pitches go. Aaron Judge and Kyle Schwarber fit the bill. It’s not just high-walk-rate sluggers, either; Matt Chapman, Adley Rutschman, Nolan Arenado, and even Randy Arozarena behave this way. On the other hand, plenty of bad hitters take borderline pitches and are still bad.
Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Every year when the postseason rolls around, we enjoyers of baseball try our best to make sure we’re properly appreciating the history unfolding on the field before us. We want to acknowledge when we’ve just watched a game so magical that it will be spoken of in tones of awe and disbelief for years to come. Downstream of that, we like to evaluate whether a game, a series, or even an entire postseason was a good one, mentally sorting them into tiers with other postseasons we’ve watched. Some measures of “good” are subjective, coming down to our personal preferences for certain strategies, styles of play, narratives, teams, or players. Other measures are more universally agreed upon and objectively quantifiable. In particular, most neutral observers value a close, exciting game, one that features both tension and action to keep observers engaged.

Win Probability Added (WPA) provides a reasonable proxy for measuring both tension and excitement. At the plate appearance level, it uses the score, inning, and base-out state (i.e. runner on second, two outs) to calculate a team’s win expectancy based on historical outcomes. The difference in a team’s win expectancy after a plate appearance relative to what it was before it represents the WPA during the plate appearance in question. WPA will be negative for the team whose odds of winning decreased while being positive for their opponent, but in this context, we’re going to focus on the magnitude of the change in win expectancy. Without a rooting interest, it’s less about which team wins and more about seeing big plays that impact the outcome of the game. Games with a large quantity of WPA have a lot of high-impact plays and lead changes that allow teams to pass win probability back and forth between one another.

Using WPA, we can evaluate the quality of the action in a given game by both looking at the average WPA per plate appearance and by adding up the game’s total WPA. Both methods provide useful insight. Average WPA per plate appearance controls for the variable number of plate appearances in a game, since games with more plate appearances have more opportunities to accumulate WPA. Sometimes that accumulation constitutes empty calories; other times it’s more substantial. Ultimately, we want the games that top the charts from both perspectives. Read the rest of this entry »