This post is part of a series covering the 2024 Contemporary Baseball Era Committee Managers/Executives/Umpires ballot, covering candidates in those categories who made their greatest impact from 1980 to the present. For an introduction to the ballot, see here. The eight candidates will be voted upon at the Winter Meetings in Nashville on December 3, and anyone receiving at least 75% of the vote from the 16 committee members will be inducted in Cooperstown on July 21, 2024 along with any candidates elected by the BBWAA.

Cito Gaston

After Jackie Robinson integrated the National League in 1947, it took 28 years — not to mention pointed public comments from Robinson himself just before his death — for a team to hire a Black manager, namely Frank Robinson, who piloted Cleveland starting in 1975. Such was the slow pace of change that it took another 14 years for two teams with Black managers to square off in the same game, when Robinson’s Orioles and Cito Gaston’s Blue Jays met on June 26, 1989. Three years later, Gaston carved out an even bigger spot in baseball history when he became the first Black manager to lead a team to a World Series victory, a feat he and the Blue Jays repeated in 1993.

During his time in the dugout, Gaston earned a reputation for putting trust in his players (sometimes to a fault) and being approachable, creating a calm and stable working environment. Even so, he spent only eight full seasons and parts of four others as a major league manager and was never hired by a team besides the Blue Jays. After falling short in multiple interviews, he was outspoken regarding the process, expressing a belief that he was sometimes just the token minority included in a team’s search for a new manager. That said, he also expressed a take-it-or-leave-it attitude to the job and often seemed happier as a hitting coach, a role he held for nine seasons and change in Toronto. Gaston is the only one of the four managers on this Era Committee ballot to win multiple World Series. The question is whether that should push him to the front of the line in this context despite his career length. Read the rest of this entry »

This post is part of a series covering the 2024 Contemporary Baseball Era Committee Managers/Executives/Umpires ballot, covering candidates in those categories who made their greatest impact from 1980 to the present. For an introduction to the ballot, see here. The eight candidates will be voted upon at the Winter Meetings in Nashville on December 3, and anyone receiving at least 75% of the vote from the 16 committee members will be inducted in Cooperstown on July 21, 2024 along with any candidates elected by the BBWAA.

Jim Leyland

Jim Leyland was his era’s archetype of an old-school manager, as he went from looking ancient at the start of his career to actually being ancient, at least in baseball terms. Prematurely gray — at 42, he looked 20 years older — and known for sneaking cigarettes between innings, he cut an indelible image in the dugout and in front of a microphone. His dry wit made him a media favorite, and despite a gruff exterior and a knack for getting his money’s worth from umpires when the situation merited it, he earned a reputation as a players’ manager rather than an old-school hardass. That sometimes worked against him, as he was prone to sticking with struggling players longer than most other managers — a vulnerability in a short series. His success will garner him strong consideration for the Hall of Fame, but his case may be haunted by the number of times his teams came up just short. Read the rest of this entry »

This post is part of a series covering the 2024 Contemporary Baseball Era Committee Managers/Executives/Umpires ballot, covering candidates in those categories who made their greatest impact from 1980 to the present. For an introduction to the ballot, see here. The eight candidates will be voted upon at the Winter Meetings in Nashville on December 3, and anyone receiving at least 75% of the vote from the 16 committee members will be inducted in Cooperstown on July 21, 2024 along with any candidates elected by the BBWAA.

Lou Piniella

Lou Piniella spent even more years managing in the majors (23, between 1986 and 2010) than he did playing the outfield (18, between 1964 and ’84). To both, “Sweet Lou” brought a flair for the dramatic and a fiery intensity — his dust-kicking, hat-stomping, base-throwing tirades became the stuff of legend — as well as tremendous baseball acumen. Like fellow Contemporary Baseball candidate Davey Johnson, he won championships in both phases of his career, but his failure even to reach the World Series a second time as a manager cast a long shadow on every successive stop. Unlike Johnson, however, he came close to election, missing by just one vote on the 2019 Today’s Game Era Committee ballot from which Harold Baines and Lee Smith were elected. Read the rest of this entry »

This post is part of a series covering the 2024 Contemporary Baseball Era Committee Managers/Executives/Umpires ballot, covering candidates in those categories who made their greatest impact from 1980 to the present. For an introduction to the ballot, see here. The eight candidates will be voted upon at the Winter Meetings in Nashville on December 3, and anyone receiving at least 75% of the vote from the 16 committee members will be inducted in Cooperstown on July 21, 2024, along with any candidates elected by the BBWAA.

Davey Johnson

Like Billy Martin before him, albeit with far less drinking and drama, Davey Johnson was renowned for his ability to turn teams around. He posted a winning record in his first full season at four of his five managerial stops and took four of the five franchises that he managed to the playoffs at least once. But after six-plus seasons managing the Mets, he never lasted even three full seasons in any other job and never replicated the success he had in piloting the 1986 Mets to 108 wins and a World Series victory. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the more positive outcomes of the Hall of Fame’s latest round of restructuring its Era Committees in 2022 was the creation of a ballot limited to managers, umpires, and executives, removing them from directly competing with players for votes and positioning them within a triennial election cycle. On Thursday, the Hall unveiled its slate of eight candidates for the 2024 Contemporary Baseball Era Committee Managers/Executives/Umpires ballot, dedicated to candidates in those categories who made their greatest impact from 1980 to the present. The candidates will be voted upon at the Winter Meetings in Nashville, Tennessee on December 3, with the results announced live at 7:30 p.m. ET on MLB Network’s MLB Tonight.

The eight-member ballot includes four managers, two executives, and two umpires. Five of the eight are first-time candidates, and seven of the eight are still alive:

While these candidates aren’t entirely without controversy — West in particular — weighty topics such as segregation and performance-enhancing drugs won’t dominate the discussions, which comes as a welcome relief. To be eligible for inclusion, managers and umpires need to have compiled 10 or more major league seasons and been retired for at least five years, though candidates 65 years or older are eligible six months following retirement. Executives need to have been retired for at least five years, though active executives 70 years or older are eligible “regardless of the position they hold in an organization and regardless of whether their body of work has been completed,” according to the Hall’s rules. Read the rest of this entry »

Variously known as the “The Human Vacuum Cleaner,” “Mr. Hoover,” or “Mr. Impossible,” Brooks Robinson set the standard for defensive wizardry at third base, winning a record 16 consecutive Gold Gloves thanks to his combination of ambidexterity, supernaturally quick reflexes, and acrobatic skill. He was an 18-time All-Star, a regular season, All-Star Game, and World Series MVP, and a first-ballot Hall of Famer. More than that, he was “Mr. Oriole” for his 23 seasons spent with Baltimore, a foundational piece for four pennant winners and two champions, and a beloved icon within the community and throughout the game. In 1966, Sports Illustrated’s William Leggett wrote that Robinson “ranked second only to crab cakes in Baltimore.” He may have surpassed them since.

Robinson died on Tuesday at the age of 86. According to his agent, the cause was coronary disease. On the broadcast of the Orioles’ game on Tuesday night, longtime teammate and fellow Hall of Famer Jim Palmer fought back tears to pay tribute. “We all know he’s a great player, he won 16 Gold Gloves, but we also know how special a person he was,” said Palmer, who like Robinson debuted with the Orioles as a teenager, spent his entire career with the team, and was elected to the Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility. “I think as a young player you make a decision early in your life, ‘Okay, who do I want to emulate? Who do I want to be like?’ Brooks was that guy.” Read the rest of this entry »

We began this series with Craig Kimbrel striking out José Ramírez to close out the All-Star Game, and I’ll admit, my original intent was to cover all of the pitchers in Part II. But as anyone who reads (or edits) my work knows, when it comes to the Hall of Fame and its candidates, I can go on, and on… and on. In part that’s because I like to use this series as an annual clearinghouse, covering the vast majority of the active players whom readers most frequently ask me about during the course of the year. It may not be a one-stop shop, but with the added volume comes some context for comparisons (Has Freddie Freeman caught up to Paul Goldschmidt? Who has a better shot, Carlos Correa or Francisco Lindor? And what about Trea Turner?) In part, it’s also because in the 20 years (!) since I introduced it, my JAWS system has become more complicated and more nuanced, requiring a bit of additional introduction. That’s particularly true when it comes to pitching, where during the 2022 election cycle, I formalized S-JAWS for starting pitchers and R-JAWS for relievers.

I had been messing with the latter since the 2019 cycle, in the context of Billy Wagner’s candidacy. The short version of the story is that while Baseball Reference’s flavor of WAR (which I use in JAWS) features an adjustment for leverage — the quantitatively greater impact on winning and losing that a reliever has at the end of the ballgame than a starter does earlier — to help account for the degree of difficulty, it’s not the only way to measure reliever value. Win Probability Added (WPA) is a context-sensitive measure that accounts for the incremental increase (or decrease) in the chances of winning produced in each plate appearance given the inning, score, and base-out situation. WPA can be additionally adjusted using a pitcher’s average leverage index (aLI) for a stat variably called situational wins or context-neutral wins (referred to as WPA/LI). Both of those are now in the sauce; R-JAWS is the average of a reliever’s WAR (including his time as a starter and a hitter, if any), his WPA, and his WPA/LI. The rankings, which I used to have to create by hand, are now on Baseball Reference, and Wagner, who ranks sixth and is the best reliever outside the Hall, is trending towards election after receiving 68.1% on the 2023 ballot, his eighth year of eligibility. Read the rest of this entry »

Shohei Ohtani is a unicorn. No player in 20th- or 21st-century AL/NL history, not even Babe Ruth in his last two seasons with the Red Sox (1918–19), has been able to sustain regular duty in both a rotation and a lineup over a full season, let alone excel at both endeavors. At this writing, the 29-year-old superstar leads the majors in homers (34), slugging percentage (.665), and wRC+ (179), and he’s got the AL’s second-best strikeout rate (32.2%) and lowest batting average against (.191). He currently ranks among the AL’s top 10 in Baseball Reference’s position player WAR (4.0, fourth) and pitching WAR (2.5, ninth), and just over a full win ahead of Ronald Acuña Jr. for the major league lead in combined WAR. Over the past two and a half seasons, he’s been worth 25.0 WAR, 5.9 more than the top position player, Aaron Judge.

Some day, Hall of Fame voters will have to reckon with Ohtani. If he reaches the kind of career numbers that Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS system forecast for him over the winter — 1,809 hits, 404 homers, 124 OPS+, 158 wins, 2,329 strikeouts, 122 ERA+, and 72.1 WAR — the decision will be a no-brainer. I’m already of the mind that if he gets to his 10th season (2027) and is still doing double duty, he’ll have my vote when he lands on the ballot regardless of what the numbers say, because what he’s doing is so utterly remarkable. WAR and JAWS weren’t really built to handle a case like his, and not only because his ability to save his team a roster spot is probably worth some uncounted fraction of a win per year, too. Read the rest of this entry »

On Thursday, I took the first swing for my annual roundup of active players who may or may not be building their cases for the Hall of Fame. With one exception, all of the ones I examined were in their age-30 seasons or later, but for this installment of shortstops and outfielders, I’ll take a look at some who are still in their 20s and have further to go before they reach Cooperstown.

For this exercise, unless otherwise indicated, I will be referencing bWAR for season and career totals, my JAWS metric, and the ZiPS rest-of-season projections, since one of the goals here is to give an idea of where these players will stand at the end of the season, having banked a full complement of WAR instead of just 80-some games worth. These future candidates are already dealing with suppressed WAR totals from the 60-game 2020 season (which hardly makes them the first to experience such scheduling limitations and career interruptions due to wars and strikes). Unlike last year, I’ll cover pitching in one installment. Note that I am by no means predicting that every player here will make it to Cooperstown or even suggesting that all are worthy; in some cases I’m particularly pessimistic, but these are the names that get tossed around

If you’re just arriving, I’d encourage you to at least read the introduction in Part 1. The important take-home point was my finding that nearly three-quarters of the position players who have reached a 40.0-WAR peak score (best seven seasons, aka WAR7) have eventually been enshrined, and so inevitably a good bit of the focus throughout this exercise has been on the math required to improve those scores. There is and will be far more to those cases, and to appreciating these players’ skills and accomplishments, but for the purposes of space I’ve had to cut to the chase. Here again is the table related to those 40.0-WAR peaks:

At every position, I’ve counted the total number of players with a peak WAR of at least 40.0; the number of Hall of Famers meeting that criterion; and the number of such players who are not yet eligible, either because they’re active, too recently retired to appear on a Hall of Fame ballot, or on the permanently ineligible list, like Pete Rose (whom JAWS classifies as a left fielder) and Shoeless Joe Jackson (right field). For catchers, I used a 32.0-WAR threshold instead of 40.0, as their values are constrained by the limits of playing time and pre-framing measures. Read the rest of this entry »

It wasn’t quite up to the level of Shohei Ohtani versus Mike Trout with the 2023 World Baseball Classic championship on the line, but the final plate appearance of Tuesday night’s All-Star Game did feature a memorable matchup. On the mound trying to secure a 3–2 victory — the National League’s first since 2012 — was Craig Kimbrel, he of the 408 career saves. Working to bring home the tying run from second base (or at least keep the line moving) was José Ramírez, already playing in his fifth All-Star Game at age 30. Ramírez fell into an 0–2 hole by taking a fastball and then chasing a curveball in the dirt but battled back to even the count before Kimbrel struck him out with a high fastball.

Someday we may talk about that matchup as one between two future Hall of Famers. Kimbrel has had his ups and downs in recent years, but he’s been dominant enough to earn a spot on an All-Star squad for the second year out of three and the ninth time overall. Earlier this year, he became the eighth pitcher to collect 400 saves, and he’s overtaken Kenley Jansen (who also recently reached 400) in the Reliever JAWS rankings. As for Ramírez, he’s hitting .289/.364/.506 (132 wRC+) and ranking among the AL’s top 10 in WAR for the sixth time in seven seasons (3.4 fWAR, 3.3 bWAR). While he’s only 30 years old, if all goes well during this season’s second half, he’ll reach an important milestone that strongly suggests future election to the Hall.

Thus far in his 11-year career, Ramirez has accumulated 43.7 WAR (I’m sticking with bWAR throughout the rest of this article unless otherwise indicated), which is impressive but not itself remarkable. Of more importance is that he already has tallied 38.4 WAR in his best seven seasons — his peak score (aka WAR7) for the purposes of calculating his JAWS. One of those seasons is this one:

Via Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections, Ramirez is forecast to produce another 2.4 WAR this year, pushing his seven-year peak score to 40.8. While that’s still 2.3 WAR shy of the Hall standard for third basemen (43.1), he has at least one other season that shouldn’t be too hard to improve upon; indeed, his preseason three-year ZiPS projection forecasts him to produce 5.6 WAR in 2024 (which would take him to 43.3) and 4.9 WAR in ’25 (inching him to 43.4).

Even without looking that far ahead, the 40-WAR peak score is significant. For a position player, it’s a strong indicator of future election to the Hall:

At every position, I’ve counted the total number of players with a peak WAR of at least 40.0; the number of Hall of Famers meeting that criterion; and the number of such players who are not yet eligible, either because they’re active, too recently retired to appear on a Hall of Fame ballot, or on the permanently ineligible list. The last of those classifications applies to Pete Rose (whom JAWS classifies as a left fielder) and Shoeless Joe Jackson (right field). For catchers, I’ve used a 32.0-WAR threshold instead of 40.0, as their values are constrained by the limits of playing time and pre-framing measures.

As you can see, nearly three-quarters of the eligible players with at least 40.0 WAR in their seven best seasons are enshrined, a higher percentage than even I would have guessed before I dug through the numbers. That percentage would be even higher if I were also to remove the players whose PED-related allegations and suspensions have effectively blocked their elections, but let’s not dwell upon them today.

Currently, eight active position players have peak scores of at least 40.0, with two more besides Ramírez on the verge: Jose Altuve (39.8) and Aaron Judge (39.6). The former’s injuries will likely prevent him from reaching the mark this year (more on which below), but the latter has already produced one of his seven best seasons (he’s appeared in only parts of eight, including his -0.3-WAR cup of coffee from 2016) and needs just 0.4 WAR once he returns from his toe injury.

With that, it’s time to launch my more-or-less annual Hall of Fame progress report. This may not seem like an obvious time to check in on such players, but the July logjam on the baseball calendar includes the Hall’s induction weekend (July 21–24) as well as the draft, the All-Star Game and its high-profile auxiliary events (the Futures Game and the Home Run Derby), and the run-up to the August 1 trade deadline. It’s a time that I get a lot of questions about active players vying for future elections, and in the interest of providing a one-stop shop — er, in three parts, so let’s call it a department store — here we are.

For this exercise, unless otherwise indicated, I will be referencing bWAR for season and career totals, my JAWS metric, and the ZiPS rest-of-season projections, since one of the goals here is to give an idea of where these players will stand at the end of the season, having banked a full complement of WAR instead of just 80-some games worth; these future candidates are already dealing with suppressed WAR totals from the 60-game 2020 season — which hardly makes them the first to experience such scheduling limitations and career interruptions due to wars and strikes. Unlike last year, I’ll cover pitching in one installment; we’ll return to Kimbrel. Note that I am by no means predicting that every player here will make it to Cooperstown or even suggesting that all are worthy; in some cases I’m particularly pessimistic, but these are the names that get tossed around. Read the rest of this entry »