Back in the spring, when the existence of the 2022 season — or at least one that started on time and ran 162 games — was anything but a certainty due to the owners’ lockout, I embarked on an open-ended Hall of Fame-related project centered around starting pitchers. Having already taken a swing at modernizing JAWS to better account for the changes in starter workloads that have occurred over the past century and a half, I turned my focus to the demographic disparities among enshrined starters, and examined the cream of the crop still outside the Hall, getting as far as those born in the 1950s.

You’re forgiven if this all seems pretty hazy or even unfamiliar, and perhaps confused as to why I’m bringing this up now. With the season in its final week but containing only minimal drama as far as the races go (pour one out for Team Entropy), it struck me that it might be my last chance to delve into the topic until after the playoffs, and so here we are.

I intended to continue this Cooperstown Notebook series during the season, particularly in light of the late-April announcement of the Hall reconfiguring its Era Committee process yet again. Up for election in December will be players on the Contemporary Baseball ballot, defined as those who made their greatest impact from 1980 to the present day. The eight-candidate ballot, which will be announced in November, will almost certainly include the obvious candidates who fell off recent writers’ ballots, namely Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Curt Schilling, and Fred McGriff. It will also likely include the holdovers who received significant support on the 2020 Modern Baseball ballot and have been classified as belonging to this period, namely Dwight Evans and Lou Whitaker (Dave Parker and Steve Garvey belong to the Classic Baseball period, next up in December 2024).

As for holdovers from the 2019 Today’s Game ballot (the one from which Lee Smith and Harold Baines were elected), all of them except Lou Piniella (who’s now qualified for the Contemporary Baseball Managers, Umpires, and Executives ballot, to be voted upon in December 2023) received “fewer than five votes” out of 16 that year. From that group, Orel Hershiser was one of two pitchers in my review of pitchers born in the 1950s who received my recommendation in light of S-JAWS, though that hardly guarantees him another ballot appearance. Dave Stieb, who’s never graced an Era Committee ballot after going one-and-done on the writers’ ballot in 2004, is the other hurler from that period whose case merits a closer look in light of S-JAWS, but I’m not holding my breath that he’ll be on there.

To backtrack a bit, I fell down this rabbit hole because as things stand only nine starting pitchers born in 1950 or later are enshrined. As a percentage of pitchers with at least 2,000 innings — a practical cutoff but not an absolute one (Dizzy Dean is the only enshrined starter from the NL, AL, and bygone white leagues with fewer) — that’s far lower than what came before:

Why should we care about this demographic dip? Mainly because we want to equitably represent more recent eras, though doing so requires an understanding that our standards need some tweaking to reflect the evolution of the starting pitcher. While voters have moved past the 300-wins-or-bust mentality by electing Bert Blyleven, Roy Halladay, Pedro Martinez, Jack Morris, Mike Mussina, and John Smoltz along with 300-winners Tom Glavine, Randy Johnson, and Greg Maddux, there are additional candidates from the not-too-distant past who are worthy of recognition, pitchers who may not be significantly better than the average enshrinee (the original stated goal of the JAWS project) but who would hardly be out of place within the broader spectrum of those already honored.

This shouldn’t be taken as a literal call for current and future voters to open the floodgates and elect players to the point that the percentages above are dead even; particularly with the Era Committee reconfigurations, electing anybody might prove to be a tall task. I’m hopeful that eventually we can boost the rates of election for pitchers of more recent vintage while keeping in mind that the somewhat looser standards make it apparent that a few guys from the more ancient eras look even stronger in the light of S-JAWS than in JAWS.

Like JAWS, S-JAWS — which is now the default at Baseball Reference’s Starting Pitcher page — uses an average of a pitcher’s career and peak WAR (best seven seasons at large) for comparisons to the averages of all Hall of Fame pitchers. The idea behind S-JAWS is to reduce the skewing caused by the impact of 19th century and dead-ball era pitchers, some of whom topped 400, 500, or even 600 innings in a season on multiple occasions. I’ve chosen to do this by prorating the peak-component credit for any heavy-workload season to a maximum of 250 innings, a level that the current and recent BBWAA candidates rarely reached, and only one active pitcher (Justin Verlander) has, albeit by a single inning a decade ago. The various emphases on pitch counts, innings limits, and times through the order make it unlikely we’ll see such levels again, at least on a consistent basis, and while we can debate, lament, and discuss whether it’s worth trying to reverse that trend, that’s not my focus. Given the current trends in the game regarding starting pitcher usage, it might make more sense 5-10 years from now to look at candidates on a 200-225 inning basis, but for now this is a reasonable place to start the adjustments.

In this piece I breezed through the pre-1900, 1900-29, and 1930-49 periods to identify the starters among the top 100 in S-JAWS who are outside the Hall, and here I went through those born in the 1950-59 period. At last we get to the 1960-69 group, which is better represented within the Hall than the decades on either side because that period produced a bumper crop of very good hurlers. Here are the ones who fall within the top 100, meaning with an S-JAWS of 43.3 or higher:

The self-inflicted wounds of Clemens and Schilling aside, the best of this group is already in Cooperstown, and I don’t need to rehash their credentials here. Of the rest, some might have gotten there with better staying power; of the pitchers I’m highlighting here, only Brown and Finley reached 3,000 innings, a level that all starters who have been elected since Sandy Koufax (1972) reached save for Halladay and Martinez.

Because of the way I designed S-JAWS, none of the six pitchers up for discussion from this batch lose much off their peak scores, but they climb in the rankings. Here’s a look at how things changed for the half-dozen I’m covering here, along with a few callbacks from previous installments:

I’ll refer back to these. As I did in the Fifties installment, I’ll start at the bottom, which isn’t to say that I’m arguing on behalf of all of these pitchers.

Dwight Gooden

Of the pitchers here, Gooden is the one who burned most brightly and seemed destined for Cooperstown. A year after being the fifth pick out of Tampa’s Hillsborough High School in the 1982 draft, the 18-year-old fireballer struck out 300 in 190 innings at A-level Lynchburg. In 1984, the 19-year-old Gooden arrived on the major league scene with a rising fastball that could reach 100 mph, and a knee-buckling curveball so good his teammates dubbed it Lord Charles instead of the common Uncle Charlie. The kid set a rookie record with a league-leading 276 strikeouts in 218 innings, became the youngest All-Star ever, won NL Rookie of the Year honors, finished second in the NL Cy Young voting behind Rick Sutcliffe (!) and earned the nickname Doctor K. Then in 1985 he turned in a season for the ages, going 24-4, with a 1.53 ERA (229 ERA+) and 268 strikeouts in 276.2 innings, good for the NL Cy Young, the pitchers’ Triple Crown (league lead in wins, strikeouts, and ERA), and 13.3 WAR (12.2 pitching, 1.1 offense) — a single-season total that stands as the highest of any pitcher in the live-ball era.

It was mostly downhill from those lofty heights. Though he helped the Mets to a World Championship in 1986, Gooden lost the sizzle on his mid-90s fastball and wasn’t nearly as dominant (17-6, 2.84 ERA, 4.3 WAR). Prior to the start of 1987 season, he went into a drug rehabilitation program and missed the Mets’ first 50 games; decades later, he admitted that he missed the Mets’ World Series parade because he was high in a drug dealer’s apartment. He returned from rehab to post a few more good years with the Mets, helping them to the NL East title in 1988 (18-9, 3.19 ERA) while making his fourth and final All-Star team, but he produced just a 103 ERA+ and a total of 23.1 WAR for the 1987-94 span. Shoulder problems stemming from overuse took their toll, as did continued cocaine and alcohol problems. While serving a 60-day suspension for testing positive for cocaine in 1994, he tested positive again and was suspended for the entire ’95 season.

Yankees owner George Steinbrenner offered Gooden a chance at redemption once the pitcher’s suspension ended, and he responded with a solid season that included a no-hitter and 2.6 WAR, but he was left off the postseason roster as the team won its first World Series since 1978. He bounced around for a few more years, relying on luck and guile more than talent — my pal Nick Stone nicknamed him “Granny Gooden” because watching him pitch was “like watching an elderly woman navigate an icy staircase” — with stops in Cleveland, Houston, and Tampa Bay before a return to the Bronx in 2000.

Like former teammate Darryl Strawberry, Gooden’s occasional moments of glory mainly served to remind us — and him — of what might have been. He doesn’t gain much ground in the move to S-JAWS, particularly relative to the other pitchers here, and his 0-4, 3.97 ERA record in the postseason doesn’t help his cause. His recovery continues to be worth rooting for, however.

Chuck Finley

Aside from Nolan Ryan, no pitcher is as closely associated with the history of the California/Anaheim/Los Angeles Angels as Finley, the franchise leader in wins (165), innings (2,675), pitching WAR (52.0), and a whole bunch of other categories. The Halos tried doubly hard to get the 6-foot-6 southpaw, drafting him in the 15th round in 1984, and again as the fourth pick in the following January’s secondary draft. He threw just 41 innings in the minors before being called up to join the bullpen of the ill-fated 1986 AL West champions.

In 1988, Finley finally nailed down a rotation spot, beginning a 12-year run as the team’s mainstay, during which he posted a 3.70 ERA (119 ERA+) while averaging 212 innings and 4.3 WAR. He ranked in the AL top 10 in WAR five times in that span, made four All-Star teams, and topped 7.0 WAR three times; over that stretch, only Clemens, Maddux, Cone, and Johnson outproduced his 51.5 WAR, while Brown tied him. His career-high 7.7 WAR ranked second in the league in 1990 as he went 18-9 with a 2.40 ERA, but he finished a distant seventh in the Cy Young voting. He never led the league in Ks, but ranked in the top 10 in 10 out of 12 seasons from 1989-2000, and in the top five in seven out of eight from ’93-2000.

Following the 1999 season, Finley left the Angels for Cleveland on a three-year, $25 million deal, which he inaugurated with his fifth and final All-Star season (16-11 4.17 ERA, 4.3 WAR); alas, the club missed the playoffs for the first time in six years. Injuries limited him to 22 starts and an ugly 5.54 ERA in 2001, and he pitched just one more year, a season that was overshadowed by wife Tawny Kitaen (of Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again” video fame) being arrested for spousal abuse for attacking him while driving the night before he was scheduled to make his season debut. Traded to St. Louis late in the year, he finished strong and helped the Cardinals win the NL Central, but chose to walk away from his next potential payday at age 39.

Finley’s better than most people remember, but he lacks any kind of hook — a Cy Young Award, a big postseason, a signature accomplishment — that would elevate his Hall of Fame case beyond what his very respectable but hardly overwhelming S-JAWS tells us. Hershiser is below Finley in the rankings, but with his 1988 achievements (NL Cy Young, record-setting scoreless streak, and epic postseason run), three other top-five Cy Young finishes, and additional October success, he’s a much more viable, and worthy, candidate for election.

Kevin Appier

An intense competitor with an unorthodox delivery and a killer forkball and slider to complement his fastball, Appier was a first-round pick by the Royals in 1987. He debuted with the club two years later, when Saberhagen was en route to his second Cy Young, and inherited the mantle of staff ace during the team’s last gasp at competitive relevance for a generation. From 1990-93, he finished among the AL’s top four in ERA three times, and from ’90-97, he ranked among the league’s top 10 in WAR seven times; his total of 46.4 (5.8 per year) trailed only Clemens and Maddux. His best season was 1993, when he led the AL with a 2.56 ERA and 9.3 WAR, but finished third in the AL Cy Young voting; his 18-8 record was no match for Jack McDowell’s 22-10 with a 3.37 ERA and 4.4 WAR (ugh). He made just one All-Star team during this stretch, but certainly deserved more.

A torn labrum cost Appier most of 1998 and a good chunk of his velocity, requiring him to get by on finesse and guile thereafter. The Royals traded him to the A’s in mid-1999, and he helped the team to the AL West title the following season while going 15-11 with a 4.52 ERA (104 ERA+). He parlayed that into a four-year, $42 million deal with the defending NL champion Mets, but while “Ape” pitched well in the Big Apple (3.57 ERA, 3.5 WAR), he was traded to the Angels for injured slugger Mo Vaughn the following winter.

Appier turned in a solid season for the Angels (14-12, 3.92 ERA, 1.8 WAR) in 2002, though he was roughed up in the postseason even as the team won the World Series. He struggled the following season due to a torn flexor tendon, however, and drew his release in late July; the Royals picked him up, and he finished out his contract but missed most of 2004, his age-36 season, due to elbow surgery. Comeback attempts in the next two seasons, with Kansas City and Seattle, didn’t pan out.

Had it not been for injuries, Appier might have had a real shot at Cooperstown, but the what-ifs only go so far. He deserved much more recognition during what was a very good career, but with just one All-Star appearance, a single season receiving Cy Young votes, and an 0-2, 5.34 ERA record in the postseason, he doesn’t have anything that would give his Hall case the traction it would need.

Bret Saberhagen

Though he wasn’t Gooden-level, Saberhagen was a pitching prodigy in his own right. A 19th-round pick out of Grover Cleveland High School in Reseda, California in 1982, he spent just one season in the minors before debuting with the Royals one week shy of his 20th birthday, showing up with a 94 mph fastball, a great changeup, and what teammate and future manager John Wathan would call “the curveball of a lifetime.”

Saberhagen’s solid performance helped win a weak AL West that season, but it was his 20-6, 2.87 ERA performance the following year that had the greater impact. Leading a young rotation to another division title, he garnered his first Cy Young award, topped the circuit with 7.1 WAR, and won World Series MVP honors on the strength of complete-game victories in Games 3 and 7 against the Cardinals, the latter a shutout that helped finish an umpire-aided comeback from a three-games-to-one deficit.

Saberhagen struggled the following year, (7-12, 4.15 ERA, 2.0 WAR), beginning an unfortunate pattern of strong odd-numbered years and lackluster even-numbered ones that included his first All-Star selection in 1987 and a second Cy Young in ’89 (23-6 with a league-low 2.16 ERA and league-high 9.7 WAR), slotted between sub-.500 records and league-average-ish ERAs in ’88 and ’90. Notably, injuries were part of the pattern; arm troubles limited him to 25 starts in 1986 and surgery to remove bone chips in his elbow cut him to 20 starts in ’88. Through his eight seasons in Kansas City, he went 36-48 with a 3.70 ERA and 10.9 WAR in the even years, and 74-30 with a 2.85 ERA and 29.9 WAR in the odds — nearly triple the value!

In the last of those seasons, Saberhagen pitched his first no-hitter, against the White Sox on August 26, 1991, but also missed a month due to tendinitis in his shoulder; even so, his 5.1 WAR ranked eighth in the league. After the season, the Royals, who had grown increasingly wary of his $2.95 million price tag, traded him to the Mets in a five-player deal that included Gregg Jefferies and Kevin McReynolds heading in the other direction. Alas, tendinitis in his right index finger and a torn medial collateral ligament in his right knee limited Saberhagen to 34 starts over his first two seasons in New York. While injured, he made headlines and was docked a day’s pay for spraying bleach at reporters as a poorly-received practical joke during the Mets’ dismal 59-103 season in 1993. He made his third All-Star team in the strike-shortened 1994 campaign, going 14-4 with a 2.74 ERA and an 11.0 strikeout-to-walk ratio. He finished second in the NL in WAR (5.5) and third in Cy Young voting while turning in his first good season in an even-numbered year.

Unfortunately, he couldn’t keep it up. Saberhagen made 25 just starts in 1995, during which he was traded from the Mets to the Rockies, and while he helped the upstart third-year expansion team claim the NL Wild Card, he was pummeled in his lone postseason start by the Braves. He missed all of 1996 due to a pair of shoulder surgeries, the first to repair ligament damage shortly after the ’95 season ended, his second the following May, to implant a titanium anchor to hold his rotator cuff together. After the Rockies declined their $5 million option on him in late 1996, he signed with the Red Sox and spent most of the ’97 season rehabbing, pitching in just six late-season games. It paid off. In 1998, the 34-year-old Saberhagen went 15-8 with a 3.96 ERA while making 31 starts, his highest total since 1989, and helped the Red Sox claim the AL Wild Card. Despite three separate trips to what was then the DL in 1999, he pieced together a strong follow-up, with a 2.95 ERA and 3.8 WAR in 119 innings.

His shoulder was in no shape to continue. Where Dr. David Altchek recommended orthopedic surgery to clean up Saberhagen’s frayed rotator cuff, he didn’t expect to discover a 90% tear when he operated. Not until July 27, 2001 would Saberhagen take a major league mound again, but on that day he spun six innings of one-run ball for his 167th and final major league win. Alas, that was followed by two rough outings, more pain, and one final trip to the DL. He retired that winter at age 37; as of 2007, when I first wrote up his Hall of Fame case, he held the record with 1,016 days on the disabled list.

Given how much time he spent convalescing, rehabbing, or pitching through injuries, it’s remarkable how well Saberhagen did pitch. As I noted in the previous installment of this series, despite not debuting until 1984 and missing some time thereafter, he ranked seventh in WAR during the ’80-89 span. Extend that for a second decade and his ranking is even more impressive:

That’s one hell of a pitcher. By S-JAWS, Saberhagen has some separation above the previous trio as well as Hershiser and Stieb, and rankings-wise, he’s in the same neighborhood as Hall of Famers as disparate as Jim Bunning, Pud Galvin, and Don Sutton, not to mention CC Sabathia. His overall postseason numbers (2-4, 4.67 ERA in 54 innings) aren’t great, but between his 1985 heroics and his two Cy Youngs, he’s got a legitimate case.

Spoiler alert: so to do the last two pitchers on my list, Cone and Brown, but that will have to wait for my next installment.

Justin Verlander wasn’t quite at his best on Wednesday night, yielding three runs in six innings against the Rangers in Houston — his first time surrendering more than two runs since June 24. Even so, the 39-year-old righty continued an impressive comeback following nearly two full seasons lost to injuries — first a forearm strain and then Tommy John surgery. In fact, he leads the American League in both wins (15) and ERA (1.85), and while those don’t carry the same currency at FanGraphs as they do elsewhere, it’s not hard to imagine him adding a third Cy Young award to his trophy room if he keeps this up.

Verlander won the award for the first time in 2011, when he went 24-5 with a 2.40 ERA and 250 strikeouts in 251 innings; by leading the league in wins, strikeouts, and ERA, he also claimed the pitching triple crown and added the AL MVP award as well. Over the next seven seasons, he finished as the runner-up for the AL Cy Young three times (2012, ’16, and ’18) but also endured some ups and downs, including a 4.54-ERA season (2014), an injury-shortened one (2015), and a late-season trade to the Astros that helped him claim a World Series ring (2017), albeit on a team that was later sanctioned for its illegal electronic sign-stealing efforts.

After narrowly losing out to Blake Snell for the award in 2018, Verlander finally won another Cy Young in 2019, going 21-6 with a 2.58 ERA and an even 300 strikeouts; in the same game he reached that plateau, he also became the 18th pitcher to surpass the 3,000-strikeout milestone. It’s taken more than two years to follow that up, however. After a spring in which he suffered both lat and groin strains, Verlander underwent surgery to repair the latter shortly after Major League Baseball was forced to postpone Opening Day due to the COVID-19 pandemic. When he finally did take the mound roughly four months later for the Astros’ season opener, he suffered a forearm strain, and after experiencing pain during a simulated game while rehabbing, he was diagnosed with a torn UCL and underwent Tommy John surgery in late September, which cost him all of 2021. Read the rest of this entry »

“They can’t all be ‘Ice Skating with Jackie Robinson‘” is a phrase often spoken in the downtown Brooklyn abode I share with my wife and daughter. In a marriage between two baseball media professionals, one a writer who was born into a lineage of Dodgers fans and the other an editor who spends her days seeking, weighing the merits of, and polishing stories for publication, it’s a line that has taken on a multilayered meaning.

The story itself is one told by Vin Scully, who called Dodgers games for 67 years, from 1950 — when Dem Bums were in Brooklyn, the perennial underdogs in a three-team city — through 2016, when they were nearing the six-decade mark of their move to Los Angeles. In it, Scully recalls the time he and baseball’s ultimate barrier-breaker raced on ice skates at a resort in the Catskill Mountains, despite the fact that Robinson, a California native who had starred in four sports at UCLA, had never been on skates; Scully, a New York native, had plenty of experience. “There aren’t very many people who can say, ‘I raced Jackie Robinson on ice,'” he concluded.

In the Jaffe-Span household, Scully’s story — which he told again and again over the years, adding details, including the fact that the baby with whom Rachel Robinson was pregnant was Sharon Robinson — serves as a reminder that that not every story can be the cream of the crop; that we should strive to bring our own work up to our highest standards while accepting that not all stories are created equal; and that the ritual of sharing stories elevates them, creating a community of their audience and a continuity over the years.

Vin Scully ice skating with Jackie Robinson. Vin was really a part of history pic.twitter.com/Gpg0JoHw0u

— Talkin’ Baseball (@TalkinBaseball_) August 3, 2022

Scully called games for the first six of the Dodgers’ seven championships, and seasons in which Dodgers players won nine MVP awards, 12 Cy Youngs, and 15 Rookies of the Year. He covered 25 future Hall of Famers including those inducted as executives and managers during his tenure. With the exception of Robinson and perhaps Sandy Koufax, Scully looms larger in the franchise’s history than any of them. The Hall of Fame recognized him with the Ford C. Frick Award for broadcasters in 1982; remarkably, Scully worked longer after winning the award than before.

Scully died on Tuesday, August 2, at the age of 94. In the aftermath of a day when baseball’s biggest trade in deadline history — the deal that sent Juan Soto to the Padres in exchange for six players — went down, the news of the beloved and iconic broadcaster’s death spread throughout the baseball world. On social media, seemingly everybody wanted to pay tribute to Scully, sharing his best calls, their own experiences with watching and listening to him through uncounted Dodgers and national broadcasts, and their encounters with the gracious and humble gentleman who in redefining his profession touched millions upon millions of people.

What follows here is an updated version of my own Scully story, first told at Sports Illustrated’s website back on September 30, 2016, as he headed into the final days of his illustrious career. I was lucky enough to listen to Scully for 37 years, intermittently in my youth but with increasing frequency over his final decade on the air thanks to cable television and MLB.tv. In our household, checking in on a Scully game three time zones away was itself a ritual, and I cherished the continuity it brought with my youth. I retell this in the spirit of “Ice Skating with Jackie Robinson” — this is the best I’ve got to offer, and I can’t think of any better way to pay tribute to the man who meant so much to me, part of a line of four generations of Jaffes who have pulled up a chair to hear him call a game.

…

On Aug. 10, 1979, the Jaffe family of Salt Lake City piled into our maroon-and-faux-wood-panel Chevy Caprice station wagon for a road trip to California. As dusk hit somewhere near the western Nevada border, my father tuned the radio dial and magically summoned a Dodgers game, called by a friendly-sounding voice: Vin Scully, who in those days alternated innings with partner Jerry Doggett.

I was nine at the time, nestled in the back of the station wagon. The previous summer, I’d become absorbed in baseball’s day-to-day flow for the first time, learning to read box scores, batting averages and division standings. My team, handed down from my father — who supplied a felt souvenir pennant for the bedroom I shared with my younger brother — was the Dodgers, and thanks to my collection of baseball cards, I could recite their batting order from memory: Lopes-Russell-Smith-Garvey-Cey-Baker-Monday-Yeager-pitcher.

My father’s own allegiance had been inherited from his father Bernard Jaffe, born in Brooklyn in 1908. Though he had greater access to Giants games at the Polo Grounds through a season ticket-holding friend, Bernie — a good enough ballplayer in his own right to (allegedly) have been offered a professional contract — fell for Dem Bums sometime in the late 1920s or early ’30s after seeing good-hit/no-field rightfielder Babe Herman get bonked on the head by a fly ball. Even after departing Brooklyn — first for the University of Maryland, then overseas to earn his medical degree (and to witness Jesse Owens at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, foreshadowing his support of Robinson), and finally to Walla Walla, Washington, more than a decade ahead of the Dodgers’ migration — he passed on his love to his sons and grandsons.

Vincent Edward Scully was born in the Bronx on November 29, 1927, the son of Irish immigrants. His father, Vincent Aloysius Scully, was a silk salesman at an upscale clothing store who died of pneumonia when his son was four years old. After her husband’s death, mother Bridget Scully took her young son to Ireland to spend time with family. “My mother told me later that when we came back, I had a brogue you could cut with a knife,” Scully recalled in 2006.

With money tight at the Scully household, Bridget rented out two spare bedrooms, usually to merchant sailors. She eventually remarried one of them, an English sailor named Allan Reeve. The family moved to the Washington Heights section of Manhattan, and Reeve worked as a doorman at an apartment on Central Park West. “To me, he was Dad,” said Scully. “I never thought of him as a stepdad. I had an ache because I never knew my father, and it was washed away by my dad.”

When he was eight years old, Scully discovered his love of baseball. From his 2020 retelling:

“I went by a laundry and in the window they had the line score of a World Series game. The Giants had lost to the Yankees that day, October the 2nd, 1936, by the score of 18-4. Well, when I saw the Giants having lost by such a heavy score, the little boy that I was, I felt so sorry for them and I became a rabid baseball fan, and especially for the Giants.

“And from October the 2nd, 1936, I had my life dedicated to baseball.”

The young Scully’s favorite player was Giants slugger Mel Ott; later, as a lefty-swinging outfielder at Fordham Prep and then Fordham University, he emulated the future Hall of Famer’s signature style, lifting his right leg before swinging.

Building upon his love of listening to college football broadcasts as a youth, when he was fascinated by the noise of the crowd, Scully pursued broadcasting for Fordham’s WFUV radio station, covering basketball, football and, in his senior year, baseball, having quit the team as a player. After graduating in 1949 and working at the CBS affiliate WTOP in Washington, D.C., Scully met Dodgers broadcaster Red Barber, who was additionally in charge of sports for CBS Radio. Barber assigned Scully to broadcast a college football game from Fenway Park in place of Ernie Harwell; with no room in the press box, he had to do it from the right field roof, which he did in the rain and snow without complaint. Barber’s satisfaction with his work led to Scully being assigned the Harvard-Yale game the following week. When Harwell left the Dodgers broadcast team after the 1949 season to join that of the Giants, the Dodgers hired Scully to be their third announcer behind Barber and Connie Desmond. The rest, as they say, is history.

The first memory of Scully that my father (Richard Jaffe, born in 1941) has dates to the 1953 World Series between the Dodgers and Yankees, the first of nearly two dozen called by Scully either on television or radio. In those days, the World Series was generally called by the announcers of the participating teams; Barber, the senior Dodgers broadcaster, had shared play-by-play duties with Yankees voice Mel Allen the year before. As the story goes, to do the 1953 Series, Barber wanted a higher fee from sponsor Gillette, but Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley refused to support him and put forth the 25-year-old Scully instead. In doing so, he became the youngest person ever to broadcast a World Series game, a mark that still stands. The Dodgers lost the 1953 series in seven games but beat the Yankees in seven in ’55. The Jaffes gathered around the radio to hear Scully and Allen call Brooklyn’s 2–0 win behind Johnny Podres‘ eight-hit shutout.

That night in the station wagon in 1979, Scully and Doggett painted a vivid portrait of the players and the action on the field, which included a parade of Dodgers runs against the archrival Giants, including six in the second inning, keyed by centerfielder Derrell Thomas’ grand slam. In the fifth, rookie Mickey Hatcher hit his first big league homer. In the ninth, staked to a 9–0 lead, Don Sutton wrapped up a five-hit shutout, the 50th of his major league career. By that point, I was under a quilt in near-total darkness, but I imagined I could see the frizzy-haired Sutton smiling as he was congratulated by his familiar-faced teammates — my 1979 Topps Dodgers set ($3 via an address in the back of The Sporting News) come to life. Thus began my 37-year relationship with the golden voice of Scully.

Growing up in Salt Lake City meant that Dodgers games on TV were limited to national broadcasts via NBC’s Game of the Week, ABC’s Monday Night Baseball, and the postseason, but occasionally I’d commandeer the family’s old Panasonic radio and replicate my father’s signature touch, finding Scully’s voice cutting through the static at the left end of the AM dial. So it was on Friday night, October 1, 1982, as Rick Monday’s grand slam backed Jerry Reuss’ three-hit shutout in a 4–0 victory over the Giants (again) to keep the Dodgers alive in a three-team NL West race, one game behind the Braves. The next day, the Dodgers eliminated the Giants via a 15–2 rout; the day after, a three-run homer by the Giants’ Joe Morgan provided the coup de gràce to the Dodgers. So it goes.

“Parrish, needless to say, is not superstitious. He wears No. 13. We have a reason for bringing that up, because we’re in the business of telling you what’s going on here, and not getting cute and superstitious. So the big story, really, with Detroit leading 4–0, is the fact that Jack Morris has not allowed a hit, and it’s going to start to build.” — Vin Scully, April 7, 1984

From 1975 to ’82, Scully not only did Dodgers games, but he also did golf, tennis and NFL games for CBS Sports, most famously calling the ’82 NFC Championship game in which the 49ers’ Dwight Clark hauled in “The Catch” to defeat the Cowboys. After that, Scully left CBS for NBC, where he joined the nationally televised Game of the Week broadcasts, paired with Joe Garagiola, who shifted to color commentary after doing play-by-play with Tony Kubek for so many years.

On the first Saturday of the 1984 season, I watched the pair call a game from Chicago’s Comiskey Park, pitting the reigning AL West champion White Sox against the hot-starting Tigers, who would win 35 of their first 40 games and breeze first to the AL East flag and eventually a World Series victory over the Padres. Nobody knew any of that yet, but that day, Tigers starter Jack Morris dominated the Sox, holding them hitless despite six walks. In the sixth inning, Scully famously laid down the law regarding the custom of not mentioning the no-hitter, one that every broadcaster who tiptoes around the subject would do well to remember, as they’ll never work as many as he did (as many as 21, though sources vary as to the exact count).

In fact, in the recording and transcript of Scully’s call of the ninth inning of Koufax’s perfect game in 1965, he begins by telling listeners, “Three times in his sensational career has Sandy Koufax walked out to the mound to pitch a fateful ninth where he turned in a no-hitter. But tonight, September the 9th, nineteen hundred and sixty-five, he made the toughest walk of his career, I’m sure, because through eight innings he has pitched a perfect game.”

Morris’s gem was the only one Scully called for a national audience besides Don Larsen’s 1956 World Series perfect game alongside Mel Allen. Scully called three perfect games in all: those of Larsen, Koufax, and the Expos’ Dennis Martinez against the Dodgers in 1991.

“High drive into deep left field, McReynolds watching, would you believe? A grand slam for Tim Raines! That has to be one of the most incredible stories of the year in any sport, the first day back.” — May 2, 1987

From the time he burst on the major league scene during the strike-shortened 1981 season — where he and the Expos ultimately ran into Fernando Valenzuela and the Dodgers, who had a date with the Yankees to avenge their ’77 and ’78 World Series losses — Tim Raines stood out as one of my favorite ballplayers thanks to his dazzling speed, and I gained a fuller appreciation of his skills via the Bill James Baseball Abstract annuals. Raines became a free agent after the 1986 season, but even at the height of his game, he got nothing but low-ball contract offers amid baseball’s collusion scandal. The rules allowed Raines to re-sign with the Expos, but he was ineligible to play until May.

Without benefit of spring training or a minor league stint, Raines stepped into the lineup on May 2, turning a Game of the Week against the Mets at Shea Stadium into the greatest comeback special since Elvis Presley’s. And of course, Scully had the call as Raines went 4-for-5, bookended by a first-inning triple off David Cone and a 10th-inning, game-winning grand slam off Jesse Orosco. Over the course of covering Raines’s Hall of Fame case 10 times, watching Scully’s call of that homer never got old.

“In the year of the improbable, the impossible has happened!” — Oct. 15, 1988

In the fall of 1988, I left Salt Lake City for Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and the overwhelming nature of college life soon made baseball a secondary concern. From the East Coast, West Coast scores were hard to come by, particularly if you no longer had a newspaper delivered to your door daily. I missed all but a few notices of Orel Hershiser’s 59-inning scoreless streak, and once the playoffs began, my first attempt to watch the NLCS went amiss as the Mets fan with one of the few TVs in our freshman unit couldn’t cope with the threat of her team being toppled by the upstart Dodgers, who had lost 10 of the 11 regular-season meetings between the two teams. Fortunately, I struck up an unlikely bond with a pair of oversized football players who owned the largest color TV on our floor, and they made no complaint when Game 4 — highlighted by Mike Scioscia’s game-tying ninth-inning homer off Dwight Gooden and Hershiser’s 12th-inning save in place of suspended closer Jay Howell — pushed toward 1 AM.

The NLCS was on ABC, and the ALCS between the A’s and Red Sox (which I had to forgo, lest I risk flunking my first wave of tests) was on CBS, but the World Series was on NBC, with Scully at the mic. My hosts didn’t have a strong rooting interest in the series, so I’m grateful they withstood my barrage of whoops, hollers and high-fives in the wake of the gimpy Kirk Gibson’s famous pinch-homer off Dennis Eckersley, which set the stage for the Dodgers’ five-game upset victory over Oakland. By now, Scully’s call is the stuff of legend, considered not just the pinnacle of his career — more famous than his calls of Hank Aaron’s 715th home run and Bill Buckner’s 1986 World Series error — but one of the greatest home run calls of all time.

“Sure, I’ll wait a minute.” — March 1989

On the heels of the Dodgers’ championship, my parents hatched a plan for my spring break, flying me down to meet them and my younger brother in Orlando, where after a couple of days at Epcot and Universal Studios, we would attend four straight games at Holman Stadium, the Dodgers’ spring training home in Vero Beach, Florida.

En route to the concession stand before one ballgame, I crossed paths with Scully himself, decked out in a cream-colored golf sweater. I asked for an autograph, then realized I had just a scrap of paper and no pen. Seeing how flustered I was, he agreed to wait while I fetched one from my mother, who was on her way to the restroom. Somehow, I not only got the pen, but Vin waited in place, and signed what might have been a golf scorecard or a ticket stub. I’ve long since lost that piece of paper — inevitable while moving half a dozen times in four years — and I never met Scully again despite being becoming a credentialed reporter, but I’ve never forgotten the man’s small gesture of patience and humanity toward a star-struck 19-year-old.

“And another drive into high right-center, at the wall … believe it or not, four consecutive home runs and the Dodgers have tied it up again!… They’re coming back in, the people in the parking lot have decided they better come back.” — Sept. 18, 2006

Three years after moving to New York City in 1995, I became part of a partial season ticket group for Yankees games, getting my fill of championship-caliber baseball on the local front while the Dodgers’ postseason dreams sputtered on the opposite coast. But starting in 2003, I began buying the MLB Extra Innings cable package (and later MLB.tv), checking in on Scully and company with increasing frequency. One of the greatest regular-season games I’ve ever watched, and my favorite of those called by him, was the epic finale of a four-game series that had seen the Dodgers slip from 1.5 games ahead of the Padres in the NL West race to half a game back following three straight losses. The Padres jumped all over starter Brad Penny for four first-inning runs, but by the third inning, the Dodgers clawed back to a tie against Jake Peavy, who unraveled after a first-inning confrontation with Dodgers first base coach Mariano Duncan.

The Padres pulled ahead late, carrying a 9–5 lead into the bottom of the ninth. In the non-save situation, manager Bruce Bochy called upon not Trevor Hoffman but Jon Adkins, who immediately served up back-to-back solo homers to Jeff Kent and J.D. Drew. As Adkins departed, Scully dropped a Dylan Thomas reference after Drew’s homer: “What is that line? Do not go gentle into that good night. Well, the Dodgers have decided they are not gonna go into that good night without howling and kicking.”

On came Hoffman, at that point three saves shy of Lee Smith’s all-time record of 478. Russell Martin launched his first pitch into left-center for another homer, and the camera cut to Martin’s jazz musician father, high-fiving everyone within reach in the stands. “The Dodgers are still a buck short,” Scully lamented, moments before Marlon Anderson connected with Hoffman’s next offering — the first time a team had hit four consecutive homers since the Twins did it in 1964, and Anderson’s second homer and fifth hit of the game.

After the Padres scored a run in the top of the 10th, Kenny Lofton worked a walk off Rudy Seanez to begin the bottom of the frame. “Ball four! And the Dodgers have a rabbit as the tying run,” said Scully. Up came a banged-up Nomar Garciaparra, back in the lineup for the first time since suffering a minor quad strain. It wasn’t quite Gibson caliber, but on a 3–1 pitch, Nomar connected. “And a high fly ball to leftfield, it is away, out and gone! The Dodgers win it 11 to 10. Oh-ho-ho, unbelievable!”

Showing the signature restraint that had first impressed me with his Buckner call, Scully let video of the jubilant Dodgers tell the story for nearly a minute and a half, as Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.” began to play to the ecstatic crowd. Finally, he cut back in. “I forgot to tell you: The Dodgers are in first place!” Another minute of crowd shots and stadium noise passed, un-Scullyed, before he finally signed off: “I think we’ve said enough from up here. Once again, the final score in 10 innings — believe it or not — Dodgers 11, Padres 10.”

“And there is one out to go, one miserable measly out. 0-and-2 … got him! He’s done it!… Clayton Kershaw pitches a no-hitter a career-high 15 strikeouts… Kershaw made six pitches in the ninth inning, you talk about getting it over in a hurry.” — June 18, 2014

The final leg of Scully’s remarkable career became inextricably intertwined with the rise and sustained excellence of the Dodgers’ latest ace. The first time Scully called a Kershaw appearance was likely the first time most of us — Vin included — saw the team’s 2006 first-round pick in action. On March 9, 2008, a 19-year-old Kershaw broke off a hellacious two-strike curveball to the Red Sox’ Sean Casey, and even an 81-year-old announcer who had just about seen it all gasped in wonder: “Ohhh, what a curveball! Holy mackerel! He just broke off Public Enemy No. 1. Look at this thing! It’s up there, it’s right there and Casey is history.”

https://twitter.com/jay_jaffe/status/1255159792370438144

Kershaw didn’t break camp with the Dodgers that year but debuted on May 25, an occasion I wrote about for FanGraphs in 2020. By 2009, when he struck out 185 in 171 innings, the 21-year-old southpaw’s starts had become appointment viewing, especially when called by Scully, which increasingly meant at Dodger Stadium as he whittled his schedule. Through the end of 2016, Kershaw owned a 71–29 record with a 1.99 ERA in 137 starts at home, virtually all called by Scully save for the occasional absence or a nationally televised game.

Scully called 14 Dodgers no-hitters: four by Koufax, two by Carl Erskine and one apiece by Sal Maglie, Bill Singer, Valenzuela, Reuss, Kevin Gross, Ramon Martinez, Hideo Nomo and finally Kershaw, whose trio of Cy Young awards harkens back to those of Koufax, reminding us of Scully’s perfection in calling Koufax’s perfecto. On Kershaw’s night of near-perfection, he didn’t walk a batter or allow a hit; the only one of the 28 Rockies batters to reach base did so on an error by Hanley Ramirez. Corey Dickerson, the final Colorado batter of the night, was the victim of Kershaw’s career-high 15th strikeout.

That game, the lone no-hitter called by Scully in the era of social media and MLB.tv, will live on in the archives available with a few clicks of a button to anybody with a subscription; it was the game I chose when our staff offered readers some viewing favorites during the bleak days of March 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic put the world on hold.

As Kershaw said later, “I think the coolest thing is thirty, forty, whatever years from now, hopefully I’ll get some grandkids of my own and show them… what it was like to have Vin call a game and what he meant to it. That’s pretty special that I’ll always have that.” Thankfully, we’ll all have that game, and so many more, to pull up once again.

“It has been such an exciting, enjoyable, wonderful season—the big crowds in the ballpark, everybody is talking about the ballclub and I really respect, admire and love the management—so everything just fell into place…. As a baseball man, and someone who has always loved the game, the situation and the conditions are perfect.” — Aug. 23, 2013

For my money, the happiest day of the year would come on some seemingly random day in late summer, when Scully would announce that he had agreed to come back for one more season. On August 28, 2015, the Dodgers made a big show of the announcement, playing a video of ownership partner Magic Johnson introducing late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, who silently revealed the news few words at a time via cue cards before Scully took a bow. The next day, however, Scully clarified by saying that in all likelihood, 2016 would be his final season.

That set the stage for a long goodbye, the tributes from all corners — other broadcasters, media (including Sports Illustrated, which put him on the cover of its May 16 issue), an endless parade of ballplayers visiting his booth to bid him farewell in person — arriving daily. Ever the professional, Scully gracefully accepted the accolades while attempting to focus on the action on the field, where the Dodgers overcame a slow start and a slew of injuries to take their fourth consecutive NL West title.

Against that backdrop, I added a title of my own: first-time father. My wife, Emma Span, then Sports Illustrated‘s senior baseball editor and now The Athletic’s MLB enterprise editor, gave birth to our daughter Robin just before midnight on August 26, 2016. Robin wasn’t even an hour old when she heard Scully for the first time; as we caught our breaths in the wee hours following her birth, I pulled up the Dodgers-Cubs game on my iPhone, as much to provide Emma with the soothing familiarity of Scully’s voice as anything, though what could be better for a newborn to hear than the reassuring voice of a kindly grandfather of 16 and great-grandfather of three? Even before Robin’s birth, staying up late to listen to Scully had been an important staple of life with Emma, a ritual for two night owls. We even watched him call a Kershaw start the night before our wedding, April 18, 2015.

In her early weeks of life, Robin was exposed to several more hours of Scully. Sitting around with a newborn whose primary alternative to nursing, pooping, sleeping and crying is just being adorable while laying there in the arms of loved ones leaves plenty of time to watch baseball, and with the opportunities to listen to Vin dwindling, we checked in nearly every night the Dodgers were at home, no matter how lopsided the score. We stuck around through a 14–1 laugher over the Rockies, Kershaw’s final start at Dodger Stadium as called by Scully. It wasn’t nearly as stirring as the night before, with its hour-long pregame tribute, but who in their right mind would skip a Kershaw call, particularly given the team’s chance to clinch a division title?

“Swung on, a high fly ball to deep leftfield, the Dodger bench empties, can you believe it? A home run? And the Dodgers have clinched the division and will celebrate on schedule!” — Sept. 25, 2016

The Giants’ victory on that Saturday night over the Padres opposite the 14-1 rout prevented the Dodgers from clinching. As I had plans all over town with my family the next day, I couldn’t sit still for Scully’s final call from Dodger Stadium, instead catching bits and pieces throughout the afternoon. As fate would have it, I left our family dinner to head into Manhattan to tape a Fox Sports Extra TV spot; in doing so, I wound up at what was at that point one of the few wi-fi enabled subway stops in south Brooklyn. The readout on the platform told me that the next 4 train would arrive in eight minutes, which felt like an eternity until I pulled up MLB.tv on my iPhone, and found the Dodgers tied, 3–3, in the bottom of the 10th against the Rockies — the broadcast flowing smoothly despite the fact that I was underground. Between pitches, Scully even relayed the Padres-Giants play-by-play. “Wouldn’t it be amazing if…” I thought to myself as Enrique Hernández took his hacks against Boone Logan before going down swinging.

Up came light-hitting, seldom-used Charlie Culberson, who hadn’t homered in any of his previous 57 plate appearances that season or at all in the big leagues since Aug. 14, 2014 (two days before my engagement to Emma). As Culberson had already collected two hits that day — basically his monthly allotment — it seemed silly even to contemplate one more, let alone expect it. But somebody forgot to tell the shortstop, who launched Logan’s second pitch, an outside fastball, over the left field fence to seal the deal.

Pandemonium ensued as Culberson rounded the bases; Scully let the moment breathe. I could barely believe my dumb luck in witnessing the moment under such unlikely circumstances — a positive turn on an emotional day that had begun with the tragic news of Jose Fernandez’s death. My train arrived just as the broadcast cut to a commercial, so it wasn’t until later that I watched the coda: Scully serenading the Dodger Stadium crowd with a recording of him signing “Wind Beneath My Wings,” with shots of him (and many a Dodgers fan) getting teary-eyed.

Once Scully announced his retirement, I tried to avoid being maudlin when considering the approaching void; someone had to. Instead, I considered my luck to enjoy him as a part of my life for more than three decades, watching game after game while feeling as though he were talking just to me, whether describing the action in detail or digressing on Socrates Brito and hemlock, or ice skating with Jackie Robinson, or the defiant significance of every player wearing Robinson’s No. 42.

On the occasion of his retirement and now his death, that appreciation of has deepened. As viewers and listeners, we were truly fortunate to have shared the latter stages of Scully’s career via social media and MLB.tv, just as Los Angelenos did via newfangled transistor radios when he and the Dodgers first arrived in 1958. In our increasingly fragmented and polarized public lives, Vin brought us together for a few hours to find common ground. That was certainly true on Tuesday night, when the Dodgers broke the news of his passing.

pic.twitter.com/FloR9dBhZj

— Los Angeles Dodgers (@Dodgers) August 3, 2022

On the SportsNet LA broadcast, Joe Davis and Jessica Mendoza did a masterful job of paying tribute, sharing their stories and memories of Scully. In one of them Davis, who has done an admirable job as his successor, related his first encounter with Scully, shortly after being hired.

Dodgers’ broadcaster Joe Davis tells the story of how he accidentally ignored a phone call from Vin Scully shortly after he got the job as the Dodgers’ new play-by-play announcer in 2015. pic.twitter.com/d249OzgNID

— Kendall (@_kendallrjones_) August 3, 2022

At Oracle Park, the Giants paid tribute as well.

Handshake line for the #Dodgers with a man that called a lot of wins pic.twitter.com/gBbN1yK80c

— Juan Toribio (@juanctoribio) August 3, 2022

Nearly six years after her birth and Scully’s retirement, my daughter hasn’t become a full-fledged baseball nut, but she’s played a few seasons of tee-ball and has become a huge fan of Yankees slugger Aaron Judge, Mr. Met, and the Brooklyn Cyclones’ mascots Sandy the Seagull and Pee Wee, all while demonstrating some curiosity about the game and even some artistic flair. With two parents absorbed in the game for their professions, she’s also shown signs of rebelling against what we hold dear in favor of finding her own way, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Still, we do our best to explain the game, its rules and its important figures to her. That includes the remarkable Vin Scully, maestro of the microphone, and the way he connected three previous generations of Jaffes to the Dodgers and to baseball. “He’s the best announcer there ever was,” I explain, “and probably the best that ever will be.”

This weekend in Cooperstown, six Era Committee candidates will be inducted alongside the BBWAA-elected David Ortiz. Among them are some of the most long-awaited honorees whose supporters agonized for decades over their being shut out, both before and after their deaths. Negro Leagues player/manager/scout/coach/ambassador Buck O’Neil and Negro Leagues and American League star Minnie Miñoso both hung on well into their 90s hoping they could see the day of their induction but died before it happened. Star first baseman and manager Gil Hodges died of a heart attack at age 47, before his candidacy became the ultimate “close-but-no-cigar” example, both via the BBWAA and Veterans Committee processes. Black baseball pioneer Bud Fowler, who was raised in Cooperstown, went largely unrecognized until the centennial of his death in 2013. Tony Oliva and Jim Kaat, both of whom are 84, are thankfully alive to experience the honor, but they, too, had a long wait, after falling one and two votes short, respectively, on the 2015 Golden Era ballot.

The festivities will be tinged with more than a hint of bittersweetness due to the deferred honors, but there won’t be any shortage of joy and catharsis that these men are finally being recognized. Yet even as they take place, it feels as though a gate is swinging shut behind them — one that may not open again for awhile given the the shakeup of the Era Committee process that the Hall announced in April which reduced the numbers of committees, candidates, and votes available. I won’t rehash the road to this point (you can see the gory details in the aforementioned link), but here’s the new format, which will roll out in this order over the next three years starting in December:

• December 2022 (for Class of 2023): Contemporary Baseball – Players. For those who made their greatest impact upon the game from 1980 onward and have aged off the BBWAA ballot.
• December 2023 (for Class of 2024): Contemporary Baseball – Managers, Umpires, and Executives. For those who made their greatest impact upon the game from 1980 to the present day.
• December 2024 (for Class of 2025): Classic Baseball. For those who made their greatest impact upon the game before 1980, including Negro Leagues and pre-Negro Leagues Black players

The Classic Baseball Era Committee now has purview over all of the candidates previously covered by the Early Baseball (1871–1949) and Golden Days (1950–69) committees — the two that produced this weekend’s honorees and which otherwise weren’t scheduled to convene again for 10 and five years, respectively — as well as about half of those covered by the Modern Baseball (1970–87) one. In other words, voters for that ballot now have to weigh candidates whose contributions may have taken place over a century apart. What’s more, where there were 10 candidates apiece for each of those ballots under the older system, the new ones contain only eight, and where the 16 committee members (a mixture of Hall of Famers, executives, and writers/historians) could previously vote for four of those 10 candidates, that number has been reduced to three. Candidates will still need to receive a minimum of 75% of votes to be elected.

In other words, there’s a new bottleneck in place for the older candidates, and it has happened just as the Negro Leagues and pre-Negro Leagues candidates — players and non-players alike — finally returned to eligibility after the books were closed on that period following the aforementioned 2006 election, which produced 17 honorees but froze out O’Neil. For those who make it to the ballot, the math that was already very tough is undeniably tougher. Instead of a maximum of 64 votes spread across 10 candidates (an average of 6.4 per candidate), there are now 48 spread across eight candidates (six per candidate). Electing four candidates from a single slate, which happened for the first time on the 2022 Golden Days ballot, would require each of those four to receive exactly 12 votes. Read the rest of this entry »

Even for a player with six previous All-Star selections to his name, Paul Goldschmidt is having a career year. The 34-year-old first baseman finished the first half of the 2022 season leading the National League in all three slash-stat categories (.330/.414/.590) as well as wRC+ (184). He’s deservedly the starting first baseman for the NL squad in Tuesday night’s All-Star Game, and he provides a great point of entry when it comes to the players who have helped their causes toward eventual enshrinement in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

This may not seem like an obvious time to check in on such players, but July is quite the logjam when it comes to the baseball calendar. In addition to the All-Star Game and its high-profile auxiliary events (the Futures Game and the Home Run Derby), we now have the amateur draft and the run-up to the trade deadline, even if the actual date of the latter has slipped to August 2 this year. Right in the middle of this is the Hall of Fame’s Induction Weekend, which kicks off this Friday and culminates in Sunday’s ceremony. 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, here we are.

Because I would like to keep this shorter than a novella, I’m not going to dwell upon the cases of Albert Pujols and Miguel Cabrera, who have the major milestones that make them likely first-ballot choices, or Mike Trout, who’s already fifth in JAWS among center fielders and 14 points past the standard at the position, or Joey Votto, who’s 12th among first basemen, almost three points past the standard, and finally in the 2,000 hit club. Nor will I ruminate on the far-off possibilities or probabilities of bright young stars with seven or fewer seasons under their belts such as Ronald Acuña Jr., Alex Bregman, Rafael Devers, or Juan Soto. Additionally, I’ll skip breaking out the framing data to explain Yadier Molina’s case as he heads into the final half-season of his career.

I’m punting on pitching for this installment as well. I owe readers a couple more entries in the S-JAWS series I was working on during the lockout, and when I get back to that, I’ll look a bit more closely at Justin Verlander, Clayton Kershaw, Zack Greinke, and Max Scherzer, all of whom have already cleared the standards. At some point I’ll also take a look at the trio of closers — Aroldis Chapman, Kenley Jansen, and Craig Kimbrel — who have each wandered into the weeds at a crucial time.

That still leaves plenty of players to discuss, even if they’re clustered in just five of the eight remaining field positions. For this exercise, I will be referencing Baseball Reference’s version of WAR for season and career totals, my JAWS metric, as well as the ZiPS rest-of-season projections created by Dan Szymborski, since one of the goals here is to give an idea of where these players will stand at the end of the season rather than crunching the numbers as if the season has ended. Read the rest of this entry »

Summarizing the life’s work of Roger Angell — who lived for 101 years and covered baseball for 56 of them, doing it better than anyone has — was such a daunting task that I knew even before I started writing my tribute that I would need a little help from my friends. So I asked a small handful writers and editors within easy reach to share a few of their favorite Angell pieces with me and our readers.

Some of these pieces were cited within my tribute and mentioned multiple times within my informal polling, so as the responses came in, I nudged others for some deeper cuts, and limited myself to those as well. Many if not most of these pieces are behind the New Yorker’s paywall, but you could do worse than subscribe. Nearly all of them are collected in the seminal volumes that introduced so many of us to Angell’s work, namely The Summer Game (1972), Five Seasons (1977), Late Innings (1982), and Season Ticket (1988), with a few collected within the anthologies Once More Around the Park (1991) and Game Time (2003), and his final book, This Old Man: All in Pieces (2015).

The roster of contributors, alphabetically (with links to some additional Angell-related content): Lindsey Adler, staff writer for The Athletic; Alex Belth, founder of Bronx Banter and The Stacks Reader; Joe Bonomo, author of No Place I Would Rather Be: Roger Angell and a Life in Baseball Writing; Jason Fry, blogger at Faith and Fear in Flushing; Ben Lindbergh, senior editor at The Ringer and Effectively Wild co-host; Meg Rowley, FanGraphs managing editor and Effectively Wild co-host; Susan Slusser, San Francisco Chronicle Giants beat writer and past BBWAA president; Emma Span, enterprise editor at The Athletic; and John Thorn, official historian of Major League Baseball. Thank you to all of these folks for their timely submissions. Read the rest of this entry »

Judging by the tributes that poured forth on the occasion of his death at the grand age of 101 years old on Friday, there’s a solid chance that Roger Angell — a man who bore first-hand witness to Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, Barry Bonds, and Mike Trout — was your favorite baseball writer’s favorite baseball writer, even though he was never a full-time baseball scribe at all. Unburdened by the daily deadlines of the beat reporter, the competition for scoops among the national writers, or (to use his term) the weight of objectivity, Angell instead mused at length in the pages of the New Yorker in a capacity that served as a sidelight to his longtime role as a fiction writer and editor. Though his frame of reference stretched so far back that he spotted Ruth walking around Manhattan as a child, and spoke of Napoleon Lajoie with his father, he didn’t take up writing about baseball until age 40. He reported, but with a twist: “I’m reporting about myself, as a fan as well as a baseball writer,” as he told Salon’s Steve Kettman in 2000.

With the luxuries of looser deadlines, greater space, and the ability to depart from sportswriting conventions, Angell filed eloquent and erudite essays a handful of times every season, writing about the year’s winners and losers, its superstars and promising newcomers, its sunsetting old-timers, and its zeitgeist as experienced from his vantage as a privileged outsider. Over the course of six decades that took him from man-in-the-seats dispatches to deep explorations of the game’s intricacies with its master craftsmen, he assembled a body of work — primarily collected in The Summer Game (1972), Five Seasons (1977), Late Innings (1982), Season Ticket (1988), and Game Time (2003) but continuing as late as his 2015 collection, This Old Man: All in Pieces — that is unrivaled, revered, and beloved.

“I wanted to concentrate not just on the events down on the field but on their reception and results,” wrote Angell in the introduction to The Summer Game. “I wanted to pick up the feel of the game as it happened to the people around me. Right from the start, I was terribly lucky, because my first year or two in the seats behind first or third coincided with the birth and grotesque early sufferings of the Mets, which turned out to be the greatest fan story of all.” Read the rest of this entry »

We went over this just a couple of weeks ago: between Kyle Schwarber, Nick Castellanos, Rhys Hoskins, and Alec Bohm, the Phillies have no shortage of defensively challenged players who might be better served as the team’s designated hitter, and luckily for them, the DH is now a permanent thing in the National League. The team’s plan at the outset of the season was to use its two new free agent sluggers, Castellanos and Schwarber, to occupy that role while minimizing their exposure in the field, yet for almost two weeks now, the position has been occupied by Bryce Harper. The reigning NL MVP was supposed to be the team’s starting right fielder, but an elbow injury has led to him shelving his glove for the moment — and it’s coincided with him heating up after a slow start.

Harper started eight of the team’s first nine games in right field, but he hasn’t played the position since April 16. Instead, he’s remained in the lineup as the team’s DH for 12 straight games. He apparently injured the elbow while making a throw to home plate on an RBI single by the Mets’ Francisco Lindor on April 11:

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In the wake of a bumper crop of six honorees elected by two Era Committees in December — including the first Negro Leagues and pre-Negro Leagues Black baseball honorees since 2006 — the Hall of Fame has radically reorganized the way that it handles candidates who are outside the purview of the Baseball Writers Association of America. Last Friday, the Hall announced its latest restructuring, a return to a triennial voting system that would appear to make it more difficult for any candidate besides a modern-day manager, executive, or umpire to land on a ballot.

The new system won’t please everybody, particularly in spots where it appears to counteract the recent flow of honorees. Fourteen candidates have been elected in the past six elections, including seven living ex-players, the first of their kind since the much-criticized 2001 election of Bill Mazeroski. By comparison, 16 candidates were elected via this route from 2003–16, including just three ex-players, all deceased. While critics can argue — and I have – that some of those recent honorees are below Hall standards, others such as Minnie Miñoso, Ted Simmons, and Alan Trammell were ripe for reevaluation via the additional research and advanced statistics that have come forth since their time on the BBWAA ballots. Those following in their wake may have a harder time getting a similar reappraisal. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s small potatoes in the context of what’s going on (or not) in the baseball industry and the rest of the world, but so far as the Hall of Fame goes, the problem in a nutshell is this: Half of the starting pitchers who are in the Hall and were born in the 1950s are named Jack Morris. While there’s no need to relitigate the polarizing battle that forestalled his eventual election — been there, done that — the real issue, to these eyes, is that the gruff ex-Tigers workhorse is the only starter in the Hall born after 1951 and before ’63. When stacked up against other enshrined starters, his credentials are modest at best, and so his presence in the plaque room feels like an indictment of the quality of his peers.

The reality is that Morris won battles of attrition, first against the forces that reshaped the role of the starting pitcher following the introduction of the designated hitter in 1973, and then against the voting bodies that were slow to recognize the strength of those forces. He was a throwback, and in the arguments over his merits he became a symbol for a bygone era. Backed by strong offenses, he piled up innings while having less success preventing runs than his the best of his peers, but more success avoiding injuries or replacement by pinch-hitters and relievers. Plus, he won a few big games in October.

For all of that, I did not have Morris or any specific pitcher in mind when I began exploring ways to modernize JAWS to better account for the changes in starting pitcher workloads that have occurred over the past century and a half. After nearly two decades of using my Hall of Fame fitness metric, I know the contours of the position-by-position rankings reasonably well, and so I had a pretty good idea in advance which ones would be helped by whatever adjustments I settled on — that while knowing that those changes wouldn’t be so radical as to upset the entire system. That said, I suspected that shining a brighter light on some of those players would particularly resonate with fans of a certain age, particularly as I worked my way through history and reached the frame of reference of players I’m old enough to have watched. I don’t cross paths with a lot of fans of Jim McCormick or Wes Ferrell these days, but Luis Tiant is another matter. Read the rest of this entry »