The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2025 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule, and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

In a home run-saturated era, Ichiro Suzuki stood out. Before coming stateside, the slightly-built superstar earned the moniker the “Human Batting Machine” from Japanese media, and he hardly missed a beat upon arriving in Seattle in 2001, slapping singles and doubles to all fields in such prolific fashion that he began his major league career by reeling off a record 10 straight 200-hit seasons. Along the way, he set a single-season record with 262 hits in 2004, and despite not debuting until age 27, he surpassed the 3,000-hit milestone. Between Nippon Professional Baseball and Major League Baseball, he totaled 4,367 hits, making him the International Hit King — a comparison that rankled some, including the Hit King himself, Pete Rose.

Despite his small stature (listed at 5-foot-11, 175 pounds), Suzuki was larger than life, an athlete on a first-name basis with two continents full of fans. Wearing “Ichiro” on the back of his jersey — his manager’s idea of a promotional gimmick — he built his legend in Japan by winning seven straight batting titles (1994–2000) and three straight MVP awards for the Orix Blue Wave, whom he led to a Japan Series championship in 1996. When he joined the Mariners, he faced widespread skepticism about whether his style of play would translate, because while NPB star Hideo Nomo had enjoyed considerable success with the Dodgers upon arriving in 1995, no Japanese position player had made the transition to MLB before. The Mariners — who within the previous two years had shed superstars Randy Johnson, Ken Griffey Jr., and Alex Rodriguez from their squad — won Suzuki’s rights and signed him, but his struggles in his first spring training caused manager Lou Piniella concern. Yet it all worked out, and in spectacular fashion. Suzuki led the AL with a .350 batting average, won Rookie of the Year and MVP honors while helping the Mariners to a record 116 wins, and began 10-year streaks of All-Star selections and Gold Glove awards.

All of this played out during a time when sabermetricians downplayed the value of batting average relative to on-base and slugging percentages. Like Derek Jeter, Suzuki was more a fan favorite than a stathead one, though his additional contributions on the bases and in right field helped him rank third among all position players for that decade-long stretch with 54.8 WAR, trailing only Albert Pujols (81.4) and Rodriguez (71.5). But Suzuki wasn’t just about the numbers. Beneath his near-religious devotion to routine burned a competitive fire that was offset by a sly sense of humor, both of which featured copious quantities of f-bombs that were hardly lost in translation, to hear others tell the stories. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2025 Hall of Fame ballot. Originally written for the 2016 election at SI.com, it has been updated to reflect recent voting results as well as additional research. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Billy Wagner was the ultimate underdog. Undersized and from both a broken home and an impoverished rural background, he channeled his frustrations into throwing incredibly hard — with his left hand, despite being a natural righty, for he broke his right arm twice as a child. Scouts overlooked him because he wasn’t anywhere close to six feet tall, but they couldn’t disregard his dominance over collegiate hitters using a mid-90s fastball. The Astros made him a first-round pick, and once he was converted to a relief role, his velocity went even higher.

Thanks to outstanding lower-body strength, coordination, and extraordinary range of motion, the 5-foot-10 Wagner was able to reach 100 mph with consistency — 159 times in 2003, according to The Bill James Handbook. Using a hard slider learned from teammate Brad Lidge, he kept blowing the ball by hitters into his late 30s to such an extent that he owns the record for the highest strikeout rate of any pitcher with at least 900 innings. He was still dominant when he walked away from the game following the 2010 season, fresh off posting a career-best ERA. 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.

“If [John] Donaldson were a white man or if the unwritten law of baseball didn’t bar Negroes from the major leagues, I would give $50,000 for him and think I was getting a bargain.” — John McGraw, quoted in various newspapers, 1915

The career totals are staggering — 428 wins, 5,295 strikeouts, 14 no-hitters, and two perfect games over a span of 33 years — and they’ve all been documented by a network of researchers unearthing primary sources. But only a fraction of those are on Seamheads, and an even smaller fraction on Baseball Reference, covering his time in the major Negro Leagues. John Donaldson is an enigma. He may have been the greatest Black baseball pitcher of all time.

A 6-foot-1, 180-pound left-hander who had speed, a wide assortment of curveballs, and a good changeup, Donaldson spent the years from 1908–40 carving out a singular career in Black baseball. He barnstormed before the major Negro Leagues were in place, dominating the competition, spent five seasons (1920-24) with the Kansas City Monarchs (whom he’s said to have named) of the first Negro National League, primarily as an outfielder rather than a pitcher, and then spent over a decade and a half continuing his barnstorming odyssey on integrated and Black semiprofessional teams. 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.

Vic Harris was a feisty and feared player, a high-average, left-handed spray-hitting left fielder with only moderate power who nonetheless stood out during his playing career, mainly from 1923 to ’43, and primarily with the powerhouse Homestead Grays. He made an even bigger mark as a manager. With his max-effort style setting an example for his players, he piloted the Grays to seven pennants (some sources count an eighth) in a 12-season span (1937–48) in the second Negro National League, a mark unparalleled in the major Negro Leagues. 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.

A five-tool player whose power, ability to hit for average, and strong, accurate throwing arm all stood out – particularly in the Pirates’ seemingly endless and always eye-catching assortment of black-and-yellow uniform combinations — Dave Parker was once considered the game’s best all-around player. In his first five full seasons (1975-79), he amassed a World Series ring, regular season and All-Star MVP awards, two batting titles, two league leads in slugging percentage, and three Gold Gloves, not to mention tremendous swagger, a great nickname (“The Cobra”), and a high regard for himself.

“Take Willie Mays and Roberto Clemente and match their first five years up against mine, and they don’t compare with me,” he told Roy Blount in a 1979 Sports Illustrated cover story.

Parker, who debuted with the Pirates in July 1973, just seven months after Clemente’s death, and assumed full-time duty as the team’s right fielder a season and a half later, once appeared to be on course to join the Puerto Rican legend in Cooperstown. Unfortunately, cocaine, poor conditioning, and injuries threw him off course, and while he recovered well enough to make three All-Star teams, play a supporting role on another World Series winner, and accrue hefty career totals while playing past the age of 40, his game lost multiple dimensions along the way. Hall of Fame voters greeted his case with a yawn; he debuted with just 17.5% on the 1997 ballot and peaked at 24.5% the next year, and while he remained eligible for the full 15 seasons, only one other time did he top 20%. Since then, he’s made appearances on three other Era Committee ballots, namely the 2014 Expansion Era one as well as the ’18 and ’20 Modern Baseball ones, but even after going public with his diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease, lending an air of pathos to his situation, he hasn’t come close to election. 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 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.

Even in an era brimming with colorful characters and exceptional hurlers, Luis Tiant stood out. The barrel-chested, mustachioed Cuban righty combined an assortment of exaggerated deliveries with a variety of arm angles and speeds that baffled hitters — and tantalized writers — over the course of a 19-year major league career (1964–82) and an affiliation with the game in one capacity or another that extended through the remainder of his life. “The Cuban Dervish,” as Sports Illustrated’s Ron Fimrite christened him in 1975, died on October 8 at the age of 83. No cause of death was announced.

The son of a legendary Negro Leagues and Latin American baseball star colloquially known as Luis Tiant Sr. — a skinny lefty, in contrast with the burly physique of his right-handed son — the younger Tiant was exiled from his home country in the wake of Cuban prime minister Fidel Castro’s travel restrictions, and separated from his family for 14 years. Against that backdrop of isolation, “El Tiante” went on to become the winningest Cuban-born pitcher in major league history, and to emerge as a larger-than-life character, so inseparable from his trademark cigars that he chomped them even in postgame showers. On the mound, he was a master craftsman whose repertoire of four basic pitches (fastball, curve, slider, and changeup) combined with three angles (over-the-top, three-quarters, and sidearm) and six different speeds for the curve and change yielded 20 distinct offerings according to catcher Carlton Fisk.

I covered Tiant’s life at length — and I mean length — here at FanGraphs shortly after he passed. Now that he’s a candidate on the Classic Baseball Era Committee ballot, I invite you to (re)read that profile for the biographical details of the man’s fascinating life and career, which began with Cleveland (1964–69), and included stops with the Twins (1970), Red Sox (1971–78), Yankees (1979–80), Pirates (1981), and Angels (1982). I’m devoting this space to a more thorough review of his case and quest for Cooperstown in the context of this ballot, particularly as he’s competing for votes with one of his former teammates and contemporaries, Tommy John.

…

Tiant finished his career with a collection of accolades that at first glance looks a little light for a Hall of Famer. He won two ERA titles, posting a 1.60 mark in 1968, the Year of the Pitcher, and a 1.91 mark in ’72, when after a three-season odyssey of injuries, different uniforms, and diminished effectiveness he worked his way from the bullpen to the rotation and became a Boston folk hero. While he additionally led his league in shutouts three times, he doesn’t have much additional black ink when it comes to traditional stats. He made just three All-Star teams and never won a Cy Young award, topping out with a fourth-place finish in 1974, as well as fifth- and sixth-place finishes. That’s a little misleading, however. In 1968, he accompanied that 1.60 ERA with a 21-9 record in 258 1/3 innings, but that year Denny McLain became the first pitcher in 34 years to top 30 wins, going 31-6 with a 1.96 ERA in 336 innings. It was only the year before that the Cy Young had been split into separate awards for each league, and voters could submit only one name; not until 1970 would they be allowed to submit a top three. McLain won unanimously, but it’s quite possible that Tiant would have finished second if voters had been allowed larger ballots; in the MVP voting, he tied for fifth with the Orioles’ Dave McNally (22-10, 1.95 ERA in 273 innings), with McLain (who won both MVP and Cy Young) the only pitcher above them.

As it is, Tiant scores a modest 97 on Bill James’ Hall of Fame Monitor, which measures how likely (but not how deserving) a player is to be elected by awarding points for various honors, league leads, postseason performance and so on — the things that tend to catch voters’ eyes. A score of 100 is “a good possibility,” while 130 suggests “a virtual cinch.”

Speaking of the postseason, Tiant was very good within a limited footprint, going 3-0 with a 2.86 ERA in 34 2/3 innings. The fractional two-thirds of an inning came in mopup duty with the Twins in 1970, the rest in ’75 with the Red Sox. He threw a complete-game three-hitter with just an unearned run allowed in the ALCS opener against the A’s; a Game 1 shutout against the Reds in the World Series; a four-run, 155-pitch complete game on three days of rest in Game 4 — a start that’s the stuff of legends; and then a valiant seven-inning, six-run effort in Game 6, when he faltered late but was saved by Carlton Fisk’s famous 12th-inning homer. Had the Red Sox won Game 7, this “hero of unmatched emotional majesty” (as Peter Gammons called him) might well have been the World Series MVP.

Whether or not Tiant’s basic numbers scan as Hall-worthy depends somewhat upon the era to which you’re comparing them. Pitcher wins are an imperfect stat to begin with for reasons statheads have spent the past 40-plus years explaining, but historically they’ve remained foremost in the minds of Hall voters, and so I think the following is at least somewhat instructive. Of the 53 pitchers who have collected somewhere between 210 and 249 career wins, just 15 are in the Hall, nine of whom began their major league careers before 1920. None debuted during the 1921–49 stretch; of the other six, four arrived in the 1950–65 range, namely Whitey Ford (236 wins, debuted 1950), Jim Bunning (224 wins, debuted 1955), Juan Marichal (243 wins, debuted 1960), and Catfish Hunter (224 wins, debuted 1965). The other two reached the majors over two decades later, namely John Smoltz (213 wins, debuted 1988) and Pedro Martinez (219 wins, debuted 1992).

Meanwhile, of the 38 pitchers in that 210–249 win range who aren’t enshrined, 11 debuted prior to 1920, six more in the 1921–49 period unrepresented within the first group, three in the 1950–65 range (Mickey Lolich, Jim Perry, and Tiant), 11 in the 1966–87 span, and then eight from ’88 onward, including three still active or not yet eligible (Zack Greinke, Clayton Kershaw, and Max Scherzer). If we set aside the pre-1950 group and the ones not yet eligible, that’s six out of 24 pitchers in this range who are in the Hall versus 18 outside. While none of the outsiders won a Cy Young, neither did Bunning or Marichal. Run prevention-wise, Hunter is the only Hall of Famer from this group with a lower ERA+ (104) than Tiant (114). Even so, Mark Buehrle, Tim Hudson, Kevin Brown, and Curt Schilling are all outside with an ERA+ in the 117-127 range.

Viewed from this vantage, it shouldn’t be surprising that Tiant didn’t get elected. But when he first became eligible, on the 1988 BBWAA ballot, he had reason for optimism given that Hunter — statistically the most like Tiant as expressed by his Similarity Score (another James creation) — had been elected just the previous year with a comparable win-loss record and ERA (224-166, 3.26 ERA) to Tiant’s marks of 229-172 and 3.30. The second-most similar pitcher to Tiant by that method, Bunning (224-184, 3.27 ERA), had received 70% on that same ballot. While slugger Willie Stargell was the only candidate elected via the 1988 ballot, Tiant received 30.9%, far short election but a debut hardly without promise; meanwhile, Bunning inched up to 74.2%.

Alas, both pitchers got lost in the shuffle on the 1989 ballot. Not only did Johnny Bench and Carl Yastrzemski both debut and gain easy entry with vote shares in the mid-90s, but Gaylord Perry and Fergie Jenkins also debuted, both with more robust résumés than either Tiant or Bunning in terms of statistics and honors. Both were former Cy Young winners with more than 3,000 strikeouts, with Perry owning a second Cy Young and membership in the 300-win club as well. Bunning fell back to 63.3%, while Tiant slipped to 10.5%.

First-year candidate Jim Palmer, a three-time Cy Young winner, jumped the line to gain entry in 1990, as Bunning slid to 57.9% and Tiant to 9.5%. When Jenkins and Perry were elected in 1991, Bunning aged off the ballot (he would be elected by the Veterans Committee in ’96), while Tiant sank even further, to 7.2%. He had missed his window; after Jenkins’ election, it would take until 2011 for another starter with fewer than 300 wins (Bert Blyleven) to gain entry via the writers. As “That Seventies Group” reshaped expectations for Hall starters’ credentials, Tiant never even climbed back to 20%, topping out at 18% in 2002, his final year on the ballot.

Tiant’s candidacy has fared similarly amid ever-changing ballot formats since then. In three appearances on the Veterans Committee ballots (2005, ’07, ’09), he maxed out at 25%. He’s now on his fourth appearance on an Era Committee ballot. He was considered alongside the likes of future Hall of Famers Kaat, Ron Santo, Gil Hodges, Minnie Miñoso, and Tony Oliva, plus this ballot’s Ken Boyer as part of the 2012 Golden Era Committee ballot, for candidates who made their greatest impact on the game during the 1947–72 period, as well as a similar cast that also included this ballot’s Dick Allen three years later. In both cases, he fell short of the level of support needed 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. When the Hall reconfigured the Era Committee system in 2016, Tiant wound up classified within the Modern Baseball Era (1970–87); after finishing below the threshold for vote totals on the 2018 ballot, he was bypassed for the ’20 one, a ballot that finally gave Dwight Evans and Lou Whitaker their first shots.

As you can see from the table above, Tiant’s Hall of Fame Monitor score (HOFM) is the lowest of the group, but he fares better via advanced metrics. He ranked in his league’s top 10 in WAR eight times, leading in 1968 (8.5) and finishing fourth in both ’72 and ’74. While he cracked the top 10 in ERA just four times, he did so in ERA+ seven times (including the two league leads), a reminder that toiling in hitter-friendly Fenway Park may have cost him some recognition. While he’s on the lower side of That Seventies Group in terms of S-JAWS, the adjusted version of my Hall fitness metric that tones down the impact of high-volume innings totals from earlier eras, his ranking is still impressive. The newer version jumps him from 59th overall to tied for 42nd with Palmer and Smoltz, two pitchers generally considered no-doubt Hall of Famers; meanwhile, he’s 45th in both career WAR and in adjusted peak. Voters won’t see another candidate above those rankings until Kershaw and friends (a quartet that also includes Justin Verlander) become eligible.

In introducing S-JAWS, I noted that Tiant is below the standard — the mean of all enshrined starters — but basically at the median (53.6). While he doesn’t particularly stand out next to a cohort of 300-game winners, he’s got much stronger advanced stats than Hunter (who nonetheless had a Cy Young and five championships going for him) and Kaat (a Cy Young winner but a compiler whose lengthy broadcast career helped his 2022 Era Committee election). His S-JAWS equals or surpasses some other enshrinees whose careers overlapped, such as Don Drysdale (53.7), Marichal (53.2), Bunning (51.4), Ford (45.5), Sandy Koufax (44.2), and Jack Morris (37.4), but those pitchers all have higher Monitor scores, with Bunning (98) the only other one below 100. The enshrined starters he outranks in S-JAWS mostly had shorter careers in earlier eras, where innings totals were higher and runs even more scarce.

I’ve wavered on Tiant, mainly in light of older versions of JAWS and in direct comparison to his Era Committee competition, because even beyond the numbers his case hasn’t always jumped out. On my virtual 2018 Modern Baseball ballot, I tabbed Marvin Miller, Alan Trammell, and Ted Simmons, but left my fourth slot empty because I didn’t see any of the other seven candidates (Tiant, John, Morris, Steve Garvey, Don Mattingly, Dale Murphy, and Dave Parker) as strong enough. Morris was elected, but Tiant is by far the strongest of that group by JAWS if not more traditional reckonings. If I had a do-over, factoring in his cultural importance as one of the most high-profile Cuban player success stories, from battling racism in the minors after being cut off from his family to his mid-career comeback and emergence as a folk hero, I’d consider him more strongly — but including him on that ballot would have hinged upon how much extra weight to give John for his own comeback after the pioneering elbow surgery that bears his name.

I’m still wrestling with Tiant versus John on this ballot. Tiant — who pitched in the same rotation with John in Cleveland, New York, and Anaheim — is squarely ahead on a performance basis, and in a vacuum I think he’s Hall-worthy; I’m pretty solidly in favor of any post-integration pitcher with an S-JAWS of 50 or higher. What I’m less sure of is whether Tiant will emerge as one of my top three on my virtual ballot, or whether Hall voters’ unfortunate history of waiting until after a candidate’s death to recognize them — see Santo, Miñoso, and Allen for just the latest in the litany — suggests that I should put aside my soft resistance to the 81-year-old John and prioritize voting for him while he’s still around to appreciate the honor. With three more candidates to evaluate, I have a bit longer to think about it.

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.

Tommy John spent 26 seasons pitching in the majors from 1963–74 and then 1976–89, more than any player besides Nolan Ryan, but his level of fame stems as much from the year that cleaves that span as it does from his work on the mound. As the recipient of the most famous sports medicine procedure of all time, the elbow ligament replacement surgery performed by Dr. Frank Jobe in late 1974 that now bears his name, John endured an arduous year-long rehab process before returning to pitch as well as ever, a recovery that gave hope to generations of injured pitchers whose careers might otherwise have ended. Tommy John surgery has somewhat obscured the pitcher’s on-field accomplishments, however.

A sinkerballer who relied upon his command and control to limit hard contact, John didn’t overpower hitters; after his surgery, when the usage of radar guns became more widespread, his sinker — which he threw 85-90% of the time — was generally clocked in the 85-87 mph range. He paired the sinker with a curveball, or rather several curves, as he could adjust the break based upon the speed at which he threw the pitch. He was the epitome of the “crafty lefty,” so good at his vocation that he arrived on the major league scene at age 20 and made his final appearance three days after his 46th birthday. He made four All-Star teams and was a key starter on five clubs that reached the postseason and three that won pennants, though he wound up on the losing end of the World Series each time.

Thomas Edward John Jr. was born on May 22, 1943 in Terre Haute, Indiana. He cut his teeth playing sandlot ball and more organized games at Spencer F. Ball Park, a three-block square with about 10 baseball diamonds used for everything from pickup games to those of two rival high schools, Garfield and Gerstmeyer, the latter of which he attended.

At Gerstmeyer, John excelled in basketball as well as baseball, so much so that the rangy, 6-foot-3 teenager was recruited by legendary Kentucky coach Adolph Rupp, and had over 50 basketball scholarship offers but just one for baseball (few colleges gave those out in those days). When Rupp paid a visit to their household, the senior John told the coach that his son was probably going to bypass college to pursue professional baseball. As the pitcher recalled in 2015:

Rupp said, “Well, we have a pretty good baseball team down in Kentucky, and your son might even be able to make our team.” My dad never liked Rupp, but that really made him mad. He told Coach Rupp, “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.” Rupp was furious. His assistant came in and tried to smooth things over, but it didn’t matter.

On the mound, John lacked a top-notch fastball but had a major league-caliber curveball that he learned from former Phillies minor leaguer Arley Andrews, a friend of his father. He pitched to a 28-2 record in high school, and while the Cleveland Indians scout who signed him, John Schulte, expressed concern about his inability to overpower hitters, he signed him nonetheless two weeks after John graduated from Gerstmeyer in 1961 — four years before the introduction of the amateur draft. 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.

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. It is adapted from a chapter in The Cooperstown Casebook, published in 2017 by Thomas Dunne Books. For an introduction to the ballot, see here, and for an introduction to JAWS, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

“Dick Allen forced Philadelphia baseball and its fans to come to terms with the racism that existed in this city in the ’60s and ’70s. He may not have done it with the self-discipline or tact of Jackie Robinson, but he exemplified the emerging independence of major league baseball players as well as growing black consciousness.”⁠ — William Kashatus, The Philadelphia Inquirer, April 2, 1996

At first glance, Dick Allen might be viewed as the Gary Sheffield or Albert Belle of his day, a heavy hitter seemingly engaged in a constant battle with the world around him, generating controversy at every stop of his 15-year career. It’s unfair and reductive to lump Allen in with those two players, however, for they all faced different obstacles and bore different scars from the wounds they suffered early in their careers.

In Allen’s case, those wounds predated his 1963 arrival in the majors with a team that was far behind the integration curve, and a city that was in no better shape. In Philadelphia and beyond, he was a polarizing presence, covered by a media contingent so unable or unwilling to relate to him that writers often refused to call him by the name of his choosing: Dick Allen, not Richie. Read the rest of this entry »