This post is part of a series concerning the 2019 Today’s Game Era Committee ballot, covering executives, managers and long-retired players whose candidacies will be voted upon at the Winter Meetings in Las Vegas on December 9. Use the tool above to read the introduction and other installments. For an introduction to JAWS, see here. Several profiles in this series are adapted from work previously published at SI.com and Baseball Prospectus. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Lou Piniella

“Sweet Lou” Piniella spent even more years managing in the majors (23, between 1986 and 2010) than he did playing the outfield (18, between 1964 and 1984). To both, he brought a flair for the dramatic and a fiery intensity — his dust-kicking, hat-stomping, base-throwing tirades became the stuff of legend — as well as tremendous baseball acumen. Like fellow Today’s Game candidate Davey Johnson, he won championships in both phases of his career, but his failure even to reach the World Series a second time as a manager cast a long shadow on every successive stop and could limit his chances for election.

A native of Tampa, Florida who was signed by the Indians as an amateur free agent in 1962, Piniella passed through the hands of the Senators, Orioles (for whom he played four games in 1964), Indians (again, with a brief 1968 cameo) and Pilots (in their lone spring training) before winning AL Rookie of the Year honors with the Royals in 1969. A high-average contact hitter who didn’t have a ton of patience or power (as his .291/.333/.409 line suggests), he was particularly potent as a lefty-masher on four pennant-winning Yankees teams, including their 1977 and 1978 championships.

He was also notoriously hot-tempered, known for breaking water coolers even before he arrived in the Bronx. “Yes, I had a bad temper,” Piniella said in 1974, his first spring as a Yankee. “I guess I was trying to succeed too much. I probably was trying to exceed my capabilities and was expecting perfection all the time. When I couldn’t reach it, I’d get mad at myself… Last year, they had a wire mesh screen around the water cooler at the new park in Kansas City so I couldn’t kick that one.”

As a left shoulder ailment limited Piniella’s playing time late in his career, he became the Yankees’ hitting coach in 1984, while still a reserve outfielder. By mid-June, he decided to retire as a player so as to take over first base coaching duties as well. In 1986, he became the team’s manager, that during an era when owner George Steinbrenner was eating managers for breakfast and lunch. Billy Martin, in his third of five stints managing the Yankees, had gone 91-64 in relief of Yogi Berra in 1985, as the Yankees finished second, but he was fired yet again, this time after a late-September brawl with pitcher Ed Whitson. Piniella’s Yankees won 90 games but finished second in 1986, 5.5 games behind the Red Sox, then slipped to fourth despite winning 89 games in 1987. When general manager Woody Woodward resigned following the season, Piniella spent half a year as the team’s GM before returning to the dugout in May, after Martin was canned yet again. Piniella himself was axed after the 1988 team finished with 85 wins. He had two years remaining on his contract, the first of which he spent in the Yankees’ TV booth.

Piniella returned to the dugout with the Reds, taking over as manager in November 1989 after Pete Rose received his lifetime ban for gambling. His first year was the most successful one of his managerial career. Driven by stars Barry Larkin and Eric Davis as well as the “Nasty Boys” bullpen of Norm Charlton, Rob Dibble, and Randy Myers, the Reds went 91-71, won the NL West (the Senior Circuit’s screwed-up geography somehow had both Cincinnati and Atlanta in the West and St. Louis and Chicago in the East) and the World Series, the last by sweeping the heavily favored A’s, the defending champions.

The Reds collapsed to just 74 wins in 1991, and while they rebounded to 90 in 1992, Piniella resigned at season’s end, just weeks after brawling with Dibble. His departure owed more to owner Marge Schott’s lack of support when Piniella was sued for defamation by umpire Gary Darling. Following the reversal of a home run call in a 1991 game, Piniella had claimed that Darling was biased; Schott refused to pay for a lawyer, forcing Piniella to do so out of his own pocket. The suit was eventually settled out of court and Piniella issued a statement of apology, retracting his comments and praising Darling and umpires in general. “But I got no backing,” he said of Schott, who by the time of his comments had been suspended for a year due to racially insensitive remarks. “It got in my craw. That was the big thing.”

Piniella wasn’t out of a job for long. In November 1992, he reunited with Woodward in Seattle, where the Mariners had finished with a winning record just once in 17 years. With young Ken Griffey Jr., Randy Johnson, Edgar Martinez, and later Alex Rodriguez, he oversaw the most successful stretch in franchise history. The Mariners finished above .500 in seven of his 10 seasons (1993-2002), making the playoffs four times (they’ve yet to return).

His 1995 team overcame a 12.5-game deficit to finish the lockout-abbreviated season tied with the Angels atop the AL West. The Mariners won the one-game tiebreaker, then beat the Yankees in a thrilling five-game Division Series that ended with Martinez bringing Griffey home with the winning run via The Double. The excitement of the moment helped generate the groundswell of support that secured the Mariners a new taxpayer-funded stadium within a week of the series’ end. Piniella won the first of his three Manager of the Year awards that year.

He took the Mariners back to the playoffs in 1997, 2000 (after Johnson and Griffey had been traded in advance of their free agency) and 2001 (after Rodriguez had departed via free agency). Fueled by the arrival of Ichiro Suzuki, the 2001 Mariners tied the major league record with 116 wins, and Piniella garnered his second Manager of the Year award. Yet his Mariners teams never advanced past the ALCS, falling at the hands of the Yankees in both 2000 and 2001. Often, they were limited by horrible bullpens, and Piniella made matters worse; the 1997-1999 units all finished with ERAs of 5.44 or above and totaled an AL-low 0.7 WAR over that span, squandering the last years of the Johnson/Griffey/Rodriguez nucleus.

After winning 93 games in 2002, Piniella, who still had one more year under contract, wanted to get home to Tampa to help care for his ailing mother. The Mariners obliged by trading him to the Devil Rays for two players. Though he guided the expansion team to its first 70-win season in 2004, the Devil Rays weren’t able to progress further, and he became frustrated by the team’s minimal payrolls. After agreeing to a buyout with one year remaining on his deal, he became the manager of the Cubs in October 2006, succeeding Dusty Baker.

With a cast led by Derrek Lee, Aramis Ramirez, Alfonso Soriano, and Carlos Zambrano (a man with an infamously hot temper of his own), Piniella guided the Cubs to back-to-back NL Central titles in 2007 and -08. He won his third Manager of the Year award in the latter year after leading the Cubs a league-high 97 wins, but in both of those seasons, Piniella’s squads were swept out of the Division Series. The Cubs declined to 83 wins in 2009, and in August 2010, with the health of his ailing mother again in mind, Piniella stepped down for the final time.

Because he managed for 21 full seasons plus two partial ones, Piniella ranks high in managerial counting stats. He’s 14th in games managed, third behind Gene Mauch and the still-active Bruce Bochy among skippers outside the Hall. Piniella is 16th in wins, trailing only Bochy, Mauch, and Baker among those not enshrined. He’s 13th in losses as well, with Mauch, Bochy and Jim Leyland the only unenshrined mangers ahead of him. Due in part to his time in Tampa Bay, he’s a modest 122 games above .500, 41st all-time; even if you wave off his time there (200-285, .412), he’d rank just 27th.

So the positives for Piniella’s case boil down to his longevity, a memorable run that legitimized major league baseball in Seattle, and one hell of a highlight reel for his tantrums. Those are offset by his lack of postseason success beyond 1990 — his teams won just three series in his final 18 full seasons — and a comparatively unexceptional winning percentage. Even if you exclude his lost-cause Devil Rays stint, his .533 would rank 30th among managers with at least 1,500 games.

Ultimately, Piniella’s case as a Hall of Fame manager rests more on longevity — which fellow candidates Johnson and Manuel lack – than it does sustained success. As I wrote when he stepped down in 2010, “In a world where [Whitey] Herzog and [Dick] Williams — two innovators who won multiple pennants, and made the playoffs more frequently without benefit of the wild card — needed a quarter of a century to gain election via the Veterans Committee, I just don’t see how Piniella has got enough to get into Cooperstown.”

George Steinbrenner

Often a bully and sometimes a buffoon, George Michael Steinbrenner III was unequivocally “The Boss,” and occasionally as unhinged as the British monarch with whom he shared both a name and a numeral. A football player at Williams College and an assistant coach at Northwestern and Purdue, he fully subscribed to Vince Lombardi’s “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing” ethos, often failing to understand that running a baseball team on a daily basis required a more subtle touch and a deeper reserve of patience than his gridiron sensibility could muster.

Nonetheless, aside from Connie Mack and Walter O’Malley, no other owner in the history of baseball was as influential or successful over such a long period. Beyond O’Malley, who uprooted the Dodgers from Brooklyn, none provided his critics and detractors with more ammunition, or unified so many in their hatred. Steinbrenner spent much of his tenure as a cartoon villain, and was suspended from baseball by commissioners not once, but twice. Yet even in absentia, he had the foresight to embrace the dawn of the free agent era, and for all of his tyrannical meddling — hiring and firing 21 managers in his first 20 years, and burning through general managers at a similarly absurd clip — he stayed out of the way of what his baseball men built in his absences long enough to preside over four pennant winners and two world champions from 1976-1981, and six more pennants and four world champs from 1996-2003, adding one final championship in 2009, the year before his death.

And for all of his notorious bluster, Steinbrenner was a big softy at heart, quick to put the Yankees name behind charitable causes and to give players and other people in his organization second (and third, and fourth…) chances, just as he had received. In the end, he was the benevolent despot who restored the luster to the Yankees franchise, turning it into the most valuable property in professional sports at the time of his death, with an estimated worth of $1.6 billion. Now run by son Hal, its estimated worth has climbed to $4 billion as of March 2018 (both figures according to Forbes).

A shipbuliding magnate from Cleveland, Steinbrenner got his first taste of professional sports ownership with the Cleveland Pipers of the short-lived American Basketball League from 1960 to 1962; the league folded midway through its second season. He resurfaced in the world of sports when he led a group of investors that purchased the dilapidated Yankees — who hadn’t appeared in a World Series since 1964, or won since 1962 — from CBS in 1973 for about $10 million, $3.2 million less than CBS had paid in 1964. Initially, Steinbrenner pledged to keep his nose out of the team’s business, saying, “We plan absentee ownership as far as running the Yankees is concerned.” Soon enough, however, he was crowding out his fellow investors, starting with team president Mike Burke, who had run the Yankees during the CBS era and negotiated with the City of New York to renovate Yankee Stadium. “Nothing is more limited than being a limited partner of George,” minority owner John McMullen would later say.

Steinbrenner quickly ran afoul of baseball, pleading guilty in August 1974 to charges of making illegal contributions to Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign and of obstructing justice. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn suspended him for two years (later reduced to 15 months), during which time he exerted his influence via the direction of Gabe Paul, who, while still general manager of the Indians, had initially paired Steinbrenner and Burke. Desperate to restore glory to the franchise, Steinbrenner embraced the era of free agency, signing A’s ace Catfish Hunter to a five year, $3.35 million deal in December 1974, when A’s owner Charlie O. Finley failed to make an annuity payment in a timely fashion. He followed that by adding superstar slugger Reggie Jackson, Hunter’s ex-teammate, in November 1976 on a five-year, $3 million deal after arbitrator Peter Seitz’s landmark Messersmith-McNally decision kicked off the free agency era in earnest, and a year later added Goose Gossage via a six-year, $2.7 5 million deal — that despite the presence of reliever Sparky Lyle, who weeks earlier had won the AL Cy Young award.

Under manager Billy Martin, the Yankees won the pennant in 1976 but were swept in the World Series by the Big Red Machine. They beat the Dodgers the following year, with Jackson, “Mr. October,” tying the series record with five homers, three in the Game Six clincher. Amid so much turmoil that the team became known as “The Bronx Zoo” (not coincidentally the title of Lyle’s diary of that season), they repeated again in 1978, overcoming a 14-game mid-July deficit behind the Red Sox (whom they would beat in a Game 163 play-in) and a blowup between Martin and Jackson that led to the skipper’s dismissal after he said of the superstar and the owner: “The two men deserve each other. One’s a born liar, the other’s convicted.”

Fueled by more free agent signings, particularly those of Tommy John and Dave Winfield, the Yankees won the 1981 AL pennant, but lost a rematch with the the Dodgers. During the World Series, Steinbrenner injured his hand in what he claimed was a scuffle with two Dodger fans in the hotel elevator. Yet no police report was ever filed, no culprits ever found. Hmmm… As the Dodgers clinched in the Bronx, Steinbrenner issued a gauche public apology for his team’s performance, and a promise that plans to build a champion for 1982 would begin immediately.

Those plans did not come to fruition, as Steinbrenner’s profligate spending and meddling led to the team’s downfall. Prospects were swapped for over-the-hill veterans who flourished elsewhere while the Yankees, despite winning 89 games or more four times from 1983-1987, with a high of 97 in 1985, failed to win another AL East flag for more than a decade. After souring on Winfield (whom he nicknamed “Mr. May”), Steinbrenner tried to escape his 10-year contract by hiring a shady small-time gambler, Howard Spira, to dig up dirt. When commissioner Fay Vincent learned of the plot in 1990, he banned Steinbrenner from baseball for life, just over a year after President Ronald Reagan had pardoned Steinbrenner for his Nixon-era transgressions.

The ban didn’t last; Vincent reinstated Steinbrenner as of March 1, 1993, just before being ousted by the other owners. While he remained as feared as ever, Steinbrenner stayed out of the way of what general manager Gene Michael — whom he had already hired and fired as manager and GM in the early 1980s — had done during his absence. Michael curbed the team’s tendency to swap prospects, sowing the seeds of the forthcoming dynasty by astute drafting and amateur free agent signings such as “the Core Four” of Mariano Rivera, Andy Pettitte, Derek Jeter, and Jorge Posada, not to mention a brilliant deal that sent Roberto Kelly to Cincinnati for Paul O’Neill and freed up center field for Bernie Williams. He also hired Buck Showalter to manage the club. Showalter’s four-season tenure ran through 1995, when the Yankees reached and were ultimately eliminated from their first postseason appearance in 14 years — at the hands of Piniella’s Mariners — was the longest on Steinbrenner’s watch thus far.

Michael was shifted into an advisory role after 1995, while Showalter departed. Steinbrenner hired Bob Watson as GM, and Watson’s choice as manager was Joe Torre, a former National League MVP who in 14 seasons of managing the Mets, Braves, and Cardinals had won just one division title and produced a .470 winning percentage. The tabloids derided the choice of “Clueless Joe,” but Torre was more than up to the task of managing both the team and the Boss. The Yankees beat the Braves in the 1996 World Series, kicking off a 12-year run that included 10 division titles, six pennants, and four championships, earning him a spot in Cooperstown in 2014.

Steinbrenner’s persona as a benevolent despot emerged during this time in the form of his repeated lampooning on Seinfeld, with series creator Larry David giving voice to the owner’s long and often petty diatribes. His soft, paternalistic side revealed itself in the multiple second chances given to Steve Howe, Dwight Gooden, and Darryl Strawberry, all of whom had battled substance abuse problems. While attaching the Yankees’ name to charities, he bristled at the thought that they should include his competitors. “I would sooner send $1 million to save the whales than send it to the Pittsburgh Pirates” he told his fellow owners.

With the Yankees restored to the top of the heap, Steinbrenner withstood the temptation to sell the team (at various times, Donald Trump and Cablevision both expressed interest) or move it to the suburbs or Manhattan’s West Side. Whatever the legerdemain it took to build the $1.5 billion “House That Ruthlessness Built” next door to “The House That Ruth Built,” he ultimately understood that the Bronx was a key part of the Yankees’ brand, as was the big-dollar spending that brought in free agents Mike Mussina, Jason Giambi, Mark Teixeira, and CC Sabathia, and led to trades for Alex Rodriguez, Roger Clemens, and Kevin Brown. Though he chafed at the credit that Torre and GM Brian Cashman, who took the reins in 1998 at the tender age of 30 after rising through the front office ranks, received, and retained a semi-anonymous cabal of Tampa advisors who often undercut the Bronx brass, he finally ceded control of daily operations to sons Hal and Hank in late 2007. That chain of events, which was followed by Torre’s departure when the team was eliminated from the playoffs, led to Steinbrenner receding from the public eye.

Ultimately, the indomitable owner’s legacy is a mixed and complicated one. Neither a saint nor a pure font of evil, he understood that nothing drove financial success the way winning did. He won more often than any owner of his era, and rebuilt the Yankees into the most valuable property in baseball. For all of his transgressions, you can’t even begin to tell the story of a substantial stretch of baseball history without him. Unlike the eight other candidates I’ve reviewed on the Today’s Game ballot thus far, he’d have my vote. But as he came nowhere close to election with either the 2010 Veterans Committee or the 2017 Today’s Game ballots, he’s hardly a lock this time around.

This post is part of a series concerning the 2019 Today’s Game Era Committee ballot, covering executives, managers and long-retired players whose candidacies will be voted upon at the Winter Meetings in Las Vegas on December 9. Use the tool above to read the introduction and other installments. For an introduction to JAWS, see here. Several profiles in this series are adapted from work previously published at SI.com and Baseball Prospectus. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Nearly 15 years ago at Baseball Prospectus, I introduced a means of using player value estimates to compare Hall of Fame candidates to those that are already enshrined at their positions — the system that soon became known as JAWS (Jaffe WAR Score). There is no similar comparison method for managers, but a few months ago, when news of Mike Scioscia’s pending retirement broke, my former SI.com colleague Cliff Corcoran made an interesting attempt to figure out the Hall of Fame standards for managers. Cliff calculated the averages above based upon 21 enshrined managers, excluding three 19th-century skippers (Ned Hanlon, Frank Selee, and Harry Wright) as well as the Negro Leagues’ Rube Foster. While the shorter careers of modern managers — shorter relative to Connie Mack and John McGraw, at least — and the ever-expanding playoff format make cross-era comparisons a bit more complicated, the numbers do help as guideposts when it comes to discussing Hall of Fame managerial candidates

Davey Johnson

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

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It was hardly unexpected, but within an hour-long period on Friday evening, Twitter brought news of the retirements of both Joe Mauer and Chase Utley, two players worthy of spots in the Hall of Fame once they become eligible five years from now, on the 2024 ballot. Mauer, who had not previously declared his intentions, wrote a personal letter to Twins fans, explaining his decision to retire at age 35, while the Dodgers merely announced they had given Utley — who had declared in mid-July that this season would be his final one — his unconditional release so as to facilitate his retirement.

While I’ve written about both players before at FanGraphs, the pairing of the announcements serves as an opportunity to round up that work and update their credentials.

Mauer is the more obviously qualified of the two. A former No. 1 overall pick out of St. Paul, Minnesota’s Cretin-Derham Hall High School in 2001, he spent the entirety of his 15-year career with the Twins, making six All-Star teams, helping the team to four postseason appearances (though, alas, no series wins), and winning three Gold Gloves and three batting titles apiece. Though he debuted on Opening Day 2004 (April 5) with a 2-for-3 showing against the Indians, he was limited to just 35 games in his rookie season due to a torn meniscus in his left knee. Even in that brief stint, he showed that he was a force to be reckoned with at the plate, batting .308/.369/.570 with six homers in 122 plate appearances for a 139 wRC+.

While Mauer would only intermittently show that kind of power thereafter — he had just six seasons with at least 10 homers — he established himself as a high-average, high-OBP hitter in a way seldom seen among catchers. He won batting titles in 2006 (.347), 2008 (.328), and 2009 (.365), making him the only three-time winner among catchers. Hall of Fame Ernie Lombardi is the only two-time winner (.342 in 1938 and .330 in 1942), while Deacon White (.367 in 1875), Bubbles Hargrave (.353 in 1926), and Buster Posey (.336 in 2012) are the only others to win. Mauer topped a .300 average six times as a catcher and once as a first baseman. More importantly, he topped a .400 OBP six times, second among catchers to Hall of Famer Mickey Cochrane’s eight, and is the only catcher to lead league more than once, doing so both in 2009 (.444) and 2012 (.416); he ranked among the AL’s top 10 seven times. In that 2009 season, when he hit a career-high 28 home runs, he also led the league in slugging percentage (.587), thereby making him the only catcher ever to win the “Slash Stat” Triple Crown. He was elected the AL MVP that year, receiving 27 out of 28 first-place votes.

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This post is part of a series concerning the 2019 Today’s Game Era Committee ballot, covering executives, managers and long-retired players whose candidacies will be voted upon at the Winter Meetings in Las Vegas on December 9. Use the tool above to read the introduction and other installments. For an introduction to JAWS, see here. Several profiles in this series are adapted from work previously published at SI.com and Baseball Prospectus. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Kirk Gibson’s walkoff home run off Dennis Eckersley may be the year’s most enduring highlight, but Orel Hershiser owned 1988 the way Babe Ruth owned 1927, or Roger Maris 1961, or Denny McLain 1968. That year, the Dodgers’ wiry righty set a still-standing record with 59 consecutive scoreless innings, surpassing that of Don Drysdale. After his 23 wins, 15 complete games, eight shutouts, 267 innings, and 7.2 WAR all led the NL, he won MVP honors in both the NLCS and World Series while helping a banged-up Dodgers squad upset the heavily favored Mets and A’s. Not only was he the unanimous winner of the NL Cy Young Award, he netted the year’s Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year and Associated Press Male Athlete of the Year awards, as well. It was a very good year.

Hershiser never equaled those heights again, but who could? Still, he showed incredible tenacity in an 18-year major-league career (1983-2000) bifurcated by a 1990 shoulder injury, ranking as the NL’s most valuable pitcher for a six-year stretch (1984-89) before his injury and reinventing himself after a groundbreaking surgery by Dr. Frank Jobe, best known for his innovation in saving Tommy John’s career. Hershiser actually won more games and pitched in more World Series after the injury than before (105 and two, compared to 99 and one), living up to the nickname “The Bulldog,” which manager Tommy Lasorda had originally bestowed upon him as a rookie to inspire him to pitch more aggressively.

Drafted by the Dodgers in the 17th round out of Bowling Green in 1979, Hershiser made his major \[league debut on September 1, 1983. After pitching eight games in relief that year and spending most of the first three months of the 1984 season in the bullpen, he tossed a complete game against the Cubs on June 29, allowing one run and setting off a 33.2-inning scoreless streak that included three complete-game shutouts, two of them two-hit, nine-strikeout efforts. He finished third in the league with a 2.66 ERA in 189.2 innings, and came in third in the NL Rookie of the Year vote behind Dwight Gooden and Juan Samuel. Armed with a new split-fingered fastball to complement a sinker that would become legendary, he made even bigger waves by going 19-3 with a 2.03 ERA (again third in the league) and finishing third in the Cy Young vote (Gooden won that, too).

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This post is part of a series concerning the 2019 Today’s Game Era Committee ballot, covering executives, managers and long-retired players whose candidacies will be voted upon at the Winter Meetings in Las Vegas on December 9. Use the tool above to read the introduction and other installments. For an introduction to JAWS, see here. Several profiles in this series are adapted from work previously published at SI.com and Baseball Prospectus. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Joe Carter

Hailed as a reliable run producer for his 15 consecutive seasons with double-digit home-run totals and 10 with over 100 RBI, Carter is most famous for hitting just the second World Series-ending home run. His three-run shot off Phillies reliever Mitch Williams in Game Six of the 1993 World Series sent the Blue Jays to their second consecutive championship and produced a call for the ages from Tom Cheek: “Touch ’em all, Joe. You’ll never hit a bigger home run in your life!”

Unlike the first player to hit a Series-ending homer, Bill Mazeroski (Game Seven, 1960), Carter was unable to parlay his fame and his superficially impressive counting stats into a spot in Cooperstown. To the relief of a burgeoning stathead community that had begun spreading the gospel of on-base percentage, he received just 3.8% of the vote in 2004, his lone BBWAA ballot appearance.

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This post is part of a series concerning the 2019 Today’s Game Era Committee ballot, covering executives, managers and long-retired players whose candidacies will be voted upon at the Winter Meetings in Las Vegas on December 9. Use the tool above to read the introduction and other installments. For an introduction to JAWS, see here. Several profiles in this series are adapted from work previously published at SI.com and Baseball Prospectus. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Harold Baines

The weight of expectation that comes with being selected with the No. 1 overall pick of the amateur draft is heavy enough without anybody bringing up Cooperstown, yet after Baines was chosen first by the White Sox in 1977, out of a Maryland high school, Chicago general manager Paul Richards said that the 18-year-old outfielder “was on his way to the Hall of Fame. He just stopped by Comiskey Park for 20 years or so.” Baines had actually been spotted playing Little League in Maryland by once and future Sox owner Bill Veeck Jr. when he was 12. No pressure, kid.

While Baines did spend 22 years in the majors and racked up an impressive hit total and compares favorably to other No. 1 picks, his accomplishments were nonetheless limited by injuries to his right knee that led to eight surgeries. From his age-28 season onward, he served mainly as a designated hitter while rarely playing the field. His 1,643 games at DH are more than any player besides David Ortiz.

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Will the Hall of Fame find room for an all-time saves leader in 2019 — besides current leader and first-ballot lock Mariano Rivera, that is? (He’ll headline the BBWAA ballot, to be released on November 19.) I refer instead to Lee Smith, the record holder from April 13, 1993 (when he overtook Jeff Reardon) to September 24, 2006 (when 2018 Hall inductee Trevor Hoffman surpassed him). At first glance, he not only appears to be the most likely ex-player to be elected from among the six on the 2019 Today’s Game Era Committee ballot, which also includes three managers and one owner, but the only one with a path to election. Released on Monday, the ballot, which centers on candidates who made their greatest impact upon Major League Baseball from 1988 onward, is as notable for its omissions as well as its inclusions.

The full slate of candidates alongside Smith includes former outfielders Harold Baines, Albert Belle, and Joe Carter; first baseman Will Clark; starter Orel Hershiser; managers Davey Johnson, Charlie Manuel, and Lou Piniella; and owner George Steinbrenner. Carter and Manuel are the ballot’s only newcomers besides Smith, which is curious because there wasn’t exactly a clamor to elect the rest, who served as bystanders when John Schuerholz and Bud Selig were elected two years ago. Six of the returnees received “fewer than five votes,” a shorthand the Hall typically uses so as not to embarrass any candidate. Piniella received seven votes, still far short of the 12 needed for election from among the panel of 16.

To these eyes, which have been studying the Hall of Fame voting since the 2002 election cycle, Smith isn’t necessarily the best candidate, but it’s not hard to see parallels with 2018 inductee Jack Morris, who was elected by the Modern Baseball Era Committee last December. Both candidates spent a full 15 years on the BBWAA ballot, Morris from 2000 to -14 and Smith from 2003 to -17; the latter was the last player to do so after a 2014 rule change that truncated candidates’ windows of BBWAA eligibility to 10 years. Both built up support slowly until they appeared to be trending towards election, with Morris crossing the all-important 50% threshold in his 11th year of eligibility and Smith in his 10th. The claims of both to a plaque in Cooperstown hinge(d) upon compiling big totals in a stat that’s since been devalued within stathead circles — 254 wins for Morris, 478 saves for Smith — but one that plays better in front of a panel where writers and historians generally constitute just a quarter of the electorate, with executives and Hall of Famers (both players and managers) making up the other three-quarters.

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On Sunday, Justin Verlander played the stopper, withstanding a trio of homers by the A’s to grind out 5.1 unspectacular but much needed innings to help the slumping Astros regain sole possession of first place atop the AL West. It certainly wasn’t an outing fit for hanging in a museum, but the fact that it was Verlander’s 200th career victory did significantly increase the likelihood that his own likeness will hang in Cooperstown one day. While only three out of the 12 starting pitchers the BBWAA has elected since 1992 finished with fewer than 300 wins (2011 honoree Bert Blyleven plus 2015 honorees Pedro Martinez and John Smoltz), only one starter with fewer than 200 wins has been elected since 1956, namely Sandy Koufax (1972).

At the moment, Verlander, Bartolo Colon (247 wins), and CC Sabathia (244) are the only active pitchers with at least 200 wins. Zack Greinke (184) is about a year away from the mark, while Jon Lester (172), Félix Hernández (168), Max Scherzer (157), Cole Hamels (155), and Clayton Kershaw (150) will need several years. As for 300 wins, who knows when we’ll see another. The careers of both the 45-year-old Colon and the 38-year-old Sabathia are on their last legs, almost literally. For as iconic as Colon is, he’s also a replacement-level pitcher at this point. Sabathia, though still effective, has mulled retirement, and his arthritic right knee, which requires regular injections for maintenance, recently drove him to the disabled list yet again.

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This isn’t a round-numbered anniversary — next year will be 40 years — but every August 2, my thoughts invariably turn to Thurman Munson, particularly as a baseball-minded New York resident. Munson’s 1979 death, via the crash of a plane he was flying, remains a pivotal moment of my own childhood for the confrontation it forced with the mortality of the men playing the game. It robbed the game of an iconic player, one whose career I believe is worthy of a plaque in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

On Wednesday, the New York Times‘ David Waldstein published an account of Munson’s final moments and the events that led up to them, based upon depositions from two lawsuits that were recently uncovered by a Long Island lawyer named Allan Blutstein. Directed at Cessna (the airplane manufacturer) and FlightSafety International (the school where Munson learned to fly), the lawsuits were separately filed by the Yankees and the other by Munson’s widow, Diana.

The depositions include testimony from two of Munson’s most prominent Yankees teammates, Reggie Jackson and Graig Nettles, as well as manager Billy Martin. All three had flown with Munson — who had only begun flying in the spring of 1978 — less than three weeks before his fatal crash in flights that themselves were not mistake-free. Jackson and Nettles both testified that the oxygen masks deployed on theirs after a loud noise, while Martin recounted flames from one engine. Given that, it’s not hard to imagine the tragedy compounding into one that could have left an even bigger hole in baseball, and in the Yankees.

Waldstein’s story is not for the faint of heart. It grimly details the injuries Munson sustained when his plane crashed short of the runway at Akron-Canton Airport — due to pilot error brought on by fatigue and improper safety procedures, according to the findings of the National Transportation Safety Board — and his passengers’ failed attempts to save him.

You don’t need the blow-by-blow of his demise to appreciate Munson’s career, however. He packed a tremendous amount into his 11 major league seasons: seven All-Star appearances (six straight from 1973-1978), three Gold Gloves, an AL MVP award (with support in six other seasons), an AL Rookie of the Year award, and a central role on a team that won three straight pennants (1976-1978) and two championships. He excelled on both sides of the ball; five times he hit for at least a .300 batting average with a wRC+ of at least 120 (his career mark was 116) and twice he led the league in caught stealing percentage, throwing out more than half the baserunners who tried to steal against him.

Drafted with the fourth pick out of Kent State University in 1968, Munson broke in with Double A Binghamton that summer and played just 99 games in the minors before making his major league debut on August 8, 1969, the start of a 26-game cup of coffee. In 1970, the 23-year-old backstop took over the Yankees’ regular catching duties and hit .302/.386/.415 with six homers and a 127 wRC+ in 526 plate appearances. Defensively, he threw out 52% of would-be base thieves. His 5.5 WAR (the Baseball-Reference version, since we’re in the Hall of Fame realm here) ranked 11th in the league and tops among all catchers. He came within one vote of being a unanimous selection for AL Rookie of the Year, and the Yankees, who had maxed out at 83 wins during the 1965-1969 stretch, went 93-69, their best record until 1976.

Munson had his offensive ups and downs over the next couple of seasons, with good on-base percentages offsetting sub-.400 slugging percentages. He was worth a combined 7.6 WAR in 1971-1972, but in 1973 he broke out to his .301/.362/.487 with 20 homers, a 141 wRC+ and 7.2 WAR, numbers he would never surpass; the last mark ranked third in the league. That kicked off a five-year stretch during which Munson hit .299/.347/.438 for a 123 wRC+, averaging a hefty 622 plate appearances, 16 homers, six steals and 5.4 WAR per year.

In 1976, Munson helped the Yankees to their first playoff appearance since 1964, hitting .302/.337/.432 with 17 homers, 14 steals, 105 RBI (his second of three straight years topping 100), a 126 wRC+, and 5.3 WAR. It may not have been his best all-around season by the numbers, but when coupled with the Yankees’ 97 wins under Martin, it was good enough for him to garner 18 of 24 first-place votes in the AL MVP race. Though Munson went a combined 19-for-40 in the postseason, the Yankees were swept by the Big Red Machine after outlasting the Royals in a five-game ALCS.

The Yankees beat the Dodgers in the World Series in both 1977 and ’78. The former year, Munson’s age-30 season, was a banner one (.308/.351/.462, 123 wRC+, 4.9 bWAR), but the latter (.297/.332/.373, 99 wRC+, 3.3 WAR) suggested that the grind of catching more than 10,000 innings in such a short timespan was taking its toll, particularly on his knees. He hit just six homers in the latter season, during which he played DH in 14 games and right field in 13. His bat came to life in both World Series; he went 8-for-25 in each, driving in seven runs in 1978. Indeed, he nearly always rose to the occasion in October, hitting .357/.378/.496 with three homers in 135 postseason plate appearances, and .373/.417/.493 in 72 World Series PA.

From a performance standpoint, Munson’s 1979 was looking a lot like 1978. Though he was the DH five times and started three times at first base, he caught 88 of the team’s 106 games through August 1 and hit .288/.340/.374, though with his still-steady defense, he was already to 2.4 WAR. After an 0-for-5 as a DH in the Yankees’ July 31 game against the White Sox in Chicago, he played just three innings at first base on August 1, then flew home to see his family in Ohio the next day; owner George Steinbrenner had granted him special permission to travel separately from the team.

The rest, alas, is history. To this nine-year-old Dodgers fan, Munson was, along with Jackson, one of the most seductively enjoyable players on the evil Yankees, one whose baseball cards I treasured. He wasn’t the first ballplayer I remember dying – sadly, Lyman Bostock preceded him by nearly a year – but Munson and the Yankees were staples of the televised games I’d witnessed to that point, Bostock merely an extrapolation from my baseball card collection and the daily box scores.

For all of his accolades and his .292/.346/.410 batting line, Munson finished his career with “only” 1,558 hits and 113 homers. Under the rules adopted by the Hall of Fame following the death of Roberto Clemente, he was eligible for the 1981 BBWAA ballot (not the 1980 one), but the writers, who had the first-year candidacies of Bob Gibson, Harmon Killebrew and Juan Marichal to consider among the 11 future Hall of Famers on the ballot, barely noticed. He received 15.5% of the vote, roughly one-fifth the support needed for election. The next year, with Hank Aaron and Frank Robinson both eligible for the first time, he sank to 6.3%, and he never reached double digits again during his 15-year run of eligibility.

Munson was similarly ignored when he appeared on three Veterans Committee ballots from 2003-2007, years where all of the living Hall of Famers were allowed to vote on a particularly expansive slate. Lost behind a handful of stronger or at least more popular candidates such as Ron Santo, Dick Allen, Gil Hodges, Minnie Miñoso, Tony Oliva and Joe Torre, Munson received single-digit vote totals each year. He did not appear on either the 2011 or 2014 Expansion Era Committee ballots, nor was he on the 2018 Modern Baseball Era Committee ballot, whose election of Jack Morris and Alan Trammell marked the first time since 2001 that any of the small committees elected a living ex-player.

Munson deserved better from the voters, because he’d laid a strong foundation for a spot in Cooperstown. Even with his death in the middle of his age-32 season, his 46.1 career bWAR ranks 14th all-time, about seven wins shy of the average Hall of Fame catcher. More importantly — most importantly given his abbreviated career — his 37.0 peak WAR, from his best seven seasons, is tied with fellow Yankees legend Yogi Berra for eighth all-time, a solid 2.5 WAR above the standard. Only five of the 15 enshrined catchers — contemporaries Gary Carter, Johnny Bench and Carlton Fisk, and recent honorees Mike Piazza and Ivan Rodriguez — are ahead of him in this category. He’s 2.2 WAR ahead of Ted Simmons, another contemporary whose candidacy I felt strongly enough about to feature in The Cooperstown Casebook given the heft of his career numbers. If I do a second edition of the book, Munson will get a spotlight.

In short, Munson’s 41.6 JAWS is 2.4 points short of the standard, ahead of just six of the 15 enshrined. The only mistake he made was dying before rounding out his career with perhaps a couple more two-win seasons and enough lingering to escape the “Rule of 2,000” mob that has effectively short-circuited so many candidacies. His career is about a year ahead of where 31-year-old Buster Posey — winner of Rookie of the Year and MVP awards, as well as a three-time champion, but in the midst of an offensive decline — finds himself now:

Munson will next be eligible for inclusion on the 2020 Modern Baseball Era Committee ballot. Here’s hoping he can join some combination of Bobby Grich, Lou Whitaker, Keith Hernandez and Simmons, all of whom deserve a closer look from committee voters.

It’s somewhat lost in the buildup to the July 31 trade deadline, but this coming weekend is Hall of Fame Induction Weekend in Cooperstown, New York. Saturday, July 28 will feature the presentation of this year’s Ford C. Frick Award for broadcasters (Bob Costas) and the J.G. Taylor Spink Award for writers (Sheldon Ocker), as well as the Parade of Legends. Sunday, July 29 will feature the inductions of six former players, namely BBWAA honorees Vladimir Guerrero, Trevor Hoffman, Chipper Jones, and Jim Thome, plus Modern Baseball Era honorees Jack Morris and Alan Trammell. Not since 1971 has the Hall inducted as many living honorees. For a full schedule of the festivities for June 27-30, see here.

If you’re among the many thousands of people making the pilgrimage to Cooperstown, you can purchase a signed copy of my book, The Cooperstown Casebook (which was released one year ago today; see Paul Swydan’s review for The Hardball Times as well as an excerpt from “Chapter 6: Blyleven, Morris, and the War on WAR”) and perhaps even talk a little baseball with me on Saturday afternoon. From 1 to 3 pm, I’ll be hawking my wares in front of Willis Monie Books at 139 Main St. Other authors will be signing there, as well, all weekend long.

Whether or not you buy a book, you can see the eight-minute spot I did discussing this year’s class and upcoming candidates with MLB Network’s Brian Kenny (filling in for Chris Russo) on Tuesday’s episode of High Heat:

For more of my yakkin’, I’ll also be part of an MLB Network roundtable on The Rundown on Friday at 2:45 pm ET and then on MLB Now from 4-5 pm.

Finally, if you want to read more about this year’s inductees, I’ve got lengthy, JAWS-flavored profiles of all six of them at SI.com: Guerrero, Hoffman, Jones, Morris, Thome, and Trammell.