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 »

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. First written for FanGraphs in 2019, it has been updated with additional research. 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.

Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday, the National Baseball Hall of Fame officially revealed the 2025 Classic Baseball Era Committee ballot, an eight-man slate covering players, managers, executives, and umpires who made their greatest impact on the game before 1980. In a rare lapse, the Hall somehow managed to steal its own thunder, as an article in the Winter 2024 volume of its bimonthly Memories and Dreams magazine revealed the identities of the eight candidates in the days ahead of the announcement. Not that it had any real effect, as the slate won’t be voted upon until the 16-member committee meets on Sunday, December 8, at the Winter Meetings in Dallas.

This is the third ballot since the Hall of Fame reconfigured its Era Committee system into a triennial format in April 2022, after a bumper crop of six honorees was elected by the Early Baseball and Golden Days Era Committees the previous December. The new format splits the pool of potential candidates into two timeframes: those who made their greatest impact on the game before 1980 (Classic Baseball Era), including Negro Leagues and pre-Negro Leagues Black players, and those who made their greatest impact from 1980 to the present day (Contemporary Baseball Era). The Contemporary group is further split into two ballots, one for players whose eligibility on BBWAA ballots has lapsed (Fred McGriff was elected in December 2022), and one for managers, executives, and umpires (Jim Leyland was elected last December). Non-players from the Classic timeframe are lumped in with players, which doesn’t guarantee representation on the final ballot.

As with any Hall election, this one requires 75% from the voters to gain entry. In this case, the as-yet-unannounced panel will consist of Hall of Famers, executives, and media members/historians, each of whom may tab up to three candidates. Anyone elected will be inducted alongside those elected by the BBWAA (whose own ballot will be released on November 18) on July 27, 2025 in Cooperstown. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s no secret that Shohei Ohtani’s game is missing a dimension. After three straight seasons of excelling both at the plate and on the mound — a span that netted him two American League MVP awards, a runner-up spot, and a fourth-place finish in the Cy Young Award voting — the two-way phenom underwent his second ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction last September, and won’t pitch again until 2025. Even so, while moving from the Angels to the Dodgers via a record-setting 10-year, $700 million free agent deal, the now 30-year-old superstar is amid another dominant season, one that could earn him a third MVP award and bolster a unique case for the Hall of Fame.

Ohtani is a unicorn. No player in 20th- or 21st-century AL/NL history, not even Babe Ruth in his last two seasons with the Red Sox (1918–19), has sustained regular duty in both a rotation and a lineup over a full season, let alone excelled at both endeavors. From 2021 — after returning from a lost, pandemic-shortened season in which he threw just 1.2 innings — to ’23, Ohtani did just that. He hit a combined .277/.379/.585 across those three seasons, posting the majors’ second-highest slugging percentage and fourth-highest wRC+ (157) and home run total (124), as well as the fourth-highest strikeout rate (31.4%) and sixth-lowest ERA (2.84) of any pitcher with at least 300 innings. By FanGraphs’ reckoning, his 26.1 WAR for the span was 4.9 more than second-ranked Aaron Judge, while by that of Baseball Reference, the margin was 7.4 WAR (28.5 to 21.1).

While he’s not pitching every sixth or seventh day this season, Ohtani is balancing his daily presence in the Dodgers’ lineup with the typically arduous rehab from UCL surgery — he did not undergo a traditional Tommy John surgery but a hybrid procedure that involved both an artificial internal brace and the insertion of a tendon to repair the damaged ligament. Though he’s gone through streaks and slumps, you’d hardly know it from his numbers, as he’s hitting .312/.399/.635 while leading the National League in slugging percentage, homers (31), wRC+ (185), and position player WAR (5.5 fWAR, 5.7 bWAR). With six more steals, he’ll notch his first 30-homer/30-steal season, and with 0.4 more bWAR (or 1.1 more fWAR), he’ll set a career high for position player WAR. Per his rest-of-season ZiPS forecast, he’s projected to add another 2.1 WAR. (For the rest of this piece, I’ll be referring to the B-Ref version of WAR unless otherwise indicated.) Read the rest of this entry »

Francisco Lindor delivered a gut punch last night — or rather two of them, homering from both sides of the plate Wednesday night at Yankee Stadium and powering the Mets to a 12-3 rout and a four-game sweep of this year’s Subway Series. After a slow start, the 30-year-old switch-hitting shortstop has been on fire since moving into the leadoff spot in mid-May. He’s helped the Mets turn their season around, given himself a shot at replicating last year’s 30-homer, 30-stolen base combination, and burnished a resumé that will in all likelihood carry him to Cooperstown one day.

The Mets already led 3-2 when Lindor came to bat with one on in the fifth inning. Batting from the left side against a scuffling Gerrit Cole, he smoked a 92-mph cutter on the inner edge of the strike zone, launching a towering shot into the second deck in right field to open up a 5-2 lead. With the score 8-2 in the seventh and two men on, he hit righty against lefty Caleb Ferguson and crushed a 95-mph middle-middle fastball for a 432-foot three-run homer to left center:

The homers were Lindor’s 20th and 21st of the season. Paired with his 20 steals, he’s on pace to match or top last year’s combination of 31 homers and 31 steals and join Ronald Acuña Jr. as the only active players with two 30-30 seasons under their belts; Bobby Witt Jr. (18 homers and 23 steals) and José Ramírez (24 homers and 18 steals) could join him as well. After batting just .195/.268/.362 (82 wRC+) through May 17, mainly while hitting second or third, he’s hit .306/.388/.566 (171 wRC+) with 14 homers in 268 PA out of the leadoff spot. The Mets were 20-24 when manager Carlos Mendoza made the move, but they’re 33-24 since, half a game behind the Cardinals (34-24) for the National League’s best record. They now occupy the second NL Wild Card spot, and instead of a much-anticipated sell-off ahead of the July 30 trade deadline, they’re likely to be buyers. Read the rest of this entry »

It has not been a very good year for pitchers aspiring to reach the Hall of Fame. Two of the four starters widely perceived to have sealed the deal have yet to throw a single pitch in the majors thus far — one hasn’t even signed and may in fact be done — and the starter who entered the year with the most momentum didn’t debut until June 19 due to (gulp) an elbow injury. Just one Cy Young Award winner from the past decade has pitched a full season, while four are in various stages of recovery from Tommy John surgery. Meanwhile, the three most-likely relievers have all been erratic to some degree or another; one of them isn’t even his team’s regular closer.

With the Hall of Fame Induction Weekend circus having left Cooperstown following Sunday’s festivities to honor Adrián Beltré, Todd Helton, Jim Leyland, and Joe Mauer, it’s a good time to ponder which active players are on their way. But particularly since the last time I took stock about a year ago, the picture is less rosy for just about every starter except Paul Skenes, and it’s far too early to talk about him. Even at a time when pitching seems to be winning the daily battle — scoring and slugging percentage are near their lowest marks in the last decade, and batting average is in a virtual tie (with 2022) for the fourth-lowest mark since 1900 — pitchers are losing the war against longevity.

This isn’t exactly a new topic, of course, and while I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how Hall voters will adjust their standards in the coming years, and how we might differently evaluate pitchers through tools such as S-JAWS (which reduces the skewing caused by the heavy-workload pitchers of the 19th and early 20th-centuries) and rolling WAR leaders, I don’t have a clear answer. The main problem is that if we decide to lower the standards by which we judge more recent starters, we are left with literally dozens of pitchers from past eras with similarly impressive resumés, and logistical roadblocks to honor an equitable share of them. If the recently retired Adam Wainwright (45.2 career WAR/36.5 adjusted peak WAR/40.7 S-JAWS) is worthy of a spot in Cooperstown, then how do we reckon with the careers of Luis Tiant (66./41.3/53.7), David Cone (62.3/43.3/52.8), Dave Stieb (56.4/41.8/49.1), and Johan Santana (51.7/45.0/48.3) — to name just a few aces from the past half-century? Given the ability to fit just eight candidates on an Era Committee ballot, with Negro Leaguers, managers, and executives also in the pre-1980 mix, and the deck generally stacked against candidates who fell victim to the Five Percent Rule, there’s little chance of catching up anytime soon. Read the rest of this entry »

Willie Mays was already a superstar by the time the Giants moved across the country following the 1957 season, yet the denizens of San Francisco did not exactly embrace him. They took much more quickly to Orlando Cepeda, who homered against the Dodgers in his major league debut on April 15, 1958, the team’s first game at Seals Stadium, its temporary new home. The slugging 20-year-old first baseman, nicknamed “The Baby Bull” — in deference to his father Pedro “The Bull” Cepeda, a star player in his own right in their native Puerto Rico — was a perfect fit for San Francisco and its culture. He helped to infuse excitement into what had been a sixth-place team the year before, winning NL Rookie of the Year honors in 1958 and kicking off a 17-year career that included an MVP award, a World Series championship, and an induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, not to mention a statue outside Oracle Park.

Sadly, 10 days after Mays’ death at the age of 93, the 86-year-old Cepeda passed away as well. The Giants and the Cepeda family announced his death on Friday night — fittingly, during a game against the Dodgers; fans at Oracle Park stood to observe a moment of silence. “Our beloved Orlando passed away peacefully at home this evening, listening to his favorite music and surrounded by his loved ones,” said Nydia Fernandez, his second of three wives, in the statement. No cause of death was provided.

As the second Black Puerto Rican to play in the AL or NL, after Roberto Clemente, Cepeda became a hero in his homeland as well as a favorite of Giants fans. He spent nine seasons with the Giants (1958-66) before trades to the Cardinals (1966–68) and Braves (1969–72), followed by brief stints with the A’s (1972), Red Sox (1973), and Royals (1974) at the tail end of his career. The 6-foot-2, 210-pound righty was a middle-of-the-lineup force on three pennant winners, including the 1967 champion Cardinals, and was selected for an All-Star team 11 times, including two per year from 1959–62; he was the first Puerto Rican player to start an All-Star Game in the first of those seasons. He was the first player to win both the Rookie of the Year and MVP awards unanimously; Albert Pujols is the only one to replicate that feat. Cepeda finished his career with 2,351 hits, 379 homers, 142 steals, and a lifetime batting line of .297/.350/.499 (133 OPS+).

Not everything came easily for Cepeda. If not for the pitcher-friendliness of the Giants’ home ballparks — first Seals Stadium and then Candlestick Park — as well as a series of knee injuries that led to 10 surgeries, he might have hit at least 500 home runs. His path to the Hall of Fame took an extreme detour due to a conviction for smuggling marijuana, which resulted in a 10-month stint in federal prison as well as a humiliating fall from grace in Puerto Rico. Only after his release and his conversion to Buddhism was he able to rehabilitate his image and work his way back into the game’s good graces, a process that culminated with his election to the Hall of Fame by the Veterans Committee in 1999, 25 years after his final game. He was the second Puerto Rican player inducted, preceded only by Clemente. Read the rest of this entry »

Willie Mays was the gold standard. We can debate whether he was the greatest baseball player who ever lived or merely on the short list of those with a claim to the title. Based upon both the legend and the statistics, we’re on more solid ground declaring that Mays was the game’s greatest all-around player, accounting for his skill and achievement at the plate, on the bases, and in the field. Combining tremendous power, exceptional speed that factored on both sides of the ball, and preternatural grace afield, the man could do it all on the diamond, and he did it with an endearing, charismatic flair. “The Say Hey Kid” — a nickname bestowed upon him when he was so fresh on the scene that he didn’t know his teammates’ names — projected a youthful exuberance and an innocence that made him an icon.

Mays began his professional career while still in high school, with the Birmingham Black Barons, signing a $250-a-month contract in July 1948, when he was just 17 years old. He was supposed to return to Birmingham this week, one of three Negro Leagues alumni from the 1920-48 period — along with Bill Greason and Ron Teasley — slated to attend a major league game tonight between the Cardinals and Giants at historic Rickwood Field, the country’s oldest professional ballpark. Sadly, Mays passed away two days ago, in an assisted living facility, at the age of 93.

Willie Mays gave this statement to Dusty Baker on Monday, a day before Willie passed, to share with the city of Birmingham: pic.twitter.com/hQ0XmRKsmc

— John Shea (@JohnSheaHey) June 19, 2024

Mays was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1979. At the time of his death, he was its oldest living member, a distinction he inherited when Tommy Lasorda died on January 7, 2021, and one that now belongs to 90-year-old Luis Aparicio. Read the rest of this entry »