The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2024 Hall of Fame ballot. Originally written for the 2015 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.

Wherever Gary Sheffield went, he made noise, both with his bat and his voice. For the better part of two decades, he ranked among the game’s most dangerous hitters, a slugger with a keen batting eye and a penchant for contact that belied his quick, violent swing. For even longer than that, he was one of the game’s most outspoken players, unafraid to speak up when he felt he was being wronged and unwilling to endure a situation that wasn’t to his liking. He was a polarizing player, and hardly one for the faint of heart.

At the plate, Sheffield was viscerally impressive like few others. With his bat twitching back and forth like the tail of a tiger waiting to pounce, he was pure menace in the batter’s box. He won a batting title, launched over 500 home runs — he had 14 seasons with at least 20 and eight with at least 30 — and put many a third base coach in peril with some of the most terrifying foul balls anyone has ever seen. For as violent as his swing may have been, it was hardly wild; not until his late 30s did he strike out more than 80 times in a season, and in his prime, he walked far more often than he struck out.

Bill James once referred to Sheffield as “an urban legend in his own mind.” Off the field, he found controversy before he ever reached the majors through his connection to his uncle, Dwight Gooden. He was drafted and developed by the Brewers, who had no idea how to handle such a volatile player and wound up doing far more harm than good. Small wonder then that from the time he was sent down midway through his rookie season after being accused of faking an injury, he was mistrustful of team management and wanted out. And when he wanted out — of Milwaukee, Los Angeles, or New York — he let everyone know it, and if a bridge had to burn, so be it; it was Festivus every day for Sheffield, who was always willing to air his grievances.

Later in his career, Sheffield became entangled in the BALCO performance enhancing drug scandal through his relationship with Barry Bonds — a relationship that by all accounts crumbled before he found himself in even deeper water. For all of the drama that surrounded Sheffield, and for all of his rage and outrageousness, he never burned out the way his uncle did, nor did he have trouble finding work.

Even in the context of the high-scoring era in which he played, Sheffield’s offensive numbers look to be Hall of Fame caliber, but voters have found plenty of reasons to overlook him, whether it’s his tangential connection to PEDs, his gift for finding controversy, his poor defensive metrics, or the crowd on the ballot. In his 2015 debut, he received just 11.7% of the vote, and over the next four years, he gained barely any ground. But from 2019 to ’21, he jumped from 13.6% to 30.5% to 40.6%, with the fifth-largest and third-largest gains on the ’20 and ’21 ballots. After repeating with the same percentage in 2022, he jumped to 55% in ’23, with the cycle’s fourth-largest gain. His share of the vote is now larger than any player who’s been linked to PEDs via BALCO, the Mitchell Report, or a suspension except for Bonds or Roger Clemens. Still, as he enters his final year of eligibility on the writers’ ballot, he’ll need a Larry Walker-like jump to get to 75%. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week I covered the American League half of the flurry of transactional activity that occurred as a result of the 40-man roster and non-tender deadlines. Is any one move here as impactful as signing a Yoshinobu Yamamoto or a Matt Chapman? No, but when your favorite team experiences a rash of injuries in June, whether or not they have the depth to scrap and compete is often dictated by the people and processes that surround this day. Below are my thoughts on the National League, with some quick scouting snippets on most of the added players and thoughts about roster construction where I had something to say.

Arizona Diamondbacks

The Diamondbacks lone addition was lefty Blake Walston, a former $2.5 million high school signee who, despite being young for his class and physically projectable as an amateur, has seen his fastball velocity plateau and slightly decline since he signed. He’s had fits and starts where he’s thrown harder, but for the most part, Walston’s fastball still sits 89-92 mph and his performance peripherals took a nosedive in 2023, though part of that was likely because of the PCL hitting environment. The lanky 22-year-old is still a fair long-term prospect because of his age and what one could reasonably hope will still be late-arriving physicality, but for now, I’d consider him at the very back of Arizona’s 40-man starting pitching depth chart. Read the rest of this entry »

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

Jim Leyland

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

Kim Ng broke ground as both the majors’ first female general manager, and its first of East Asian descent, the culmination of a three-decade rise through the front offices of the White Sox, Yankees, Dodgers, and Major League Baseball. But after a three-season run during which she guided the Marlins to just their fourth postseason appearance ever, not to mention their first full-season finish above .500 since 2009, she and the team have parted ways. Reportedly, while the Marlins exercised their end of a mutual option for 2024, she declined her end, believing she had earned a stronger commitment from ownership.

After a decade and a half of interviews that put her on the cusp of history, Ng became the first female GM of a men’s team in any major league North American professional sport when the Marlins hired her in November 2020. She took over on the heels of the pandemic-shortened season, during which the Marlins went 31-29 and made the expanded playoffs, their first postseason appearance of any kind since 2003. The Marlins backslid to 67-95 in 2021 and 69-93 last year amid considerable organizational upheaval, but this year’s team broke through, winning 84 games (albeit with a -57 run differential) and drawing 1.16 million fans, the NL’s lowest total but the team’s highest since 2017, when it was still under the ownership of Jeffrey Loria. The Marlins finished third in the NL East, and through a tiebreaker claimed the fifth playoff seed. They dropped two games to the Phillies and were eliminated on October 4.

Generally such breakthroughs elicit extension offers that provide security instead of placing executives in lame-duck positions. Ng did receive an offer, according to ESPN’s Buster Olney, but it came with a catch. Owner Bruce Sherman is seeking to bring in a president of baseball operations, a senior executive to whom Ng would have reported. Understandably, moving down the pecking order wasn’t what Ng had in mind, as she had hopes of expanding and reshaping the front office under her own vision, cutting ties with holdovers in the scouting and player development department “with whom she did not reach a good working relationship,” according to the New York Post’s Joel Sherman. Read the rest of this entry »

Alas, even throwbacks get injured. For all of the excitement about the extent to which Sandy Alcantara bucked recent trends by piling up innings and pitching complete games en route to the 2022 NL Cy Young award, his combination of volume and velocity — both at the outer edge of what pitchers of recent vintage have shown they could sustain — placed him at risk for an arm injury. His season ended about a month before those of his Marlins teammates, who made it as far as the NL Wild Card Series, and on Friday the 28-year-old righty announced that he had undergone Tommy John surgery, which will sideline him for the 2024 season.

Alcantara missed just one start over the first five months of the season due to a bout of “very mild” biceps tendinitis in late April, but after throwing eight innings in his September 3 start against the Nationals, he landed on the injured list with what was initially diagnosed as a flexor strain. On September 13, Marlins manager Skip Schumaker told reporters that an MRI revealed that Alcantara had actually sprained his ulnar collateral ligament. Even so, he soon resumed a throwing program. After multiple pain-free bullpen sessions, he was allowed to make a rehab start for Triple-A Jacksonville on September 21. He threw four scoreless innings, but afterwards told the team that he felt renewed tightness in his forearm. The Marlins announced that he was being shut down for the remainder of the season.

While the Marlins hadn’t offered any indication that Alcantara’s sprain was significant enough to merit surgery, it’s not terribly surprising; after all, a sprain is a tear, and with a UCL sprain, it needn’t be a full thickness tear to require surgery. It’s unclear whether the injury worsened with that rehab outing, but the more likely explanation is that as with the Orioles and Félix Bautista, the Marlins qualifying for the postseason made it worth seeing whether Alcantara could pitch through a partial tear. The answer, sadly, was no. Read the rest of this entry »

Caleb Ferguson is far from the biggest name on a Los Angeles Dodgers team that won 100 games during the regular season. Much for that reason, people who don’t closely follow the perennial NL West powerhouse probably don’t know how effective he’s been. To little fanfare, the 27-year-old southpaw made 68 appearances and went 7-4 with three saves while posting a 3.43 ERA and a 3.34 FIP over 60-and-a-third innings. Moreover, his numbers were even better if you discount the seven times he served as an opener. As a reliever, Ferguson won seven of nine decisions with a 3.02 ERA and a 3.07 FIP. His K-rate out of the pen was a tasty 27.5%.

Home cooking has been to his liking. Pitching at Chavez Ravine — Dodger Stadium if you will — the Columbus, Ohio native logged a sparkling 1.10 ERA while holding opposing hitters to a paltry .190/.258/.267 slash line.

Those things said, Ferguson is a square peg in a round hole when it comes to one of the organization’s well-known strengths. Analytics aren’t his thing.

“I guess it has the characteristics of a high-spin fastball,” Ferguson replied when I asked about the movement profile of his mid-90s four-seamer, a pitch he relied on 66.5% of the time this year. “But I don’t really look at the metrics, to be honest. I just come in and try to make good pitches. More than anything, I try to throw the ball in the safest spot to each guy. When I look at scouting reports, it’s basically just the safe zones and the danger zones.”

Ferguson likewise claimed not to know the metrics on his 33.5 percent-usage slider (Baseball Savant classifies the pitch as a cutter). Nor is he interested in knowing. Read the rest of this entry »

The wild card round is already short enough, and this year, all four matchups ended in sweeps. That’s not much postseason baseball for the Rays, Blue Jays, Brewers, and Marlins. Suffice it to say, none of those teams took October, despite what the t-shirts promised.

While I feel a twinge of heartache for the losing side in any postseason matchup, I feel especially bad for the first-round exits. After a 162-game slog with the playoffs as the only goal, their season is over in the blink of an eye. With time, some will be forgotten as contenders entirely. That seems a shame, considering how well each of these teams performed in the regular season.

With that in mind, I wanted to take one last moment to recognize the playoff performances of Miami, Milwaukee, Toronto, and Tampa Bay, before the winds of the postseason blow on to the Division Series matchups. To be clear, there isn’t a ton to celebrate; they were each swept, after all. Still, every eliminated team had at least one player whose postseason showing deserves a pat on the back. Read the rest of this entry »

As I’ve done for the past few years, I’m going to be grading each eliminated postseason manager on their decision-making. We spend the year mostly ignoring managers’ on-field contributions, because to be honest, they’re pretty small. Using the wrong reliever in the eighth inning just doesn’t feel that bad on June 22; there are so many more games still coming, and the regular season is more about managing the grind than getting every possible edge every day. The playoffs aren’t like that; with so few games to separate wheat from chaff, every last ounce of win probability matters, and managers make personnel decisions accordingly. What better time to grade them?

My goal is to rank each manager in terms of process, not results. If you bring in your best pitcher to face their best hitter in a huge spot, that’s a good decision regardless of outcome. Try a triple steal with the bases loaded only to have the other team make four throwing errors to score three runs? I’m probably going to call that a blunder even though it worked out. Managers do plenty of other things – getting team buy-in for new strategies and unconventional bullpen usage behind closed doors is a skill I find particularly valuable – but as I have no insight into how that’s accomplished or how each manager differs, I can’t exactly assign grades for it.

I’m also purposefully avoiding vague qualitative concerns like “trusting your veterans because they’ve been there before.” Coverage of the Twins’ sweep of the Blue Jays focused on Carlos Correa’s crafty veteran playoff leadership, but Royce Lewis, Pablo López, and Jhoan Duran were key parts of Minnesota’s victory too. Forget trusting your veterans – the playoffs are about trusting your best players. Correa is important because he’s a great player and great leader, not because of the number of playoff series he’s appeared in. There’s nothing inherently good about having been around a long time; when I’m evaluating decisions, “but he’s a veteran” just doesn’t enter my thought process. Yesterday, I covered the two American League teams that lost in the first round. Today, it’s the senior circuit’s turn. Read the rest of this entry »

I guess we statistically inclined writers aren’t technically supposed to believe in momentum. At least, we’re not supposed to believe it’s measurable or predictive. In baseball as in physics, the trajectory of events can be altered in the blink of an eye. Sometimes it’s hard to pinpoint the moment momentum changes. Not so here.

On Wednesday night, Aaron Nola followed up Zack Wheeler’s Game 1 masterpiece with seven scoreless innings of his own. The Phillies got to Braxton Garrett early and broke the game open with a late Bryson Stott grand slam. Final score: 7-1. Time to crank the Tiësto remix of Calum Scott’s cover of “Dancing On My Own,” play the video of Harry Kalas singing “High Hopes,” and hop on a plane to Atlanta for the NLDS.

It looked very, very easy, even by the standards of a two-game sweep, but it was not preordained. Needing one win to clinch the series, the Phillies were presented with two obvious chances to seize control of the game. They grabbed both without hesitation. Read the rest of this entry »

Extremes in defense were on display as the Wild Card round kicked off on Tuesday afternoon. In the Rangers-Rays opener, Texas left fielder Evan Carter laid out for a great catch of an Isaac Paredes line drive in the first inning, starter Jordan Montgomery dove to make an impressive snag of Jose Siri’s popped-up bunt in the second, and Josh Jung made a nice grab on Manuel Margot’s soft liner in the seventh. On the other side, Siri’s day from hell continued as he missed catching Corey Seager’s wall-banging double in the fifth, then deflected and briefly lost control of a Seager bloop before airmailing it over third base in the sixth, costing the Rays a run. And misery loves company — his Rays teammates made three additional errors in their 4-0 loss.

Meanwhile in Minnesota, center fielder Michael A. Taylor made a pair of exceptional catches, and Carlos Correa saved a run in the fourth by fielding a dribbler that had gone under third baseman Jorge Polanco’s glove, making a sidearm throw home while on the run to keep Bo Bichette from scoring. Read the rest of this entry »