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.

Every year when the postseason rolls around, we enjoyers of baseball try our best to make sure we’re properly appreciating the history unfolding on the field before us. We want to acknowledge when we’ve just watched a game so magical that it will be spoken of in tones of awe and disbelief for years to come. Downstream of that, we like to evaluate whether a game, a series, or even an entire postseason was a good one, mentally sorting them into tiers with other postseasons we’ve watched. Some measures of “good” are subjective, coming down to our personal preferences for certain strategies, styles of play, narratives, teams, or players. Other measures are more universally agreed upon and objectively quantifiable. In particular, most neutral observers value a close, exciting game, one that features both tension and action to keep observers engaged.

Win Probability Added (WPA) provides a reasonable proxy for measuring both tension and excitement. At the plate appearance level, it uses the score, inning, and base-out state (i.e. runner on second, two outs) to calculate a team’s win expectancy based on historical outcomes. The difference in a team’s win expectancy after a plate appearance relative to what it was before it represents the WPA during the plate appearance in question. WPA will be negative for the team whose odds of winning decreased while being positive for their opponent, but in this context, we’re going to focus on the magnitude of the change in win expectancy. Without a rooting interest, it’s less about which team wins and more about seeing big plays that impact the outcome of the game. Games with a large quantity of WPA have a lot of high-impact plays and lead changes that allow teams to pass win probability back and forth between one another.

Using WPA, we can evaluate the quality of the action in a given game by both looking at the average WPA per plate appearance and by adding up the game’s total WPA. Both methods provide useful insight. Average WPA per plate appearance controls for the variable number of plate appearances in a game, since games with more plate appearances have more opportunities to accumulate WPA. Sometimes that accumulation constitutes empty calories; other times it’s more substantial. Ultimately, we want the games that top the charts from both perspectives. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s time for another cycle of prospect lists, and as I’ve become accustomed to doing for the last few seasons, I’m starting with scouting reports on pro players in foreign leagues, with a focus on players available for MLB free agency this offseason. On The Board, you can see a fresh batch of scouting reports and evaluations for relevant players from Nippon Professional Baseball, the Korea Baseball Organization, and the Chinese Professional Baseball League in Taiwan, as well as reports on some young players I’ve identified as potentially impactful long-term prospects. For those who need a crash course on the age- and pro experience-driven lines of demarcation that dictate how MLB teams sign international players, I’d point you to a number of MLB.com glossary entries, including those on international free agency for those in Asian pro leagues, international amateur free agency and bonus pool restrictions, the Japanese posting system, and the Korean posting system.

It can be overwhelming to sift through so many different types of players on that section of The Board — it’s a real apples and oranges situation when we’re talking about some guys who are in their 30s and others who are still teenagers — so I’ve got many of them broken into digestible subgroups below. You’ll notice that some players appear across multiple categories. The Board has each player’s full scouting report and tool grades — think of this as more of a table of contents. 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. 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 »

When I talked to him at last year’s GM meetings, J.J. Picollo told me that an offseason priority was to add “guys with experience” to a Kansas City Royals roster that was long on promising young talent but short on veteran presence. Picollo did just that — Seth Lugo, Hunter Renfroe, Will Smith, and Michael Wacha were among those brought on board — and while the additions only told part of the story, the end result was a best seller. One year after winning just 56 games, the 2024 Royals went 86-76 and played October baseball for the first time in a decade.

What does the AL Central club’s Executive Vice President/General Manager see as the top priority going into next season?

“We need to be a little more dynamic offensively, and by that I mean we need to get on base at a higher rate than we did this year,” Picollo told me earlier this week in San Antonio. “We’re trying to target players we can lengthen out our lineup with, whether it’s someone at the top, in the middle, or toward the back end. Our identity is more pitching and defense, base running, and situational hitting, so how can we add some guys that can complement what we already have that will allow us to score more runs?”

The Royals crossed the plate 735 times in 2024, the sixth-highest total in the American League. Their .306 on-base percentage was ninth-highest, while their .403 slugging percentage and their 170 home runs ranked sixth and tenth respectively. As power obviously helps provide more runs, I asked Picollo if OBP is indeed the priority. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about a listener proposal to artificially designate (and trade) a two-way player, then (19:28) conduct the 10th annual free agent contract over/under draft, plus closing banter (1:09:45) about the new Sacramento team’s city designation, a Philly front-office shuffle, and POBO priority.

Audio intro: Philip Bergman, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Ian Phillips, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to typing monkeys research
Link to typing monkeys research summary
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Link to two-way rule
Link to Sam on not swinging
Link to previous over/under draft results
Link to competitions/drafts sheet
Link to MLBTR top 50
Link to FG top 50
Link to A’s name change info
Link to MLBTR on the Phillies

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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 »

Read the rest of this entry »

The Seattle Mariners had the most starter innings in the majors this year and fell short of the playoffs. Conversely, Detroit Tigers had the fewest starter innings and reached the postseason. For their part, the Kansas City Royals, who had the second-most starter innings, did play October baseball, while the San Francisco Giants, who had the second-lowest total, did not. And then there were the Milwaukee Brewers. Much like the Tigers, the Brewers made the postseason despite getting a low number of innings from their starters — they ranked fifth from the bottom — in part because several of their relievers had outstanding seasons.

What does that all mean? Moreover, what might it mean going forward?

In search of answers, I spoke with the general mangers and/or presidents of baseball operations of the five aforementioned teams at this week’s GM Meetings in San Antonio, Texas. For the execs whose clubs had a low number of starter innings, I was interested in how few innings they felt they could get next year and return (or advance) to the postseason. For those whose clubs topped the starter innings rankings, my inquiries were more about their philosophy and preferences in the seasons to come.

———

Justin Hollander, Seattle Mariners

“I don’t think there is such a thing as too many [starter innings],” said Hollander, whose club had 942 2/3 starter innings this season. “We are very cognizant of pitcher health and of making sure we’re putting them in positions to succeed. I think we did about as well as you can with that. In a perfect world, you would never have a stressful inning as a pitcher; that’s not realistic. But surrounding our starters with an impact bullpen, which we’ve done over the years, gives the manager and the pitching coaches the freedom and confidence to let the starter go to the point where they feel like they’ve done everything they can to win the game.

“Our starters take a ton of pride in going deep into the game. We don’t want to artificially limit them, or script out what that’s going to look like. Watching and evaluating the game as it goes on — when is the right time? — is something that our staff has done a great job of.”

The days of a Mickey Lolich going 300-plus innings, like he did multiple times in the 1970s with the Tigers, are long gone and unlikely to be repeated. Even so, are today’s top-end innings standards — Logan Gilbert’s 208 2/3 was this year’s highest total — at all detrimental to a pitcher’s long-term health and effectiveness?

“In the 2024 baseball universe, our starters are pretty optimized,” opined Hollander. “And I think there is a distinction between optimized and maxed out. We’re not looking to max out and get every possible pitch out of our starters, we’re looking to optimize the performance of our team. We don’t ask them to do more than that, because then you might be risking maximizing to the detriment of the team.

Despite “an impact bullpen,” giving more innings to relievers hasn’t been a consideration for the Mariners.

“We’ve never talked about that,” Hollander told me. “Obviously, there is a rest component, and there may be a time when someone hasn’t pitched in a few days so it’s kind of a must-pitch day for them if there is a spot to get them in the game. I think we had a great balance this year between pitcher usage and pitcher rest. But I don’t think we ever factored in the idea of wanting to take a starter out to put someone in from the bullpen if it wasn’t time to take the starter out. Our starters are among the highest-impact starters in baseball. We want to do everything we can to put them in position to succeed for as many innings as they have to give us.”

———

Scott Harris, Detroit Tigers

Citing both his team’s 753 starter innings, a number that owes something to a spate of injuries, as well as the volatility of reliever performances year to year, I asked Harris, “What is the fewest you can get next year and return to the postseason?”

“I think the line between starter and reliever is blurring,” Harris replied. “If you watched the Tigers in the second half, we didn’t have traditional starters that started our games; we had a pitcher come in and replicate a starter’s workload. The philosophy behind that is, we felt like we could get better matchups without putting an extra strain on our bullpen. And we didn’t actually put an extra strain on our bullpen. So, I don’t think it will be hard to replicate what we did last year if we choose to pursue that nontraditional pitching strategy of a reliever starting a game, then a starter-type pitching the bulk innings, and then relievers coming in at the end of a game. Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday, we published this year’s installment of our annual Top 50 Free Agent rankings. Those rankings were compiled by Ben Clemens, with the players listed in the order in which he prefers them, but he’d be the first to tell you that there isn’t a lot of daylight separating many of the guys toward the back of the list. Particularly in a class like this, with a lot of good-but-not-great free agents, there are probably a number of players who fell just outside the Top 50 who you could argue merit inclusion. With that in mind, I asked the writers who provided the player-specific commentary for this year’s rankings a question: Which player who didn’t make the list would you have included on your personal Top 50?

These are their answers, with the players listed in alphabetical order. Enjoy! – Meg Rowley

Scott Barlow, Relief Pitcher
Dependable relievers are especially valuable in today’s game, and that should make Scott Barlow an attractive, relatively low-cost option on the free agent market. Over the last four seasons, the 31-year-old right-hander has averaged 66 appearances with a 3.21 ERA, a 3.38 FIP, and a 27.7% strikeout rate. Sliders and curveballs have been his primary weapons. When I talked to Tim Herrin earlier this summer, Barlow’s then teammate called him “Scotty Spin,” saying that he had “the best breaking stuff” in the Cleveland Guardians bullpen. Read the rest of this entry »