Jim Leyland, Hall of Fame manager: 4 things we learned from the Contemporary Era election

NASHVILLE — We’ve known for two decades that Jim Leyland was a Hall of Fame storyteller, a Hall of Fame ranter (and raver) and a no-doubt Hall of Fame character of baseball. But what he was, really, was a Hall of Fame manager waiting to happen.

And on Sunday night, the Contemporary Baseball Era Committee made that official. Finally.

When the dust settled on the committee’s day of deliberations on eight famed managers, executives and umpires, Leyland was the only man elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. In an election in which a candidate needed 12 votes to clear the 75 percent hurdle necessary for election, Leyland didn’t even make it close. His name was on all but one of the 16 ballots.

There was more Hall of Fame heartbreak for Lou Piniella, though. He missed by one vote for the second straight election. And former National League president Bill White came up two votes short. None of the other six candidates got more than four votes, which meant their vote totals were not revealed by the Hall.

So what do those results tell us? Let’s look at Four Things We Learned from this election.

1. Who doesn’t love Jim Leyland?

Leyland didn’t get elected because this committee was stacked with 16 of his buddies, former players and biggest cheerleaders. Leyland is heading for Cooperstown because he was so good at his job, even all the players and managers he once beat knew they were losing to one of the greats.

I’m giving credit to Hall of Fame historian and writer Chris Bodig for pointing this out, but it’s so true. Joe Torre was on this committee. Leyland’s Tigers bounced Torre’s Yankees from the Octoberfest in the 2006 ALDS. But also …

Chipper Jones and Tom Glavine were on this committee. Leyland’s Marlins upset their Braves team in the 1997 NLCS. But it wasn’t just them, because…

Jim Thome was on this committee. He played for one of the scariest teams never to win a World Series — the 1997 Cleveland Indians. But that, too, was a Leyland production. His Marlins outlasted Thome’s Indians in an epic World Series Game 7.

We can’t say for sure that all four of those men cast a vote for Leyland. But I’d bet Leyland’s World Series ring on it. For more than two decades, it was pretty much impossible to have a who’s-the-best-manager-in-baseball conversation with anyone in the game and not have Jim Leyland’s name come up. And that sentiment undoubtedly swept over the room Sunday.

“I’ve talked to so many managers about this,” said Phillies president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski, who hired Leyland to manage two teams, the Marlins and Tigers. “It’s interesting. I was watching MLB Network (last week), and Joe Maddon was on there, and he talked about Jim Leyland. And he said the one thing you knew when you managed against Jim Leyland — and I heard this so many times — was that you were never going to outmanage him. He was as prepared as any manager in the game. You were never going to pull something off on him. He was just that good. He knew the game inside and out.

“In every aspect of managing,” Dombrowski said, “I don’t think there’s anything that could ever come up that Jim Leyland couldn’t handle — from a player perspective and from a game-situation perspective.”

2. He had the track record

So what else makes Leyland a Hall of Fame manager? The committee obviously thought his collection of achievements separated him from the other three managers on the ballot — Piniella, Davey Johnson and Cito Gaston. Here’s why:

1,769 wins, managed in three World Series and won a ring — Before Sunday, only four managers in history had that set of accomplishments but were not in the Hall of Fame. One was Leyland. The three remaining are Terry Francona, Dusty Baker and Bruce Bochy. They’re locks to escape this list themselves. But it also wouldn’t be a shock if they all got elected the next time this committee meets, in three years.

He won three Manager of the Year awards and finished second three times — The Manager of the Year trophy has only been around for a little over four decades. But the list of men to win it at least three times — and also finish as the runner-up at least three times — won’t take long to recite. It consists of only Leyland, Tony La Russa (four firsts, four seconds) and Baker (three of each).

But … asterisk alert! Bobby Cox (four firsts, two seconds) and Buck Showalter (four firsts, two seconds) also had six top-two finishes. So let’s not overlook them, either.

He won 700-plus games with two teams — In his first job as a big-league manager, Leyland won 851 regular-season games with the Pirates. In his last job as a big-league manager, Leyland won 700 regular-season games on the nose with the Tigers. That places him in a very cool group.

Only four other managers have won that many games for more than one team. You’ve heard of them! La Russa (A’s and Cardinals) is one. Sparky Anderson (Reds and Tigers) is two. Francona (Red Sox and Indians/Guardians) is the third. Bochy (Padres and Giants) is the fourth. What do they have in common? They’re all either Hall of Famers or mortal-lock Hall of Famers.

He never got fired! Oh, and one more thing I decided was worth mentioning. How about a guy who managed for 22 years, worked for four different teams and never got fired? Leyland actually left all of those teams — the Pirates, Marlins, Rockies and Tigers — of his own volition.

OK, you could argue he headed for the exit ramps on a couple of them before they asked him to go. Nevertheless, when he left Pittsburgh, the town cheered him all the way to the finish line. Ditto in Detroit. In Florida, he gave Dombrowski a year’s notice that fire sales weren’t what he signed up for. And in Colorado, he left guaranteed money on the table. So none of these could even be remotely considered “a firing.”

Has any other manager been employed by that many teams, managed that many games (3,499) and still could honestly say he hadn’t been fired by any of them? I can’t find any. But feel free to do all the research on this that makes you happy. Knock yourselves out. I’d love to know if anyone else can make that claim.

3. His three trips to the World Series separated him from this pack

So why Leyland and not Piniella? Or Johnson? Or Gaston?

Only the committee really knows. But we can hazard a guess.

Piniella managed in the same era, won 66 more games (1,835) and had a better career winning percentage (.517, to Leyland’s .506). He and Leyland also won the same number of World Series (one). But Piniella won in 1990 and never got back to the Series in six trips to the playoffs, while Leyland guided two Tigers teams to the pennant, though neither of those teams got a parade out of it. Regardless, three World Series versus one was an important distinction.

And Johnson seems to have lost out to Leyland over similar logic. On one hand, Johnson’s .562 career winning percentage is 56 points higher than Leyland’s. And Johnson is one of only five managers in the World Series era with a winning percentage that good, a World Series ring and as many wins as he finished with (1,372). The other four — Joe McCarthy, John McGraw, Billy Southworth and Fred Clarke — are all in the Hall of Fame.

On the other hand, Johnson managed over 1,000 fewer games than Leyland, never made it to a fourth season with any team after he left the Mets and also got his teams to just one World Series. So Leyland’s overall body of work was a separator there.

And while Gaston won back-to-back World Series in Toronto, that has never been an automatic ticket to Cooperstown. Ask Ralph Houk. And Gaston also managed 10 fewer seasons than Leyland, while never managing anywhere except Toronto.

So if this committee was in the mood to elect a manager, it’s hard to make a case that it elected the wrong one, as deserving and popular a choice as any of the other three would have been.

4. Leyland’s negatives weren’t that negative

Finally, what exactly was the reason not to elect Jim Leyland. There were really only two. But it’s a stretch to fixate on either of them.

He won only one World Series — If you’re looking for complaints, there’s only one place to look — on social media. And this was the big gripe on my feed about Leyland: He won the World Series only once. Hey, so what?

Let’s throw some names out there of Hall of Fame or future Hall of Fame managers with “only” one trophy: Bobby Cox, Baker, Whitey Herzog and Earl Weaver, just to name four. In a world in which winning one of those World Series means having to navigate multiple rounds of potential October disaster, it’s unfair to compare any modern manager to, say, John McGraw.

Leyland made it there three times and won once. That was actually better than the competition. Remember that, OK?

He only had a .506 winning percentage — Of all of Leyland’s “black marks,” this is theoretically the most troubling. But now think about some of the situations he found himself in.

When Leyland arrived in Pittsburgh, the Pirates had lost 104 games the year before. A decade later, he won a World Series with the Marlins, then had his roster sold out from under him by owner Wayne Huizenga. And three decades after he managed one season with the Rockies, they are still looking for some kind of magic formula that leads to winning.

But to latch onto that winning percentage as a reason to overlook all the greatness in Jim Leyland, you would have to be a beer-mug-half-empty kind of history major. And clearly, there were none on this committee.

It’s still worth thinking about. But Dombrowski took on that line of second-guessing before I could even bring it up. He started by recapping the situation Leyland inherited in Pittsburgh, with all the built-in losing that entailed. Then Dombrowski brought up the whole Florida closeout sale by management and the impact it had on Leyland’s career.

“If we hadn’t broken up that ’97 club in Florida, we wouldn’t even ask this question,” Dombrowski said, “because he’d be a lock, stock and barrel Hall of Famer — right there with the Bobby Cox’s and Tony La Russa’s and Joe Torre’s. I think that was the group of the three of them that all went in (to Cooperstown) together. And Jim would be right there with them, because his record would be that same way.”

Of course, nobody knows what would have happened if the Marlins had kept that core group together for the next three, four or five years. We only know what did happen. And what did happen was no reflection on the manager. That’s not even debatable. And it’s why Hall of Fame voting, even in committees like this one, needs to be about more than the raw numbers.

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One call changed it all.

The moment Jim Leyland and his wife Katie heard he was elected to the Class of 2024! pic.twitter.com/V8o9UL35DK

— National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum ⚾ (@baseballhall) December 4, 2023

So on a life-changing Sunday in December, Jim Leyland got the phone call that will lead him to a magical weekend in Cooperstown next July. It brought him to tears of joy. And it put a smile on the face of so many people in baseball who know and love him.

“He belongs in the Hall of Fame,” Dombrowski said. “He’s a Hall of Famer.”

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(Top photo of Jim Leyland in 2013, his final season managing the Tigers: Gene J. Puskar / Associated Press)