The Hall of Fame's Missing Managers

A few months ago, when the Astros won their second World Series in six seasons, it was the first championship of the long managerial career of Dusty Baker. The calls began immediately for Baker to be elected to the Hall of Fame as a manager, the shiny new title being the only perceived missing piece of his résumé to that point.

That’s not literally true, because there have been a couple of managers elected to the Hall without the benefit of a World Series title to their credit, so the path to Baker’s eventual election had already been open. But, essentially, that argument was correct. Of the 22 men in the Hall of Fame strictly for their managerial records, only four (Ned Hanlon, Al Lopez, Wilbert Robinson, and Frank Selee) had no World Series title on their record, and two of those four (Hanlon and Selee) managed before the World Series existed. And, candidly, the elections of Robinson and Lopez were probably mistakes.

I took a look at those 22 Hall of Fame managers, and tried to come up with a way to measure their Hall of Fame qualifications objectively. Similar to the Hall of Fame Monitor developed by Bill James years ago, I decided to come up with a rating that produced an average score of 100 for the managers in the Hall already. This is entirely unscientific, done just to figure out where the Hall of Fame has given the most weight in their past managerial selections.

I looked at eight different components of a manager’s career record - Wins, Winning Percentage, Games Managed, Post-Season Wins, Post-Season Winning Percentage, Playoff Appearances, Pennants, and World Series Championships. I also decided to include three non-Hall of Fame managers who are widely viewed as eventual Hall of Famers as soon as they are eligible for election - Baker, Bruce Bochy, and Terry Francona. That gives me a total of 25 men to examine, so the weights assigned should produce a result where 12 or 13 of the 25 score above 100, and the other 12 or 13 score below it.

To account for the fact that the eras in which these men managed differed in some of these key components - like the number of playoff spots available, the number of games played, etc. - I decided to award points in comparison to just the other managers from their era. Three broad eras were grouped together: Pre-WWII, Post-WWII, and the Division Era. These aren’t neat because some guys straddled multiple eras, but it simply wasn’t going to be fair to compare a manager who mostly managed in the Dead Ball era with someone who manages now, when nearly half the teams qualify for the playoffs.

Without giving all the messy details, I assigned points based on how far above or below the average Hall of Fame manager each man was in each category. So, for example, how far was a man’s career winning percentage above or below the average for his era? Or his number of playoff appearances, or championships, and so on. Then those points were added or subtracted from a starting score of 100 to see where each Hall of Famer scored overall.

Here are the results, including the three men assumed to already have Hall of Fame records:

That gives me 12 managers above 100, 12 below 100, and one at exactly 100, and they pretty much align the way most people would rank them without any system to help them. A top-5 of Mack, McCarthy, Stengel, LaRussa and Torre would be viewed as pretty reasonable, even if your personal mileage may vary a bit.

Likewise, I would guess that a bottom-5 of Hall of Fame managers would look a lot like Selee, Herzog, Hanlon, Robinson and Lopez. Maybe not Herzog to many people, but the truth is that his election was bit odd. His record just doesn’t stand out compared to a lot of managers who haven’t been elected:

And no, this is not a call for the election of Davey Johnson or Mike Scioscia or anyone else on that list. Would they be better than many of the managers already elected? Sure, but do they approach the average accomplishments and the full group of current and future Hall of Fame managers? No, they don’t, and none of them are particularly close, either.

As you can see, I applied the system to managers who aren’t in the Hall of Fame, too, just to see if any obvious candidates had been left out. Not to ruin the suspense, but the answer is no. No one comes anywhere close to a score of 100, or 90, or 80, or even 70 or 60. Leyland’s score of 44 was the highest among the managers I applied it to. I may have missed a candidate or two, but the way the weights work, it’s doubtful anyone else would compile a decent score.

So you may be asking a pretty obvious question at this point - “Why, Paul, is this post called ‘The Hall of Fame’s Missing Managers’ if you couldn’t identify any other deserving candidates?” And that would be a great question, if not for one thing - This system is entirely unfair to a whole group of managers why haven’t talked about yet…

Managers from the Negro Leagues.

Take another look at the list of Hall of Fame managers. Now that you know what to look for, it’s pretty glaring, isn’t it? None of them, not one, is from the Negro Leagues.

It’s true that Rube Foster is in the Hall of Fame, and he managed a bit, but he’s there for being an executive, and the founder of the Negro National League. Other Negro Leaguers in the Hall of Fame managed a bit, too - Oscar Charleston, and Bullet Rogan, and John Henry Lloyd, and so on - but they were elected as players, not as managers.

And let’s be clear, there are plenty of worthy managerial candidates from the Negro Leagues. No one would elect Dave Malarcher to the Hall based on his playing career, but what about his .628 winning percentage and two Negro Leagues World Series titles as a manager? He had a third title as well at a time the Negro Leagues didn’t play a World Series. Frank Duncan only managed for 6 seasons, but won two pennants and a World Series, and posted a .570 career winning percentage that was better than anyone on that list of Whitey Herzog’s and his comps. Vic Harris has a pretty decent record as a player, but his time managing the legendary Homestead Grays is easily worthy of induction as a manager - 7 pennants, a World Series win, and a ridiculous .663 winning percentage. Candy Jim Taylor managed for all or part of 27 seasons, racking up 3 pennants and two World Series titles, numbers that would likely compare well to Bochy’s given that both had overall records just below .500.

The scoring system I put together doesn’t work for these guys, because, just like with Negro Leagues players, we have incomplete statistics for them. You can’t use a stats-based method for evaluating managers that don’t have complete stats. Common sense needs to prevail instead, just like it finally did with players from the Negro Leagues. Those great teams, full of Hall of Famers and now recognized as Major Leagues in their own right, didn’t simply manage themselves.

The failure of the Hall of Fame to elect even one manager from the Negro Leagues is a glaring, and embarrassing, omission. It needs to be fixed sooner than later.