Is Mike Scioscia a Hall of Fame manager? And what is the standard for a skipper in the modern game? (2024)

When The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal broke the news on Sunday that longtime Angels manager Mike Scioscia intends to step down after his contract expires this fall, what surprised me most wasn’t Scioscia’s impeding departure from the Angels, which feels overdue, but the ease with which Rosenthal and others referred to Scioscia as a Hall of Fame-quality manager.

That might have been recency bias on my part. Barring one of the greatest comebacks in major-league history, Scioscia will have taken the Angels to the playoffs just once in his final nine years in Anaheim, failing to win a single postseason game over that stretch. That doesn’t erase the fact that the Angels reached the playoffs six times in Scioscia’s first 10 years at the helm, winning the first and only pennant and World Series in franchise history under Scioscia in 2002. Nor does it erase any of Scioscia’s 1,628 (and counting) wins, his two Manager of the Year awards, nor lower his .537 career winning percentage (though that last does project to fall by one point by the end of this season).

Scioscia will turn 60 in November and, per USA Today’s Bob Nightengale, intends to retire rather than seek another managerial job. If he never manages again after this year, is Mike Scioscia a Hall of Fame manager?

Jay Jaffe’s JAWS system, which has established a widely-respected objective Hall of Fame standard for players, does not have a calculation for managers, in large part because the “W” in JAWS stands for WAR and there are no wins-above-replacement statistics for managers. In fact, there are very few value-based statistics for managers at all. In the current century, publications such as The Bill James Handbook and the Baseball Prospectus annual have started to track and print strategy-based statistics for managers, but neither has assigned any value to those statistics. While progressive analysis generally disapproves of sacrifice bunts, intentional walks, and high pitch counts, I’m not aware of any advanced formula that attempts to measure the on-field impact of a manager’s strategic decisions.

Some look to run differential to assess whether a manager’s team is over- or underachieving. However, the differences between a team’s Pythagorean and actual winning percentages can more often be attributed to team’s construction than to its manager. Got a bad rotation, but a good bullpen? Chances are your team loses big, wins close, and exceeds its Pythagorean expectations. How much credit should the manager get for that bullpen performance? It likely depends on the pedigree of the pitchers in the ‘pen, and thus varies significantly from case to case. In the modern game, the pitching coach and front office play their parts, as well.

I’m on record as being skeptical about the size of the impact a manager can have on his team’s on-field performance. However, I’m not callous enough to suggest that managers can’t have an impact. Nor am I about to argue that we should remove the two dozen managers already inducted to the Hall of Fame. The Hall would be incomplete without Connie Mack, John McGraw, and Casey Stengel, among others. What’s more, the percentage of managers whose election to the Hall of Fame strikes me as questionable is far lower than the percentage of questionable selections among the players. I see no reason to raise the existing standard for Hall of Fame managers.

Establishing just what that standard is, however, is tricky. Without advanced formulas that adjust for context, including the strength of the league or division, the quality of a manager’s roster, or preseason expectations, we’re left with a decidedly old-school set of statistics for managers. Ranking all major league managers by games, 11 of the top 13 are in the Hall of Fame. By wins, 12 of the top 14 are in the Hall. By winning percentage, 11 of the top 14 are in the Hall. By championships, 9 of the 10 with three or more World Series titles are in. By pennants, 22 of 23 with four or more league championships are in.

In total, twenty-five men have been inducted into the Hall of Fame as managers. That number does not include long-time Pirates player/manager Fred Clarke, whom the Old Timers Committee ostensibly inducted as player in 1945, but whose plaque spends 28 of its 35 words on his managerial accomplishments. It does include Harry Wright and Rube Foster, two men who were more important as pioneers—in 19th-century baseball and the Negro Leagues, respectively—than as managers, and whose managerial records are difficult to compare to those of recent major-league managers. Similarly, Ned Hanlon and Frank Selee were inducted primarily for their work in the 1890s, making them awkward comparison points for modern managers due to the shorter seasons and irregular, or often non-existent, postseasons of that decade.

Eliminating Wright, Foster, Hanlon, and Selee, but including Clarke, we are left with 21 Hall of Fame managers whose careers can be fairly used to evaluate modern candidates for the Hall. One might argue about just how “fair” it is to compare a modern manager to Mack, who managed for 53 years, 50 of them while also possessing a significant ownership stake in his team. However, the sample is large enough that Mack’s presence doesn’t skew it dramatically. Here are the averages in the categories mentioned above for that group of 21 modern major-league Hall of Fame managers:

You’ll notice I added playoff appearances to that list. That category isn’t as strong a determinant as the others because of the expansion of the available playoff spots in recent decades, but it will become relevant when discussing contemporary candidates such as Scioscia. I’ll deal with that in more detail once we get there.

For now, just five of the 21 Hall of Fame managers in that sample fail to exceed the average in any one of those categories, while one other is above average in games and wins, but with a losing career record. Those six represent the bottom quartile of the current Hall of Fame class. Here they are ranked by winning percentage:

Of those five, the only one who clearly doesn’t belong in the Hall of Fame is Wilbert Robinson. Robinson isn’t the only modern major-league manager in the Hall of Fame never to have won a World Series, nor is he the only one to have won fewer than two pennants. However, only one other Hall of Fame manager fits both descriptions, and that manager is Al López, who had a .584 career winning percentage (a 90-win pace over 154 games), fourth among all Hall of Fame managers. López had the misfortune of spending most of his managerial career in the American League during the great Yankees dynasty of the 1950s and early ‘60s. From 1949 to 1964, the Yankees won every pennant but two. Both of those exceptions were won by a team managed by López, the 111-win Indians in 1954 and the Go-Go White Sox in 1959. As for Robinson, not only did he only win two pennants during an 18-year span in which every NL team won at least one, but his teams only finished above fourth place on two other occasions.

Robinson was a major figure in pre-depression baseball. The jovial yang to former 1890s Baltimore Orioles teammate and fellow Hall of Fame manager John McGraw’s irascible yin, Robinson was the primary catcher of those great Baltimore teams and managed Brooklyn from 1914 to 1931. Known as “Uncle Robbie,” Robinson lent his name to the team itself, which was known as the Robins for those 18 seasons. Yet, once you get past his personality and durability, little in Robinson’s record suggests he deserved induction specifically for his accomplishments as a manager.

Harris is also something of a questionable choice, having never finished above third place outside of those three pennant-winning seasons, but he does rank seventh all-time in wins and fifth all-time in games managed. As a player/manager, Harris led the Senators to their first championship and two of the three pennants in team history in his first two seasons as Washington’s “boy manager” at the ages of 27 and 28. More than twenty years later, he came out of retirement to lead the Yankees to their first post-War championship in 1947.

I’m more sanguine about the other four men on that list.

In a 25-year managerial career, McKechnie won four pennants with three different franchises and led the 1925 Pirates and 1940 Reds to championships. Including a half-year stint in the Federal League in 1915, McKechnie posted a winning percentage of .540 or better with four of the five franchises he managed. The only exception was the 1930s Boston Braves/Bees. McKechnie had a .458 winning percentage in eight years in Boston; Casey Stengel, his immediate successor, had a .432 mark over the subsequent six years. Both managers wound up in the Hall of Fame. Something tells me the losing wasn’t their fault.

Williams was one of the great itinerant managers of the 1970s and ‘80s. He could be difficult and often butted heads with ownership and the front office, which is why none of his managerial stints lasted a full five seasons. However, he only spent one full season unemployed between 1967 and 1988, and of the six teams he managed, the only one he failed to improve was the mid-70s Angels. As a rookie skipper in 1967, he led the Red Sox to their first pennant in 21 years, a performance so improbable it was dubbed “the Impossible Dream” in Boston. In 1971, he took over an A’s franchise that hadn’t seen the postseason in 40 years and won three straight division titles and two championships before falling out with colorful owner Charlie O. Finley. At the end of the decade, he led the Expos to their first and greatest run of success, setting up their only postseason appearance in the bifurcated strike season of 1981. He then went to San Diego and delivered the Padres’ first pennant.

Lasorda won pennants in his first two full seasons as the Dodgers’ skipper, then won the World Series with the team in his fifth full season. In his first dozen seasons at the helm, the Dodgers made the playoffs six times, winning four pennants and two World Series, and were the only team to win multiple World Series in the 1980s. Near the end of Lasorda’s career, the Dodgers were in first place in a weak National League West division when the 1994 strike hit, and returned to the playoffs in Lasorda’s final full season in 1995. Beyond his on-field success, Lasorda was also one of the game’s great personalities, an outspoken, often hilariously profane character who clearly believed that “entertainer” was part of his job description.

Among the Hall of Fame managers, only World War II-era Cardinals skipper Billy Southworth managed or won fewer games than Whitey Herzog, but Southworth’s .597 career winning percentage, fifth all-time regardless of era or minimum number of games, easily explains his induction. As for Herzog, he led the Royals to their first three playoff appearances from 1976 to 1978, then went to St. Louis and snapped a 14-year pennant drought by leading the Cardinals to the championship in 1982. Herzog ultimately guided the Cardinals to three pennants from 1982 to 1987, making them the only team to appear in three World Series in that decade. Herzog gets additional credit for the Cardinals’ success because he was their general manager from 1980 to 1982, during which he traded for Ozzie Smith, among others, and had an outsized influence on the team thereafter. He was also the innovator of a speed-and-defense-based approach for teams that played in artificial-surface stadiums, dubbed Whiteyball.

Herzog, Lasorda, and Williams are three of the eight divisional-era managers thus far inducted (Earl Weaver, Sparky Anderson, Bobby Cox, Joe Torre, and Tony La Russa are the others), and their presence on the above list, along with the relative dearth in expansion-era managers in the Hall, suggests that using the averages from those 21 modern managers may be setting the standard too high. From 1901 to 1957, 31 percent of team seasons were guided, at least in part, by a Hall of Fame manager. From 1957 to 1995, just 21 percent of team seasons featured a Hall of Famer at the helm, and the most recent season to reach or exceed that 21 percent was 1990.

JAWS uses the performance of the average Hall of Famer at a given position as the standard based on the belief that there have been a significant number of undeserving players inducted into the Hall of Fame. It thus follows that to avoid lowering the standard further, new inductees should be at least roughly equivalent to that average Hall of Famer. However, no manager not already in the Hall of Fame has won more than 1,961 games or more than five pennants. Only two, Gene Mauch and Bruce Bochy, have managed more than 3,648 games. Only one, Bochy, has won more than two World Series. If we were to hold managers to the JAWS standard, Bochy would be the only approved candidate to have managed in the major leagues since the 2014 Hall of Fame class of Bobby Cox, Joe Torre, and Tony La Russa retired after the 2010 and 2011 seasons.

Even by that 21-percent standard, there should be an average of six Hall of Fame managers in the 30-team major leagues at any one time. Looking around the league right now, the top candidates are Bochy, Terry Francona, Joe Maddon, Buck Showalter, and Scioscia. Dusty Baker was still active last year. It’s entirely possible that one or more of this season’s younger managers could go on to have a Hall-worthy career, and I nominate the 56-year-old Bob Melvin as an arguably underappreciated mid-career manager who could finish strong (that is, if teams are still hiring managers over 55 in the next decade).

For now, let’s look at the six veteran managers I mentioned above, along with three other recent retirees who I think also deserve serious Hall consideration. In this case, because active averages can fluctuate, I’ll rank them by career wins:

MOY is the Manager of the Year award, which I omitted before because the award wasn’t created until 1983. All of the current Hall of Fame managers began their managerial careers before the Baseball Writers’ Association of America introduced the award, but every Hall of Fame manager to manage past the 1988 season won the award at least once. Cox and La Russa won it a record four times each.

Looking at the above list, Bochy could ultimately be just the third Hall of Fame manager with a losing career record, following Harris and Mack, but he leads this group in games, wins, pennants, and championships despite being the fourth-youngest of the nine men above. He’s a shoo-in.

On the other side of the coin, I’m struck by how weak Showalter looks in this comparison. Beyond being the only one of these nine managers not to have won a pennant, he has the third-worst winning percentage, the fewest playoff appearances, and is seventh out of the nine in career wins. The good news for Buck is that he’s the third-youngest man on the list, his Orioles contract is up after this year, and his overachieving tenure in Baltimore seems likely to earn him another job with what would, by default, be a better team, should he want to continue managing. Still, the Hall looks like a reach for Showalter at this point.

After Bochy, the skipper with the best Hall candidacy on that list is Francona, the only other manager with multiple championships to his credit, and historic ones at that given that his first broke the Red Sox’s 86-year title drought. Francona is also second only to Davey Johnson in winning percentage among these nine, is well on his way to a ninth playoff appearance, and is the youngest man on the list not planning to retire this fall.

As for Johnson, he was on the 2017 Modern Baseball Committee Ballot, but, needing 12 votes, received fewer than five. Piniella, who was also on the ballot, received seven votes. Leyland, who retired the same year as Johnson, didn’t even make the ballot. Personally, I think Johnson should be the first of that trio to be inducted. He led four different teams to the playoffs, compiled a .562 winning percentage (91 wins over 162 games) over 17 seasons, and his teams averaged better than a second place finish, something that no current Hall of Famer, nor any other manager on the above list, can claim. Johnson was also ahead of the curve in his use of computers and statistics. However, among current Hall of Famers, only Southworth and Herzog won fewer games, none won just a single pennant, and the only man trailing Johnson in wins on the above list, Maddon, should pass him in the coming seasons.

At 64, Maddon is the oldest active manager in baseball, but he has said he wants to manage for at least five more years. That should guarantee him more than 400 additional wins. If he sustains his strong winning percentage and adds some postseason accomplishments along the way, he will have a strong case by the time he retires, even if the late start to his career will have suppressed his cumulative totals. Maddon has managed his entire career in the wild-card era, in which playoff teams have had, at best, a 1-in-4 chance of winning the pennant and a 1-in-8 chance of winning the World Series. By winning two pennants and one World Series in seven postseasons, Maddon has beaten those odds on both fronts thus far, and both of his pennants and his World Series win were landmarks for his teams, the Rays and Cubs.

Perhaps the most interesting Hall of Fame candidacy among the men listed above is Baker’s. His career totals in games and wins are roughly equivalent to the averages for every Hall of Fame manager who entered the league after 1910 (3,438 games, 1,864 wins). His winning percentage is equivalent to that of Herzog, who was inducted with nearly 600 fewer wins. Only four Hall of Fame managers have exceeded his nine playoff appearances, and Baker brought all four teams he managed to the postseason, three of them multiple times. However, the analytical community derided Baker during his career for his excessive devotion to veterans of questionable value, seeming obliviousness to on-base percentage, and the mismanagement of his pitching staffs. Perhaps more importantly to the eventual Veterans Committee voters, despite his nine playoff appearances, Baker took just one team to the World Series and never won a championship. Baker lacks López excuse for that lack of a championship and, even facing an extra round of playoffs, should have won at least two pennants in those nine postseasons. Still, the rest of his resume comfortably meets the Hall standard. If inducted, he would be the first African-American manager to reach the Hall of Fame for his work in the major leagues.

As for Scioscia, he’s solidly mid-pack among the above nine. He’s fourth in winning percentage, fifth in wins, and will fall to sixth in playoff appearances once Maddon’s Cubs reach the postseason this year. His games and wins totals are almost exactly average for this group, as are his seven playoff appearances and one championship. However, he doesn’t exceed the current Hall of Fame averages in any category.

The current Hall of Famer whose career Scioscia’s most resembles is that of his own former skipper, Lasorda. The similarities between the two are almost eerie. Both are Italians who grew up just outside Philadelphia, played for the Dodgers, and managed a single team in the Los Angeles area for their entire careers. Both had the bulk of their success in the first half of their careers. Both won a championship via an expanded playoff field (Lasorda in the split 1981 season, Scioscia via a wild-card berth in 2002), and their career totals are remarkably similar:

Scioscia, who will finish with 3,078 games and will likely win another 20-something of them, has exceeded Lasorda in terms of regular season performance. However, he falls significantly short of Lasorda in terms of postseason success, and he never achieved anything resembling Lasorda’s ubiquitous celebrity. Of course, while it is called the Hall of Fame, Scioscia’s relative lack of personality shouldn’t be a demerit. As for his comparative lack of postseason success, that reflects a reality that the Eras Committee voters will need to take into account to when evaluating managers from the wild-card era.

If we truly consider the playoffs a craps shoot, that would suggest that every playoff team has a 50 percent chance of winning a given series (even in specific cases, the reality is rarely far from that). Prior to the introduction of divisional play, that meant that every team that reached the playoffs not only automatically won the pennant, but had a 50 percent chance of winning a championship. In Lasorda’s day of two divisions per league and one round of playoffs, it was a 50 percent chance of winning the pennant and a 25 percent chance of winning a championship. For Scioscia, however, it has been a 25 percent chance of winning the pennant and a mere 12.5 percent chance of winning the World Series, and that’s before factoring in the Wild Card Game, in which Scioscia’s Angels have never participated.

Lasorda still beat his odds. Remember, he faced two-tiered playoffs in two of his seven postseasons (1981 and 1995), yet still won the pennant in 57 percent of his playoff appearances and the World Series in 29 percent of them. Scioscia beat his 1-in-8 World Series odds, but fell short of his 1-in-4 pennant odds. I can’t justify keeping Scioscia out of the Hall over the lack of a single pennant. Still, this accounting suggests my initial reaction to the news of Scioscia’s impending retirement was correct. Scioscia may very well end up in the Hall of Fame, but he is a borderline candidate by the Hall’s current standards.

(Top photo of Scioscia:John McCoy/Getty Images)