Managers Lou Piniella And Jim Leyland Rep An Era That No Longer Exists

Usually, the surest thing about any Baseball Hall of Fame Veterans Committee-esque election is you’ll never be entirely sure what to call it without double or triple checking.

Thus, after the aforementioned double and triple check, we can safely declare that the Contemporary Baseball Era (non-players) Committee will gather to determine the Cooperstown fates of eight candidates who built their resumes in the dugout, front office or while donning an umpire’s uniform.

Anyone amongst the group of managers Cito Gaston, Davey Johnson, Jim Leyland and Lou Piniella, executives Hank Peters and Bill White and umpires Ed Montague and Joe West who receives at least 75 percent of the vote will be enshrined during the induction ceremonies July 21. Results will be announced tonight at 7:30 PM EST.

But given the size of the 16-person electorate and the inherent difficulty in winnowing down votes that consist of candidates from three different walks of baseball life, it’s always folly to try and predict who will make the cut and enter the hallowed Hall via the committee.

What we do know is this the type of referendum on managers that is unlikely to be held by future whatever-the-Veterans-Committee-is-going-to-be-calleds, because Gaston, Johnson, Leyland and Piniella mixed championship success with longevity in a manner that will be hard for any modern manager to emulate.

Gaston is one of just four managers to direct teams to consecutive championships in the divisional play era and the other three — Dick Williams, Sparky Anderson and Joe Torre — are already enshrined in Cooperstown. With Major League Baseball having expanded the playoffs three times since Gaston’s Blue Jays won the last championship of the pre-wild card era in 1993 — and twice since Torre’s Yankees navigated a three-round format to win it all in 1998, 1999 and 2000 — there’s a chance no manager ever does it again.

Johnson is one of three managers to take four teams to the playoffs. Heading into 2024, only six teams have a manager whose resume includes at least two full-time managerial stops, a reflection of not only the grind the job takes on skippers but the preference of analytically-minded general managers to hire someone they can, ahem, mold as their own.

Nowhere is the lack of experience amongst current managers more evident than in the cases of Piniella and Leyland, who rank 16th and 17th all-time in games managed with 3,548 and 3,499, respectively.

Among the 15 men ahead of the duo, 11 are in the Hall of Fame. As long as they remain out of the dugout, the freshly retired Dusty Baker and Terry Francona are sure to be elected when the Contemporary Baseball Era (non-players) Committee (or whatever it’s called by then) gathers again in 2026, when they may be joined by Bruce Bochy, who completed the first year of his three-year deal with the Rangers by winning his fourth World Series.

Bochy will be the only active skipper next season who has managed at least 3,000 games, though Bob Melvin is 58 games shy of joining that club. The only other manager to preside over at least 2,000 games is the Rockies’ Bud Black (2,394). The only other one even at 1,500 games is the Tigers’ A.J. Hinch, and he’s just barely there at 1,508.

The experience gap between now and then is particularly stark once you take out a calculator and figure out just how far away the modern skipper is from matching or even approaching the tenures of Piniella and Leyland.

Hinch would need to manage more than 12 full seasons — taking him into the 2036 season, when he’d be 62 years old — to reach Piniella on the all-time games managed list. The Rays’ Kevin Cash and the Cubs’ Craig Counsell, who rank fifth and sixth in games managed at 1,356 and 1,332, would each need to manage more than seven full seasons just to get to 2,500 games. The Dodgers’ Dave Roberts, at 1,196 games managed, would have to manage into the early weeks of the 2032 season — more than eight more full seasons — to reach 2,500 games. And these calculations are assuming no seasons shortened by work stoppages or any other terrible things nobody could have imagined prior to 2020.

It’s a bit of baseball irony that the only other active men to manage at least 1,000 games — the Mariners’ Scott Servais, the Braves’ Brian Snitker and the Diamondbacks’ Torey Lovullo — all seem to act with some sort of independence in the dugout but are between 56 and 68 years old, meaning it’s unlikely they’ll build the longer resumes of a Leyland or a Piniella.

With front offices taking such an outsized role in dictating what a manager does and doesn’t do, the most complicated part of evaluating the potential Hall of Famers amongst active managers is determining how much credit they should or shouldn’t receive.

Piniella and Leyland, on the other hand, defined their teams — plural. Piniella took over the Reds months after Pete Rose was suspended for life for gambling and directed them to the franchise’s most recent World Series in his first season at the helm in 1990. He took his bases-throwing intensity to Seattle in 1993 and directed the Mariners — who’d recorded one winning season and no playoff berths in 16 years before his arrival — to seven winning seasons and three playoff berths in 10 seasons. Seattle’s made the playoffs once since.

Piniella then went to the Devil Rays as their first name manager before directing the Cubs to consecutive division titles in 2007-08 — their first back-to-back trips to the playoffs since 1906-08.

After standing up to and nearly coming to blows with Barry Bonds while managing the Pirates in 1992 and turning the mercenary Marlins into champions in 1997, Leyland was hired by the Tigers in October 2005 following 12 straight losing seasons. In 2006, Detroit won its first five games, a streak that ended with a 10-2 loss to the White Sox that unleashed Leyland’s wraith.

“Yeah, we stunk period — we stunk and that’s not good enough,” Leyland said. “This stuff has been going on here before and it’s not going to happen here.”

The Tigers made the World Series in 2006 — the first two trips to the Fall Classic under Leyland, who directed Detroit to the playoffs five times in eight seasons. The Tigers have made one trip to the postseason and recorded two winning seasons since his retirement following the 2013 campaign.

Outside of Bochy, Counsell — who reached managerial free agency after nine years with the Brewers and inked a five-year deal with the rival Cubs — and maybe Melvin, no active skippers carry a reputation as a difference-maker nor as the symbol of their teams.

Piniella and Leyland may or may not be Hall of Famers. But they were representatives of their times — a time that no longer exists fewer than 15 years after their departures.