RIP Maury Wills (1932-2022)

Maury Wills, the former MVP-winning shortstop for the Los Angeles Dodgers, passed away at his home in Sedona, Arizona, yesterday at the age of 89, just 13 days shy of what would have been his 90th birthday. Wills stole 586 bases in his Major League Baseball career and is often credited with bringing the steal back into the game. He won three World Series titles with the Dodgers and made the All-Star team in five different seasons.

Dave Roberts, the current manager of the Dodgers, wears the uniform #30 in honor of Wills and has said that he probably wouldn’t be a manager in Major League Baseball today were it not for the influence Wills had upon him when he was a player.

“He just loved the game of baseball, loved working and loved the relationship with players. We spent a lot of time together. He showed me how to appreciate my craft and what it is to be a big leaguer. He just loved to teach. So I think a lot of where I get my excitement, my passion and my love for the players is from Maury.”

— Dave Roberts, Los Angeles Dodgers manager, Los Angeles Times (Sept 20, 2022)

Last December, Wills was on the Golden Days Eras Committee Hall of Fame ballot, which gave him another shot at baseball immortality. That committee ballot considered ten men whose primary impact on the game was from 1950-69. Given that Wills was 89 years old, many thought it might be his last chance at Cooperstown while still alive. Wills was not selected on that ballot. Another longtime member of the Dodgers (Gil Hodges) was elected, along with Jim Kaat, Tony Oliva, and Minnie Minoso.

Wills never got close to Cooperstown when he was on the Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA) ballot: his highest vote share was 40% in an election requiring 75% for induction. Although Wills’ accomplishments are diminished in the sabermetrics era (his career WAR was just 39.6), he was considered a pioneer during his playing days.

“Maury Wills revolutionized the grand old game quite as much as Babe Ruth. He put the game back, you might say, on its feet. Prior to Maury Wills you could have played the game in wet cement. The ballparks were bigger, the pitches faster and the carpet surfaces lightning fast, but nobody was paying attention. Until Maury.”

— Jim Murray (Los Angeles Times, January 6, 1980)

Cooperstown Cred: Maury Wills (SS)

• Dodgers (1959-66), Pirates (1967-68), Expos (1969), Dodgers (1969-72)
• Career: .281 BA, .330 OBP, .331 SLG, 2,134 Hits, 586 SB
• Career: 88 OPS+, 39.6 WAR (Wins Above Replacement)
• 1962 N.L. MVP (.299 BA, 208 Hits, 130 Runs, 104 SB, 6.0 WAR)
• Finished in the top 10 of the MVP voting four times (1961, ’62, ’65, ’71)
• Led the N.L. in Stolen Bases 6 times
• Five seasons as an All-Star, won 1961 & ’62 N.L. Gold Glove Awards

(cover photo: Don Wingfield/National Baseball Hall of Fame Library

This article was originally posted last December in advance of the Golden Days Hall of Fame ballot. The beginning of the piece was updated with the news of Wills’ passing. The rest of the article appears as previously written, providing a tribute to Wills’ career and analysis of his worthiness for a plaque in the Hall of Fame.

Maury Wills: Before the Majors

Maurice Morning Wills was born on October 2nd, 1932, in Washington, D.C. He was one of 13 children raised by Guy and Mable Wills. Maury was a three-sport star at Cardozo High School in Washington (playing football, basketball, and baseball). He pitched and played third base in high school, but when signed by the Brooklyn Dodgers in the summer of 1950, they made him an infielder exclusively.

Wills spent eight full seasons as a minor-leaguer before getting promoted to the big leagues in June 1959 (with the Dodgers having moved to Los Angeles before the 1958 campaign). Twice while he was in the minors, Wills was drafted or purchased by other teams. After the 1955 season, in which the 23-year old Wills struggled mightily (hitting .202 for AA Fort Worth), he was demoted back to A-ball (in Pueblo, Colorado). Later, he was selected in the minor-league draft by the Cincinnati Redlegs in December 1956. Wills spent the 1957 campaign with Cincinnati’s AAA affiliate in Seattle but was returned to the Dodgers before the 1958 season.

During the 1958 season (Wills was with the Dodgers’ AAA affiliate in the eastern part of Washington state), manager Bobby Bragan encouraged the right-handed-hitting shortstop to learn how to switch-hit. During that season with the Spokane Indians, Wills hit .253 and stole 25 bases.

“He (Bragan) taught me to be a switch hitter. I was afraid of the curve ball… I could run, I could field, I could throw. I could do all the things they wanted you to be able to do except I couldn’t hit the curve ball.”

— Maury Wills (si.com, April 27, 2020)

After that ’58 campaign, Wills was sent to the Detroit Tigers in a conditional deal, but he was returned to the Dodgers shortly before the ’59 campaign when he was unable to beat out All-Star Rocky Bridges for the starting shortstop job.

For the Dodgers, the shortstop position had long been covered by Pee Wee Reese (a future Hall of Famer), but Reese’s skills declined in 1958, and he was primarily replaced by utilityman Don Zimmer, who hit .262 with 17 HR and 60 RBI. Zimmer remained the starting shortstop in 1959 and hit .341 in his first 12 games of the season. In the next 32 games, however, Zim went into a horrific slump, hitting just .154. Wills, hitting .313 with 25 stolen bases in two months with Spokane, was promoted. He made his major league debut on June 6th in Milwaukee.

1959-61: Maury Wills in the Majors

The 26-year old Wills got off to a slow start with the Dodgers (slashing .160/.192/.220 in his first 22 games), but future Hall of Fame manager Walter Alston stuck with him. By the end of July, Wills was still hitting just .200 (with no HR, one RBI, and one stolen base in 38 games), but he found his hitting stroke in August. For the last two months of the 1959 season, he hit .303. The Dodgers won 88 games, which was good enough to win the National League pennant. In his rookie campaign, Wills got to enjoy the thrill of a World Series victory: the Dodgers defeated the Chicago White Sox in 6 games (Wills hit .250 with a stolen base, one RBI, and two runs scored).

As a rookie, Wills wasn’t especially popular with teammates, who nicknamed him Mousy. But he did connect with Alston, who encouraged him to steal more bases. He also bonded with Pete Reiser, a coach on the team from 1960 through 1964. Reiser, who finished 2nd in the 1942 N.L. MVP voting with the Brooklyn Dodgers, became a base-stealer in an era where thefts were rare. Reiser was one of just eight men in the ‘40s to steal at least 30 bases in a season, swiping an M.L.-leading 34 bags in 1946. Reiser nicknamed Wills “Tiger” and taught him “everything for stealing bases,” Wills said.

Wills was entrenched as the starting shortstop at the start of the 1960 campaign but still hadn’t found his running legs entirely. Through the end of July, he was hitting .289 with 18 stolen bases (against 7 times caught stealing). Up to this point, Alston had exclusively used his fleet-footed shortstop at the bottom of the order. As a team, however, the Dodgers were missing a big chunk of their power game with injuries and declined performance impacting their two longtime stalwarts, Gil Hodges and Duke Snider.

And so, starting in August, Wills was put atop the lineup and started to use his legs to steal bases at will to put himself into scoring position. Wills responded by hitting .300 in the last 58 games of the season, all while swiping 32 additional bases (while getting caught only 5 times). For the season, Wills finished with a .295 BA, and an N.L.-leading 50 steals, the most in the senior circuit since Hall of Famer Max Carey swiped 51 bags in 1923. Overall, baseball’s awards-voting writers deemed Wills’ 1960 campaign worthy of a 17th place finish in the MVP balloting.

Wills had another solid season in 1961, hitting .282 with 105 runs scored while stealing 35 bases, still good enough to lead the N.L. He won the first of his two Gold Gloves and made the league’s All-Star squad twice (two All-Star Games were played per season from 1959-62). Wills placed 9th in the ’61 N.L. MVP balloting as the top vote-getter for the Dodgers.

As a team, the Dodgers only managed 82 wins in 1960 and 89 wins in ’61, falling short of the N.L. pennant after winning the title in ’59.

Maury Wills’ Magical 1962 Campaign

If Maury Wills ever makes the Hall of Fame, it will be because of his magnificent 1962 season, in which he had arguably the best baserunning campaign in the history of the game. This was the first season that the team called Dodger Stadium its new home, and it was also the season in which Wills stole 104 bases. Maury’s 104 bags swiped broke the longtime modern baseball record of 96 steals, set by Ty Cobb in 1915. (In the years since we have learned that there were 16 seasons in the 19th century in which a player stole 97 or more bases).

Anyway, from 1946 to 1961, only 14 men had stolen as many as 30 bases in a single season, including Reiser. During those years, Wills, Luis Aparicio, and Willie Mays were the only players to steal as many as 50 bags (Aparicio had the most, with 56 in 1959). So for Wills to improve on Aparicio’s 56 stolen bases and zoom to 104 is, in a way, akin to when Babe Ruth hit 54 home runs in 1920, blowing away the previous high in baseball of 29 (Ruth in 1919).

Not only did Wills steal 104 bases, but he also did so with remarkable efficiency, getting caught just 13 times for a superb 88.9% success rate. In this terrific season, Wills also hit .299, rapped 208 hits, scored 130 runs, and led the N.L. with 10 triples. Wills, never a power bat, also had career bests with 6 home runs and 48 RBI.

Additionally, Wills played in a record 165 games. This happened because the Dodgers and San Francisco Giants finished the season tied with 101 wins. Per baseball’s rules at the time, the teams broke the tie with a three-game playoff, with all games counting for regular-season stats. Sadly for Dodgers fans, the Giants took two out of those three games to win the N.L. pennant, although Wills could hardly be faulted for the final loss: he went 4-5 with 3 stolen bases but only scored once in the Dodgers’ 6-4 defeat.

Again, Wills won the Gold Glove and was an All-Star twice. A highlight of the season for Wills personally was that the first of the two Mid-Summer Classics was at D.C. Stadium in Washington, his hometown. Wills elected to stay with his parents rather than the players’ hotel. Wills was the game’s MVP (the N.L. won 3-1) thanks to a pinch-running appearance in which he stole 2nd base to set up the first run of the game and a single to lead off the 8th, setting up another run scored.

An interesting stat, researched by Graham Womack: Wills had a nearly identical number of stolen base opportunities in the 1961 and 1962 campaigns, with 348 in ’61 and 349 in ’62. But he attempted more than twice as many steals in 1962 as he had the previous year, running in 33.6 percent of his opportunities.

After the season, Wills narrowly beat Mays for the N.L. MVP Award (earning 209 points to Mays’ 202, with one more first-place vote).

Incidentally, with his star growing, 1962 was the season in rumors circulated that Wills was clandestinely dating actress Doris Day, a big fan of the Dodgers. Given that Wills and Day were both married and an interracial couple (at a time long before America was ready for that), General Manager Buzzie Bavasi ordered Wills to stop seeing her.

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1963-66: Annual Stolen Base King

Stealing 104 bases required a level of effort that Maury Wills was not eager to undertake again. In his book It Pays to Steal, he said that the “physical beating I took is more than I want to endure.” Late in the ’62 season, Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Murray wrote that “his body is so bruised he constantly looks as if he had just crawled out of a plane wreck.”

In 1963, his legs became “stiff, puffed up, and hurting,” he said recently to Sports Illustrated’s Graham Womack. “I was almost afraid to steal a base,” Wills said. “I didn’t want to have to slide.”

A year after playing in 165 games, Wills managed to play in only 134 contests in ’63. He established new career highs with a .302 BA and .355 OBP and led the majors again with 40 stolen bases, but he was also caught 19 times, the most in MLB. Still, thanks to the first of four consecutive brilliant campaigns by Sandy Koufax (25-5, 1.88 ERA), the Dodgers won 99 games and the N.L. pennant. Although Wills hit just .133 (with one SB) in the Fall Classic, the Dodgers swept the New York Yankees in 4 games.

As a stolen base artist, Wills had a better campaign in 1964 (53 SB, 17 CS), but he only hit .275 (.318 OBP) and scored 81 runs in 158 games. In addition, the Dodgers offense overall was lackluster (.250/.305/.340), and the team won just 80 games.

Wills had the second-best season of his career in 1965, helping the Dodgers back to the World Series as a 97-win team. Playing in 158 games, Wills didn’t improve much at the plate (hitting .286 with a .330 OBP), but he nearly matched his ’62 baserunning prowess. He easily led Major League Baseball with 94 stolen bases (although, in this campaign, he also was caught stealing 31 times, for a 75% success rate). Unfortunately, because that the Dodgers lacked top RBI men (with Ron Fairly driving in the most with 70 ribbies), Wills scored just 92 runs despite all of the steals.

In the 1965 Fall Classic, the Dodgers faced off against the Minnesota Twins. Three times Koufax matched up against the Twins’ Jim Kaat, and twice Koufax got the better of his fellow lefty, helping Los Angeles to a 7-game series win. Although he didn’t have any signature moments, Wills had an excellent World Series, hitting .367 with 3 RBI, 3 Runs, and 3 SB.

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After the season, Wills finished 3rd in the N.L. MVP voting, behind Mays and Koufax.

Until his return in ’69, 1966 was the last season for Wills with the Dodgers and also the last of Koufax’s brilliant career. Playing in 143 games, Wills hit .273 and stole 38 bases, but was caught stealing 24 times and scored just 60 runs. For the first time since 1959, Wills didn’t lead the N.L. in steals (finishing third behind future Hall of Famer Lou Brock and Sonny Jackson).

Thanks mainly to Koufax (27-9, 1.73 ERA), the Dodgers did win another N.L. pennant but were swept in the World Series by the Baltimore Orioles, with Wills going just 1-for-13 (.077) in his final Fall Classic.

After the season, Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley organized a postseason goodwill trip to Japan. Wills went reluctantly but then skipped out after a few games, choosing instead to vacation in Hawaii and enjoy one of his favorite hobbies, playing the banjo (with Don Ho and Sammy Davis Jr.). O’Malley wasn’t pleased and, on December 1st, traded Wills to the Pittsburgh Pirates for infielders Bob Bailey and Gene Michael (the future manager and General Manager for the Yankees).

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1967-68: Maury Wills with the Pittsburgh Pirates

Wills loved Los Angeles and wasn’t happy about the trade to Pittsburgh, but that was the hand he was dealt. Given that Koufax had retired, the Pirates seemed to be a better bet to win the N.L. pennant in 1967 than the Dodgers. The Bucs had won 90 or more games in 1965 and ’66 and had a strong core of three future Hall of Famers (Roberto Clemente, Willie Stargell, and defensive whiz Bill Mazeroski). Wills moved to third base because the Pirates already had a Gold Glove-winning double-play duo (Mazeroski and shortstop Gene Alley).

Ultimately, the Pirates were merely average in Wills’ two campaigns, winning 81 games in ’67 and 82 in ’68. Wills was solid, if not superb, with the Bucs.

• 1967: .302 BA, .334 OBP, 92 Runs, 29 SB, 10 CS
• 1968: .278 BA, .326 OBP, 76 Runs, 52 SB, 21 CS

Wills’ stolen base totals in ’67 and ’68 were the second-best in the league each year (behind Brock), although his 21 CS were the most in the league in ’68.

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1969-72: Montreal and a Return to La-La Land

After the ’68 season, Major League Baseball welcomed four new franchises into the league. The newly founded Montreal Expos selected the 35-year-old Wills as its 11th pick in the expansion draft.

As it has often been in the history of MLB expansion, the Expos were awful, with only one other star player besides Wills (right fielder Rusty Staub). Playing for manager Gene Mauch, Wills was back at shortstop.

The highlight of the season was Opening Day at Shea Stadium in New York. Wills went 3-for-6 with 2 doubles, 2 runs scored, and a stolen base: the Expos won the first game in the franchise’s history by an 11-10 score. But it was all downhill from there. At the end of May, Les Expos were 11-32. Wills was a big part of that failure: he hit .186 in his first 42 games with Montreal.

Unhappy with the team and his play, Wills briefly asked to be put on the voluntary retired list at the beginning of June before changing his mind. He actually hit .500 in his last five games with the Expos, but it was clear that Maury and Montreal weren’t a good fit. On June 11th, Expos General Manager Jim Fanning made Wills a very happy man by trading (with Manny Mota) back to the Dodgers in exchange for Fairly and utility infielder Paul Popovich.

Wills, rejuvenated and happy, hit .297 for the balance of the campaign while stealing 25 bases (for a total of 40 combined with the 15 bags swiped in Montreal). In 1970, Wills hit .270 (.333 OBP) in 132 games; he stole 28 bases and scored 77 runs.

Playing in the newly created N.L. West, Los Angeles wasn’t in contention in either 1969 or 1970 but was in a pennant race with the Giants until the end of the 1971 season. The Dodgers added a badly needed power bat (Dick Allen) for the ’71 campaign, helping the team to 89 wins, putting them just one game behind the Giants in the West. In this pennant-race campaign, Wills, now 38 years old, hit .281 (.323 OBP). He only stole 15 bags but still scored 73 runs. Strangely, this merely average campaign was good enough to get Wills a 6th place finish in the MVP vote.

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The 1971 season was Wills’ last as a regular player. The Dodgers had a 23-year-old replacement ready to go in 1972, Bill Russell. As a result, Wills only played in 71 games in ’72 in a backup role. He hit just .129 with one steal and 16 runs in 152 plate appearances. He was released at the end of the season, a few weeks after his 40th birthday.

Manager Maury Wills

Wills spent five years (1973-77) as a color analyst for NBC Sports in his post-playing days. He also managed in the Mexican Pacific League (a winter league) and boldly claimed in his book How to Steal a Pennant that he could take a last-place club and turn them into champions in four years.

In August 1980, a lousy team decided to take Maury at his word. Seattle Mariners President Dan O’Brien decided to hire Wills to replace the fired Darrell Johnson. As a result, he became just the third African-American to hold a managerial job in Major League Baseball (after Frank Robinson and Larry Doby).

The Mariners were 39-65 (.375) when Wills took over. Unfortunately, things didn’t get better right away; the M’s lost 10 of the first 12 games with Wills as their skipper. After that, the team enjoyed a relatively positive stretch in which they won 18 out of 40 games, which featured a 6-game winning streak and two walk-off wins in September. Unfortunately, the season ended on a sour note with 8 consecutive losses. Overall, the team went 20-38 under Wills.

Seattle got off to a brutal start in 1981 (going 6-18), and Wills was summarily dismissed, replaced by Rene Lachemann. Critics were harsh.

“Maury Wills was neither just another manager nor was he an outstanding one, though he had waited and begged for virtually half of his adult life to become one… He made unconscionable strategic mistakes, third-grade, sandlot mistakes. And he compounded his mistakes by claiming to know all or by blaming someone else. Maury Wills might have been spared the gallows, even with his record, had it not been for all the other things… But there were too many other things, none of which the devil made him do.”

— Steve Rudman (Seattle Post-Intelligencer, May 11, 1981)

In this column, Rudman documented the “other things”: calling for a relief pitcher when nobody had warmed up, lineup mistakes, using his only left-handed reliever as a pinch-runner, holding up a game for 10 minutes while searching for a pinch-hitter, and leaving a spring training game in the 6th inning to hop on a plane to California. That’s a small sample from Rudman’s column about Wills’ 82-game managerial career.

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Maury Wills and the BBWAA Ballot

In January 1978, two and a half years before his misadventures as the skipper in Seattle, Maury Wills appeared on the BBWAA ballot for the Hall of Fame for the first time. Wills got 30.3% of the vote, the 12th highest total among the 37 listed candidates. All 11 players who got more votes than Wills would be granted plaques in Cooperstown in the following 35 years, including Gil Hodges, who has got vastly more BBWAA votes without getting into the Hall of Fame than any player in baseball history until he finally made it last December.

Anyway, given that the BBWAA writers have always been limited to selecting a maximum of 10 names and that most ballots have had plenty of worthy candidates, 30.3% is quite respectable as a first-ballot showing. I’m pretty confident that nobody knew this at the time, but, as of 1978, every first-ballot candidate who had gotten at least 30% in the previous 42 years of the voting wound up in the Hall of Fame eventually, either via the BBWAA or, more often, via the Veterans Committee. Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Murray (a strong supporter of Wills’ Hall of Fame candidacy) noticed the dichotomy.

“To get into the Baseball Writers’ wing of the Hall of Fame, you better be Babe Ruth. Or better. To get in the veterans’ wing, all you have to be in a crony… It should be pointed out, Maury Wills set his records before the advent of carpeted ballparks… The baseball writers are sometimes loathe to reward a guy for a single, incandescent, virtuoso performance over one season. They prefer a guy who keeps doing a predictable thing over and over again.”

— Jim Murray (Los Angeles Times, January 20, 1978)

Wills’ vote share improved to 38.3% in 1979, which was when another shortstop (Luis Aparicio) appeared on the ballot for the first time. The 9-time Gold Glove Award winner (who also had 11 seasons as an All-Star) finished further back at 27.8%.

In the next few years, Wills and Aparicio made an incremental improvement on the ballot but not much. Then, in 1982, Hank Aaron and Frank Robinson became eligible for the first time, and many candidates suffered in comparison. Wills’ vote share fell from 40.6% in 1981 to 21.9% in ’82. Interestingly, Aparicio’s share of the vote improved from 36.9% to 41.9%. One influential writer (a future Spink Award winner) explained it at the time:

“Aparicio — not Maury Wills, as many have been led to believe — revolutionized the game when he brought back the stolen base as a weapon in the late ’50s. When Aparicio led the 1959 ‘Go Go’ White Sox to the franchise’s first pennant in 40 years by stealing 56 bases, he was the first American Leaguer since 1944 to steal 50 or more bases in a season. At that point, the last National Leaguer who stole 50 or more bases did it in 1923.”

— Bill Madden (New York Daily News, January 14, 1982)

As it turned out, Aparicio would surge on the ballot in the following two years and was the top vote-getter (84.6%) on the 1984 ballot, getting a plaque in Cooperstown with Harmon Killebrew and Wills’ former teammate in Los Angeles, Don Drysdale.

In the meantime, perhaps also due to his arrest for cocaine possession in late 1983, Wills never even reached 30% again. He topped out at 29.2% in 1986 and finished his 15 years on the BBWAA ballot at 25.6% in 1992.

Maury Wills and Luis Aparicio

Before getting to the case for/against Maury Wills for the Hall of Fame, let’s briefly explore what Madden wrote about the two shortstops nearly 40 years ago whose teams, ironically, faced off against each other in the 1959 World Series. Part of the basic Hall of Fame case for Wills is that he “revolutionized” the stolen base game, but Madden gave that credit to the slick-fielding Venezuelan Aparicio.

Wills’ first big stolen base season was in 1960 when he swiped 50 bags. Aparicio had already done this in 1959 (with 56 SB, which led the majors). Even in 1960, Wills’ 50 steals were a tick behind Aparicio’s 51 for the overall MLB lead. Little Luis outdid Wills in 1961 as well, swiping 53 bags compared to Maury’s 35.

It was in 1962, of course, that Wills had his monster campaign with 104 stolen bases and won the MVP and, after that, was credited as the man who revitalized the stolen base game. But, as we’ve seen (and Madden saw 40 years ago), Aparicio beat him to the punch. Overall, Aparicio led the A.L. in stolen bases a whopping nine times, compared to the six times that Wills led the N.L.

Next, let’s look at the career record:

• Luis Aparicio: 506 SB, 136 CS (78.8%)
• Maury Wills: 586 SB, 208 CS (73.8%)

It’s hard to conclude that Wills was a better base-stealer than Aparicio. And, when it comes to the Hall of Fame, Luis also won 9 Gold Gloves (compared to Maury’s 2). Today’s metrics back up the contemporary rewards; Aparicio’s defensive metrics are vastly superior. This is why Baseball-Reference credits Aparicio with a 55.8 career WAR, compared to Wills’ relatively low 39.6.

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Clearly, it’s a bit of a stretch to say that Wills was solely responsible for “revolutionizing” the stolen base game. A “co-revolutionary,” perhaps, but that’s a challenging way to make a Hall of Fame argument. Other factors must be considered to make the case.

The Hall of Fame Case for and against Maury Wills

The Hall of Fame case for Maury Wills is relatively basic:

1. He was at the forefront of the change in the game in which runners terrorized opposing pitchers by running wild on the basepaths, as we’ve discussed.
2. He had an extraordinary MVP campaign in 1962 when he broke Ty Cobb’s modern record with 104 stolen bases.
3. When he retired at the end of the 1972 season, Wills’ 586 career stolen bases were the 5th most in the modern game (1901 and beyond), behind Ty Cobb, Eddie Collins, Max Carey, and Honus Wagner. Moreover, his 586 SB were, at the time, the most for any player who had debuted in the previous 60 years.
4. He led the N.L. in stolen bases six times.
5. He stole those 586 bags as a 2-time Gold Glove winner at shortstop while also accumulating 2,134 career hits, a high total for a shortstop.
6. He was a member of three teams that won the World Series.

Adding together all of these points in favor, Wills achieved 104 points on the Bill James “Hall of Fame” monitor, a ranking system the sabermetric pioneer created in the 1980s to determine whether a player would (not should) make it into Cooperstown. On that scale, 100 points designate a “likely” Hall of Famer.

While researching this piece, I primarily encountered arguments #1 and #2. There was a prevailing narrative that he was in some way the progenitor of the stolen base movement, even though, as we’ve seen, Aparicio beat him to the punch by a year.

Counterpoint Arguments

Here are some rebuttals to the above six arguments in favor:

1. We’ve already discussed this. Wills was undoubtedly one of the first two players to steal bases in significant numbers. Is that worth a spot in the Hall? I don’t think so, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
2. The 1962 MVP season is a significant point in favor, but plenty of players have had MVP seasons (or two) who don’t have plaques in Cooperstown. More on 1962 is still to come.
3. Yes, he had the 5th most steals in the modern game as of 1972, but he was surpassed in just the next 15 years by Lou Brock, Rickey Henderson, Joe Morgan, and Bert Campaneris. Today, he has merely the 15th most SB since 1901.
4. OK, he led the league in stolen bases six times, but he also led the league in times caught stealing seven times.
5. In the modern era, Wills’ career total of over 2,000 hits and over 500 SB (for a shortstop) has been matched by Ozzie Smith, Aparicio, Campaneris, and Jose Reyes.
6. Being a shortstop on teams that won 3 World Series titles is an excellent credential but not a unique one. As a shortstop, Campaneris matches that credential as well. Additionally, Wills was a rookie in 1959 when he got his first ring. His contribution was a slash line of .260/.298/.298 (55 OPS+) and a WAR of -0.2.

Was Maury Wills the Best Shortstop Candidate for the Golden Days Ballot?

The question I just posed is both relevant and somewhat irrelevant at the same time. Allow me to explain. The Golden Days ballot last December contained the names of ten Hall of Fame candidates whose primary impact on baseball was from 1950-69. Since Wills got 9 out of 16 votes on the 2015 ballot, he was an easy call to appear on last year’s ballot. But is he the best shortstop candidate from this era? I say the question is also somewhat irrelevant because Wills was competing against players from other positions.

Still, if Wills weren’t even the best shortstop candidate, it would be hard to choose him over some of the other players on last December’s ballot: Dick Allen, Jim Kaat, Tony Oliva, Minnie Minoso, Gil Hodges, and Ken Boyer.

So, let’s look at Wills and some other shortstops who spent most of their careers in the 1950s or ’60s.

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Take a close look at these numbers. Allow your brain to ponder them for a moment. Besides the massive advantage in stolen bases, are the rest of the numbers more compelling than those posted by Jim Fregosi, Al Dark, or Dick Groat?

Wills indeed won an MVP, but so did Groat. (Spoiler alert. You can look it up. Willie Mays also deserved to win the MVP in 1960, the year Groat won). Yes, it’s true that Wills won three World Series titles, but Groat won two; Dark won one.

Fregosi and Dark also have the advantage of having meaningful careers as MLB managers. Dark won the 1974 World Series with Oakland, Fregosi the 1993 pennant with Philadelphia.

None of these other shortstops had the “magic year” and signature accomplishment of the 104 bases swiped by Wills in 1962. Still, the totality of their career accomplishments are on par or superior.

The point is this: if it’s hard to separate Wills from these other shortstops (it’s hard for me, maybe not for you, the reader), then how would you elevate him above the other candidates on the 2022 Golden Days ballot, all of whom had stronger statistical resumes?

How Good Was Maury Wills’ 1962 Campaign?

OK, now that I’ve popped the Maury Wills Hall of Fame balloon by comparing his career to those of other shortstops for the era, let’s focus in more detail on the one thing he has that the others don’t. While those other shortstops had similar or superior career value, none did have that “magic year.”

Earlier in the piece, I noted that the 1962 MVP campaign of Wills represented arguably the best baserunning season in the history of baseball. If that statement can be documented to be reasonably accurate, it’s a significant feather in Maury’s potential Cooperstown cap.

Although sabermetrics, and Wins Above Replacement (WAR) in particular, didn’t exist when Wills played, I’m going to use it here to make the case that Wills may very well have been more valuable on the bases in 1962 than any other player in any season in baseball history. In my not always humble opinion, the baserunning component of WAR (Rbaser) is one of the most reliably accurate measurements that go into the overall calculation. It’s based on easily measurable events: besides stolen bases and times caught stealing, it encompasses the percentage of extra bases taken, such as going 1st to 3rd on a single, and the number of times a player is thrown out on the basepaths (OOB).

Let’s take a look at some of the best and most famous baserunning seasons in baseball history. Of course, the most notable are those with the highest stolen base totals. The best, however, include players who had less robust stolen base totals but had better percentages when it comes to SB%, XBT% (percentage of times taking an extra base), OOB (times thrown out on the basepaths, not including times caught stealing, pickoffs, or force plays).

So, on this graphic, you’ll see all seasons in which a player stole 100 or more bases and the top 6 seasons in Rbaser, the baserunning component of WAR (which includes SB%, XBT%, and OOB).

WP Table Builder

If you look at the parts, you can see why Maury’s historic 1962 campaign was so phenomenal from a baserunning standpoint. Besides his 104 steals, he had an extraordinarily high success rate (88.9%), took a lot of extra bases when his teammates got hits (XBT%), and was rarely thrown out on the basepaths. Simply put, he added far more value on the bases than Lou Brock did in 1974, when he swiped 118 bags, or than Rickey Henderson did in 1982, when he stole 130. Brock and Henderson negated too many of their steals by being caught in other attempts.

By the way, being caught stealing too many times is a point NOT in favor of Wills for Cooperstown since his career success rate is just 73.8%. Generally, if a player does not succeed in at least 75% of his stolen bases attempts, the times caught stealing negate all of the value of the bases swiped.

Another Note: Ty Cobb’s 1915 campaign is not on the list above. Some of these metrics only go back to 1951. Either way, we know that, while he stole 96 bases in 1915, he was caught stealing 38 times, so his “Rbaser” (7.6) is much lower than most of those shown on this list. Cobb’s 1915 season was still pretty darned spectacular, however. He slashed .369/.486/.487, which gave him a 185 OPS+ and 9.5 WAR.

The 1962 N.L. MVP Vote

A cornerstone piece of the Hall of Fame resume for Maury Wills is that he was an MVP winner. As we’ve shown, he had a remarkable season on the bases. But, looking back, he wasn’t the right choice for the N.L. MVP. Take a look at the numbers of some of the other top candidates in comparison.

WP Table Builder

You don’t have to believe in WAR to see plainly that Willie Mays, Frank Robinson, and Hank Aaron (all-time “inner circle” Hall of Famers) had superior campaigns, and Maury’s teammate (Tommy Davis) was pretty darned great as well (with a slightly lower WAR because of poor defensive metrics). Using Mays as the prime example, it’s true that Wills stole 86 more bases. That’s a lot. But Mays managed to score the same number of runs (130) while driving in 93 more.

In real life, here’s how they finished in the balloting:

• Maury Wills: 209 points (8 first-place votes)
• Willie Mays: 202 points (7 first-place votes)
• Tommy Davis: 175 points (3 first-place votes)
• Frank Robinson: 164 points (2 first-place votes)

A plurality of the voters saw a new, bright, shiny object (104 steals) and decided that those stolen bags trumped the production of players who scored more or just as many runs but also drove in 88 to 105 more.

The Career Value of Maury Wills without 1962

One final point about the “big season.” If you have a candidate with a historic season on his resume (as we have with Wills), it’s helpful to look at the rest of their career. Imagine that the big season didn’t exist. Would that player still be a worthy Hall of Fame candidate? If the answer is “yes” or “it’s close,” then the big season should push them over the finish line. So, here are Wills’ career statistics without the 1962 campaign:

• .279 BA/.328 OBP/.327 SLG
• 14 HR, 410 RBI
• 1,926 Hits, 937 Runs
• 482 SB, 195 CS (71.1%)
• 33.6 WAR

Hmmm. Even when accounting for the fact that shortstop is a premium position, those don’t look Hall of Fame-worthy to me, and it’s not close. Especially troubling is that Wills only succeeded in stealing bases at a 71% clip in the rest of his career. According to the baserunning component of WAR (Rbaser), Wills got 34% of his career value as a baserunner in that one campaign. Also, according to Rbaser, Wills was the 26th most prolific baserunner in MLB history. Eleven players with a higher Rbaser aren’t in Cooperstown, including Maury’s longtime teammate with the Dodgers, Willie Davis.

Baseball-Reference provides stolen base success data (SB%) going back to 1951. During the last 71 years, there have been 37 players who have stolen at least 400 bases. Wills’ career 73.8% rate of SB success is 31st out of 37. If you strip out his successful 1962 campaign, his 71.1% success rate is 35th out of 37.

Conclusion

When I think about Maury Wills as a Hall of Fame candidate, I find his resume, in many ways, similar to the resume of Roger Maris, who broke Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record when he hit 61 taters in 1961. Both Maris and Wills had the “big season,” but, on balance, the totality of their careers feel lacking. If Wills were to be elected to Cooperstown in the future, I would be OK with it. It would be easy to write the text on his plaque. But I’m not an advocate.

If the “big season” were enough to enter the Hall of Fame, you’d have to elect Maris. You’d have to elect Dwight Gooden, who had arguably the best pitching season of the last 100 years. Generally speaking, there should be two paths to Cooperstown: career value or peak value. Wills didn’t have either. OK, I guess you could argue that he had peak value as the premier base-stealer in baseball from 1960-69, but he was also the premier “getting caught stealing” player in the decade and, by WAR, just the 22nd best player. There are seven other players from 1960-69 with a higher WAR who aren’t in the Hall of Fame (Norm Cash, Vada Pinson, Johnny Callison, Curt Flood, Boyer, Fregosi, and Felipe Alou).

And, as a hitter, Wills was substandard. By OPS+, he was 93rd out of 127 (for players in the 1960s with at least 3,000 plate appearances). And that’s not only comparing him to the likes of Aaron, Mays, and Robinson. His OPS+ of 92 from 1960-69 is just the 7th best among shortstops, behind Fregosi, Dick McAuliffe, Dennis Menke, Eddie Bressoud, Campaneris, and Ron Hansen.

I have argued elsewhere on this site that, sometimes, a player’s career transcends his statistics. I believe that passionately. It’s the Hall of Fame, not the Hall of WAR. But I don’t see it here. Without the MVP title of 1962, would Wills even be considered for Cooperstown? I don’t think so. Many of you will disagree. That’s what’s great about the Hall of Fame debates.

“I got more people who are kind of obsessing over it, just to use a word, maybe that’s not the proper word, more than I am, really. I’m so grateful for the life I’ve had, been given. The career that I’ve been given. If I get into the Hall of Fame, fine, but if I don’t, god has been so good to me.”

— Maury Wills (Washington Post, April 17, 2015)

RIP Maury. Thanks for reading.

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