Jim Leyland belongs in the Hall of Fame, so what I’m about to write is not about Leyland’s Cooperstown worthiness.

But I do think the Contemporary Baseball Era Committee got it wrong when it moved Leyland ahead of Davey Johnson and Lou Piniella. Leyland was the only candidate of eight under consideration who received the necessary 12 votes of the 16 committee members who were charged with making determinations on a ballot of managers, executives and umpires whose primary contributions to the game came since 1980.

When Joe Torre was en route to winning his first World Series as a manager in 1996, I wrote a column that if he did get that championship he should be elected to the Hall of Fame. I thought there should have been a category for someone’s baseball life, and I believed that when you combined Torre’s borderline Hall career with managing a championship team, the result, in total, was a Hall of Fame life.

Torre ultimately made that argument inconsequential by piloting four titles while with the Yankees to easily get elected to the Hall.