Many Mets fans have fervently hoped for years that Gil Hodges would gain induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Now it turns out that by being denied access, the honor is all his.
After yesterday's newly rejiggered Veterans Committee subcommittee election results were announced, we learned a plaque will hang in Cooperstown for Walter O'Malley. This is who the Hall of Fame sees fit to deify: not someone who brought joy and grace and runs batted in by the boatload to the loyal borough of Brooklyn, but someone who packed up the plantation and shipped it to Los Angeles.
Walter O'Malley is a Hall of Famer like the Ayatollah was Time's Man of the Year. His impact was undeniable, but that's Nook of Notoriety stuff, not the hallowed Hall we spend so many hours idealizing and so many more hours figuring out how to get to without hitting a deer or anything. You don't schlep through dark roads and miles of highway anxiety to stare at a plaque devoted to a man who destroyed so much collective and individual happiness. If he bested Brooklynites with a big bat like Musial's or a live arm like Spahn's, OK, that's fair, that's baseball. But he did it with an airplane and a fleet of moving vans.
That's just wrong.
Pete Hamill is the spokesman for the half-century of heartbreak, anguish and disgust that defines the post-1957 Brooklyn Dodgers fan, and in today's Daily News he nails most magnificently the injustice of Walter O'Malley's enshrinement in Cooperstown:
For some of those people who roared and cheered, the hurt would last a lifetime. Many felt like naïve fools. Baseball wasn't a secular religion after all. It was a business, as cold as any business. That disillusion was permanent.
If O'Malley made money on the West Coast, then he got his reward. He got richer. If baseball grew more lucrative because it forged a footprint on the Pacific Coast, then O'Malley's peers and business descendants have already collected their honor. They got richer. That's worthy of praise on some level, some ledger somewhere. Just not in the Baseball Hall of Fame, an institution I once wished would accept Gil Hodges but I now understand is no longer worthy of association with a truly great icon of baseball.
The Veterans Committee subcommittee on executives also elected Bowie Kuhn yesterday, proving there is hope for errand boys everywhere.
Hi Greg,
Let's dismiss, for the time being, the pain he and Robert Moses caused Brooklyn. Walter O'Malley still does not hold the credentials of a maverick owner who changed the face of baseball.
He was no visionary and the face of baseball was changed not by him but because of him. O'Malley's only concern was to avoid the revenue loss projected if his club stayed at Ebbets Field and not that of paving the way of major league baseball's expansion to the west . He left Brooklyn because he could not get the location he wanted for a new stadium.
True, he was the first since Jacob Ruppert in 1923 to privately finance a new baseball arena and Dodger Stadium was indeed light-years ahead of anything built before it's time. But that doesn't qualify election to the Hall, either. What are his other credentials?
– A contract dispute with Andy Messersmith that led to the challenge of the reserve clause in 1975?
– No televising Dodger games except for the nine played in San Francisco (and introducing the concept of pay-TV for Dodger games in 1964)?
– Refusing to negotiate jointly with Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale during their 1966 joint-holdout?
– Punishing Maury Wills by trading him to Pittsburgh in 1967 because he jumped ship on a post-season tour of Japan?
Bad choice.
I stopping gifting the HOF with my annual donation when they, for the final time of his storied life, deemed Buck O'Neil unworthy of induction after using him to promote the game for all those years. Disgusting. Watching him talk about it was one of the most heartbreaking things I've ever witnessed. I don't want to be in any club that won't have the likes of him as a member.
The HOF once held my awe. Now… notsomuch. Yeah, I still love being able to view the amazing baseball artifacts and yeah, I'll still make the trek(s?) when my two main men (Maddux and Piazza, if you're keeping score) are inducted. But I'll do it with a heavy heart, because their plaques will no longer mean to me what they once did.
Um, I “stopped.” Greg, get us an “edit post” function! I'm obviously way too stupid and lazy to post properly without one!
Personally, I lost a good chunk of my dwindling respect for the Hall when its President, former Ronald Reagan aide Dale Pestroskey, chose to disinvite lefty actors Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon from a planned “Bull Durham” 15th Anniversary celebration a few years back.
Most of what was left slipped away with the snubbing of Buck, and I think I'm about all out today. Disgraceful.
Nonetheless, I usually feel compelled to remind (as, sadly, the Hall also does when its enshrinement decisions are criticized) that the institution itself doesn't make the choice as to who joins. Those calls are made by the writers (for the marquee players) or various other committees set up for that purpose, the Veteran's Committee in this case.
That being said, anybody at the Hall who didn't see today's travesty coming as a direct result of the “rejiggering” was a fool. They handed the fox the keys to the henhouse. That, perhaps, is the greatest failing of the stewards of our game's history.
No, wait. Their greatest failing was politicizing “Bull Durham” for a tawdry high-five from George W. Bush. As Robbins brilliantly said at the time, “Long live democracy, free speech and the '69 Mets — all improbable, glorious miracles that I have always believed in.”
I found that whole incident unsavory. Personally, I observed the 15th anniversary of “Bull Durham” in my home, with family and a few close friends as I believe it was meant to be observed.
The fact that Marvin Miller did not get in is an even bigger travesty, imo.
F the Hall of Fame, and that GOP lackey Dale Pestroskey.
(getting off my political and union soapbox now.)
Gil's wife (Joan I think her name is) spoke at Opening Day of my Little League once. She laid down a pretty good case, in my young eyes, for Gil's induction. It was about then that I realize the HoF wasn't all it's cracked up to be. Perhaps, as you suggest, Greg, it's fitting that traitorous dog O'Malley was inducted. They deserve each other, him and the Hall.
At least Gil's immortal baseball spirit won't have to be associated with that lame excuse for a human being.
Thank God for 1955 or Brooklyn really would be an endless sea of baseball disappointment.
Does anybody know who was in this recent committee that helped place Barney Dreyfuss in the Hall after all these years? How many people out there actually who he is!.Don't get me wrong- he's not a terrible choice. But if your going back that far, there is a few other guys in need of some serious consideration..
Gil not getting a sniff really is sad..
Rich
The 15th anniversary of “Bull Durham” was overcommercialized as it was.
That said, it was a bush (lower-case) move by the Hall.
The Miller snub was ridiculous in its own right, but asking a committee largely made up owners to vote in the Players Association mastermind was like asking Scratchy to vote Itchy into the Cat Hall of Fame.
The committee for this particular election:
Monte Irvin and Harmon Killebrew; former Yankee player and American League president Bobby Brown; John Harringon, formerly of the Red Sox; current executives Jerry Bell (Twins), Bill DeWitt (Cardinals), Bill Giles (Phillies), David Glass (Royals), and Andy MacPhail (Orioles); and media members Paul Hagen (Philadelphia Daily News), Rick Hummel (St. Louis Post-Dispatch), and Hal McCoy (Dayton Daily News).
One can only hope the hall has learned its lesson. With the 20th anniversary of “Major League” looming in 2009, I'd hate to see any shoddy treatment befall the great Corbin Bernsen.
O'Malley did, albeit inadvertently, make baseball a truly national game. And he did approve and preside over the breaking of the color barrier. And to be honest, Moses had a lot more to do with him leaving than people blame him for; and according to my Dad, no one was going to Ebbets anymore.
But for this, and this reason alone, Walter O'Malley is A-OK and a hall of famer in my book: his desertion begat the Mets. Without that move, all of us would be Dodger fans, or Giants fans, or maybe even a couple of us (ick) Yankee fans. And we may very well have been content with this, as it's impossible to miss something that never existed. But what we would have been deprived of: The ol' Perfesser, the Miracle, Ya Gotta Believe, Game 6, grand slam single, 9/21/01, double plays at home… Seaver, Koosman, Doc, Straw, Mex, Kid, Edgardo, Mike, Jose, David – just names from other teams. That is a world I don't want to live in. So, acknowledging he might have broken a couple of hearts in '57, I say thank you, Walter O'Malley; we are forever in your debt as Met fans.
Now, Mr. Hodges still being excluded? A travesty.
Then to honor O'Malley, the Mets should build a shrine to the Dodgers in Queens.
Oh wait…
I have a copy of “Mets Magazine” on my guest table in the office, a coworker who knows nothing about baseball was thumbing through it. When he got to the Citi Field section, he said “Wow, this looks really neat and retro.” I made the mistake of telling him it is modeled after Ebbets, and he was baffled: “Wait, why would they model it after some other team's stadium? And why the Jackie Robinson rotunda if he never played for them?” I tried to explain how the owner was a Dodgers fan growing up, and even I realized none of this made sense. I told him “This is the life of the Met fan. It's just how we do things, you get used to it eventually”.
I think you just have to grateful the place isn't modeled after Yankee Stadium with a “Babe Ruth Rotunda.”
Not that it would surprise anyone.
Yes, but what a thoughtfully stocked guest table in KF's office!
A handsome assortment of yearbooks, Mets magazine and (until recently) the “Welcome to Rip City” SI. Complements the large Mets banner on the wall nicely. I like to make my fellow fans comfortable.
Speaking of Yankee Stadium, I saw an eye-opening line in an article about naming rights and co-branding. They mentioned our new stadium, and how weak it is that it will be named after a bank, no longer honoring Bill Shea. Said that the Yankees were spared that indignity, as the city granted them a $10 million annual rent discount specifically so they wouldn't have to sully their blessed image with corporate sponsorship.
I wish I had saved the link. If this is true, what an outrage. It's not enough they received more public money than did the Mets, we all have to chip in for this now, too?
Found this from the Washington Post in October:
Starting in 2009, the New York Mets will play in the new Citi Field, ditching the old Shea Stadium name in exchange for $400 million over 20 years from Citibank. The Yankees' new stadium will be named, oddly enough, Yankee Stadium, but only because the city reduced the annual rent from $10 million to $10 to keep corporate sponsors out.
Nice negotiating by somebody.