Many Mets fans have fervently hoped [1] for years that Gil Hodges [2] 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 [3] 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 [4]. 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 [5] 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 [6], some ledger somewhere. Just not in the Baseball Hall of Fame, an institution I once wished would accept Gil Hodges [7] 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.