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The key words to the Hodges family, it turned out, were not “Hall of Fame.”
They were “I’m so happy to tell you…”
That’s as far as Jane Forbes Clark, the Baseball Hall of Fame’s Chairman of the Board got in her phone call late Sunday afternoon before Irene Hodges, daughter of legendary Dodgers player and Mets manager Gil Hodges, burst into tears. Loud, lovely tears.
“I just was hysterical,” Irene Hodges said. “I didn’t hear [Clark] for a while.”
Nearly 50 years after his passing, nearly 53 years after the writers contemplated his Cooperstown candidacy for the first time, Hodges finally reached his game’s promised land. In a bit of news that warmed the hearts of baseball fans understandably distressed by the current labor turbulence, Hodges joined three other players (Jim Kaat, Minnie Minoso and Tony Oliva) from the Golden Days Committee ballot and two (Bud Fowler and Buck O’Neill) on the Early Days Committee. Even if the writers elect no one on our ballot — a distinct possibility — the July 24 induction ceremony figures to be hopping.
“We have waited so long for my dad to get this honor,” Irene Hodges said. “Not that he needs it, but we’re so happy for him.
“I can’t explain, because you get kind of numb. You get used to it not really happening, I was excited, I was stressed, but when it happens, it’s just an unbelievable moment.”
After Irene Hodges calmed down, she asked Clark if she wouldn’t mind repeating the information to 95-year-old Joan Hodges, Gil’s widow. The Hodges family will travel en masse to Cooperstown to partake in the events (fingers crossed that Joan can join), and you know that Mets fans of a certain age will be there to thank Gil for leading their 1969 club to its miraculous first title in franchise history.
“I have to tell you, my dad would be so thrilled for all the people — and it’s unbelievable after 50 years that he’s gone — the amount of people that love him and support him,” Irene Hodges said. “My dad would be more thrilled about that than anything, and they’re happy that he’s in.”
When Gil Hodges died suddenly at age 47 on April 2, 1972, shocking the baseball world and forcing the Mets to find an immediate successor as manager (it was Yogi Berra, you know), his name already had appeared on four writers’ ballots. While he registered a significant spike from 40.7 percent to 57.4 percent the year after his passing, he never leapt considerably closer to the requisite 75 percent threshold, topping out at 63.4 percent in his final year of 1983. Then came countless looks by different veterans committees, each one falling short until now, when Hodges, his excellent playing career combining with his brief yet celebrated managing run, eked in by nabbing 12 of the 16 votes, the minimum number for election (and one more than poor Dick Allen, who just fell short with 11).
Art Shamsky, one of Hodges’ ’69 Mets, watched the MLB Network broadcast live and celebrated upon hearing his manager’s name, and you can understand why he hadn’t quite shaken off the long wait for this news.
“His contributions to the game on and off the field, I think, certainly merited this,” Shamsky said, referring his former manager’s election. “I think a lot of people felt that way, and I just don’t know why he didn’t get in before.
“But that’s over with and done. We’re all excited about it.”
Over with and done. Hodges’ first year on the ballot, the Mets won it all. This now officially his last year on the ballot … well, don’t get carried away just yet. You can rest assured that, no matter how much agita the industry’s current powers create, there’ll be one heck of a party, a party such a very long time coming, in upstate New York come July.
Aren’t you happy to be told that?
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