By Yours Truly
http://throneberryfields.com/2017/12/11/is-gil-hodges-really-shy-of-being-a-hall-of-famer/
Gil Hodges in the Ebbets Field batting cage . . .How beloved and respected was Gil Hodges during his playing career? Enough that when he sank into a
ferocious batting slump crossing the end of the 1952 season and the beginning of the 1953 season, the
entire borough of Brooklyn, if not all New York City, took up prayers for him. A devout Roman Catholic,
Hodges was genuinely touched that even non-Catholic churches joined the prayer chain.
The thing that most people hear about that one is that a priest stood in a
Brooklyn pulpit that Sunday and said, “It’s too hot for a sermon. Just go
home and say a prayer for Gil Hodges.†Well, I know that I’ll never forget
that, but also I won’t forget the hundreds of people who sent me letters,
telegrams, and postcards during that World Series. There wasn’t a single
nasty message. Everybody tried to say something nice. It had a tremendous
effect on my morale, if not my batting average.
—Gil Hodges.
Maybe the one character flaw Hodges ever had was a pronounced inability to manage stress. Roger
Kahn in
The Boys of Summer has described Hodges’s lifelong propensity to suck it down, stand in,
and take it, but it took its toll. Teammates witnessed his hands shaking violently when trying nothing
more demanding than lighting a cigarette, a seeming anomaly in a man whose physical strength
was considered singular.
Did you hear what happened when Hodges landed in Okinawa? The Japs surrendered. So did half the
Marines. went one joke about Hodges’s strength.
You know what happens when big Gil squeezes that
bat? Instant sawdust. went another. Once, when he managed the second Washington Senators, he
announced hundred-dollar fines for four players he said violated the team curfew, saying he expected
to see $400 in a cigar box on his desk later that day. He opened the box and found $700.
“[H]e knew how weak physical strength could be,†Kahn wrote.
He had learned that watching his father die one part at a time . . . [H]e drove
himself to move ahead and drove himself to fight down fear, and what can give
a strong athletic man a frightful heart attack at forty-four is the war he wages
within himself, even if he is soft-voiced, like Hodges, and blankets the conflict
under casual remarks, a hard blank look, bantering ways, and the faint, almost
casual smile.
A year after that heart attack, Hodges managed the 1969 Mets to their improbable World Series conquest.
Asked to explain it in the immediate aftermath of the clinching Game Five, Hodges smiled a little more
than casually, spread his hands, and replied, “Can’t be done.†Three years later, a second heart attack
killed him during spring training. At 47.
It’s entirely possible that, with all due respect to Dale Murphy and his supporters, Hodges is the most
popular former player who isn’t in the Hall of Fame. He achieved 60+ percent of the Baseball Writers
Association of America vote twice during his eligibility and missed getting in by way of the Veterans
Committee by a single vote in 1993, when (it was alleged) Ted Williams refused to sanction ailing Roy
Campanella’s vote by telephone.
Hodges never got that close again. He came up for election on the Golden Era Committee ballot three
years ago; that committee elected nobody, with two players—Dick Allen and Tony Oliva—missing by a
single vote. Hodges, Ken Boyer, Billy Pierce, Luis Tiant, and longtime executive Bob Howsam each
received three votes. They meet again next year, and Hodges could still make a return engagement.
Which doesn’t mean he’s any closer to being elected to the Hall of Fame than he was in 2014. And, as
is the case with such public favourites as Murphy and Don Mattingly, Hodges has a case that, regretfully
enough, brings him home short of being a bona fide Hall of Famer. Like them, Hodges would be a Hall
of Famer if all you needed was character. Unlike them, Hodges’s case wasn’t derailed by injuries, though
he did begin dealing with knee issues in earnest in 1960.
In any fresh review of Hodges’s Hall case, he has two problems going in: a) He’s not the best first
baseman who isn’t in the Hall of Fame. b) Keith Hernandez
is the best first baseman who isn’t in the
Hall of Fame, maybe the best all-around first baseman who ever played the game, and one who
revolutionised how the position is played defensively while he was at it, and Hernandez’s Hall case,
too, was paddywhacked by injuries when he should have had two or even three more seasons to
secure his case.
Hodges was the best first baseman of a time that actually
didn’t produce truly great first basemen.
He won three Gold Gloves and might have won a fourth if the Gloves had been introduced earlier
during his career, and lifetime he was worth 48 runs saved defensively. And he did play on six pennant
winners and two World Series winners as the Dodgers’ regular first baseman.
Hodges may have been beloved, but he was never the best player on his teams. Campanella, Jackie
Robinson, Duke Snider, and Pee Wee Reese were far enough superior players among his Brooklyn
teammates. When the Dodgers went west, Hodges earned a final Gold Glove and finished eighteenth
in the league’s Most Valuable Player voting while playing on a World Series winner that was, arguably,
one of the worst teams ever to win a Series.
He finished his career with 370 home runs, tenth all-time when he retired, but as Jay Jaffe of
Sports
Illustrated points out, he played his absolute prime seasons in the Ebbets Field bandbox while never
finishing higher than fifth among his league’s leaders in OPS, higher than sixth in OPS+, or fifth in
slugging percentage.
Hodges has seven consecutive 100+ runs batted in seasons but never led his league in that category.
He has eleven straight seasons of 22+ home runs including a four-year streak in which he hit 40, 32,
31, and 42, but never led his league in that category, either. From 1949-1957, his 40.9 wins above a
replacement-level player was ninth in the Show and third on the Dodgers, behind Snider’s 58.2 and
Robinson’s 53.0. And his career WAR is 11.4
below the average Hall of Fame first baseman.
How did Hodges finish on the six pennant winners for whom he was a regular player?
1949—Eighth. (3.2.)
1952—Second. (5.5.)
1953—Sixth. (4.5.)
1955—Fifth. (4.4.)
1956—Sixth. (3.5.)
1959—Seventh. (2.8.)
Total—23.9. Average—3.9.
While I was at it, I thought I’d look at Jackie Robinson for 1949-56 (he retired after the 1956 season)
and Duke Snider for the same six as Hodges:
Robinson:
1949—First. (9.6.)
1952—First. (8.5.)
1953—Third. (7.0.)
1955—Eighth. (2.6.)
1956—Fourth. (4.5.)
Total—32.2. Average—6.4.
Snider:
1949—Fifth. (5.2.)
1952—Fourth. (4.6.)
1953—First. (9.3.)
1955—First. (8.6.)
1956—First. (7.6.)
1959—Ninth. (2.3.)
Total—37.6. Average—6.3.
Think about that for a moment. Measured by their wins above a replacement-level player, Duke Snider
was the Dodgers’ best player in half the pennant-winning seasons on which he played as a regular and
one of the five best in two others. Jackie Robinson was the Dodgers’ best player in two and one of the
five best in two more, and overall covering their participation in pennant winners together Duke Snider
was only a sliver behind him.
Gil Hodges, God love and keep him,
was never the absolute best player on six pennant-winning Dodger
teams for which he played as their regular first baseman; he was one of their five best for two of those
seasons and between their sixth and eighth best in four others. Then, what about the seasons in which
Hodges was the Dodgers’ regular first baseman but the Dodgers didn’t win the pennant?
1950—Seventh. (3.5.)
1951—Third. (5.7.)
1954—Second. (6.2.)
1957—Fourth. (4.4.)
1958—Seventh. (1.3.)
Total—21.1. Average—4.2.
Hodges was slightly better in seasons where the Dodgers didn’t win the pennant while he was their
regular first baseman; he was one of the team’s top three players three times, one of their top four
once, and less than one of their top five once.
All the foregoing by itself is
not a bona fide Hall of Fame playing record. Now, what if we marry
Hodges’s above average playing career—he’s a classic case of an above- average player who was
periodically great, and that’s allowing for the two seasons he spent in the Marines in World War II—
to his managing career, as so many including myself have liked doing in the past? After all, he did
bring off the impossible in 1969.
Hodges managed the Senators for five seasons before returning to the Mets (who sent the Senators
pitcher Bill Denehy in return) for 1968. The good news is that the Senators improved in every season
Hodges managed them; they won a few more games under his command each time out.
The bad news is that, through little enough fault of his own, he never managed higher than a sixth-
place team, the finish in his final year in Washington. Except for bombardier Frank Howard, some
superb glove men like Ed Brinkman and Ken McMullen, and the occasional quality pitcher like starter
Pete Richert or relievers Ron Kline and (later) Darold Knowles, Hodges never really had solid
Washington teams.
When he became the Mets’ manager, Hodges took them to a ninth-place 1968, an improvement over
their 1967 season. After the 1969 miracle, he led them to identical third-place National League finishes
with identical 83-79 records. He’d kept them pennant-competitive but unable to stay the full course.
His death in spring 1972 robbed him of the chance to continue leading a pennant-competitive team
who eventually snuck into the National League East championship of 1973 and took the Oakland
threshing machine to a seventh World Series game they damn near won—under Yogi Berra’s
command.
It also stuck Hodges with a .420 winning percentage as a manager lifetime, which tells you something
about death too often being a thief of more than just life itself. Two or three more winning seasons, and
maybe the 1973 pennant and a little more managing the Mets, had he lived, might have flipped it over
just enough to put Hodges a handful of points above .500 as a manager.
Don Drysdale said he couldn’t leave his house for three days upon learning of Hodges’s death; it hurt
too deeply. Jackie Robinson, six months shy of his own premature death, weepingly embraced Gil Hodges,
Jr. at the funeral and told him this was the worst day of his life next to the death of his oldest son. New
York only
led the mourning for Hodges.
I’m not entirely convinced that being the ninth best player of his prime seasons is
really enough to put
Gil Hodges in the Hall of Fame, no matter how popular, beloved, or respected he was (and remains). I’m
not entirely convinced that marrying that to his managing record, even with the Miracle Mets, is
really enough to put him in the Hall of Fame.
But if they ever decide to open up and consecrate a National Baseball Hall of Decency, you can bet
Hodges will go in undebated as part of the charter class.
Asked to explain how the Mets delivered a
1969 miracle, Hodges smiled, spread his
hands, and purred, “Can’t be done.â€----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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