Yastrzemski, Bench to Bring Special Feeling to Cooperstown

Carl Yastrzemski got an early start on Cooperstown, playing here as a teen-ager, but that was nothing like today will be, when the former Boston Red Sox outfielder will be inducted into the baseball Hall of Fame.

Also to be inducted are Johnny Bench and Red Schoendienst.

This is the 50th anniversary of the Hall of Fame, which opened in this upstate New York village of 2,300 on June 12, 1939. Because of the anniversary, and due to the tremendous popularity of Yastrzemski and Bench in the 1960s and ‘70s, tiny Cooperstown will be stretched to the seams for the annual induction ceremonies this afternoon.

A crowd of 20,000, larger than ever before, is expected to attend the enshrinements on the steps of the National Baseball Library. The teams that Yastrzemski and Bench played for, the Red Sox and the Cincinnati Reds, will play an exhibition game here Monday, a block away from the Hall of Fame and Museum. Tickets for Doubleday Field, which seats 9,800, were gone months ago, and a Hall of Fame spokesman said that checks for 50,000 more tickets had to be returned.

Besides the three players, Al Barlick will become the seventh umpire to be inducted. Also being honored are Harry Caray, who will receive the Ford Frick Award for broadcasting, and Bob Hunter, formerly of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, and the late Ray Kelly of the Philadelphia Bulletin, winners of the J.G. Taylor Spink award.

Yastrzemski, who will be 50 next month, came to Cooperstown in the 1950s when his sandlot team from Long Island, N.Y., played for the Babe Ruth League state championship. Yastrzemski got two hits and a teammate hit a disputed home run for a 1-0 victory. The losing pitcher, Dave Giusti, also made it to the big leagues.

Now Yastrzemski is here because of a 23-year career--all with the Red Sox--during which he batted .285 with 3,419 hits, 452 homers and 1,844 runs batted in.

In 1967, when Yastrzemski was the American League’s most valuable player, New Englanders showed up at the World Series with badges that said, “Yaz, Sir, He’s My Baby!” More than two decades later, the love affair still sizzles. Forty buses from the Boston area are bringing Yastrzemski’s fans to Cooperstown.

In baseball, there’s a record for everything, and the Hall of Fame says that this is one for the books, surpassing the 20-plus buses that came from Baltimore in 1983 when Brooks Robinson was inducted.

At the plate and in left field, Yastrzemski was a regal presence, the kind of player who seemed to win games without dirtying his uniform. The 42-year-old Bench, on the other hand, was of the Gas House Gang mold. He scrambled to throw out runners, kept Cincinnati’s pitchers in top form, blocked home plate like a railroad locomotive and hit 389 home runs.

In fact, Bench typifies some of the characters from James Fenimore Cooper, the 19th-Century romanticist. That Cooper marksman “who could hunt flies with a rifle” sounds like Johnny Bench.

Cooper’s father was a judge who founded this town in 1788. The 200th anniversary of the novelist’s birth will be observed here in September.

Bench and Yastrzemski were voted into Cooperstown by the baseball writers in an election earlier this year. Schoendienst was selected by a special veterans’ committee.

Bench and Yastrzemski are a breed that’s becoming rarer all the time, players who went through an entire career playing for only one team.

After more than 11 seasons, it looked as though Schoendienst might be able to say the same thing about St. Louis, but in June of 1956 the Cardinals traded their slick second baseman to the New York Giants.

Schoendienst survived one more trade and an attack of tuberculosis before he finished his playing career in St. Louis, closing the books with a .289 average. Twice he managed the Cardinals to World Series titles, beating Yastrzemski and the Red Sox in 1967.