Give Him One Last Summer

Thirty years after a heart attack killed Gil Hodges, a powerful and gentle man cruelly laid low at 47, a grass-roots movement urges ever more strongly, “Put Gil in the Hall.”

On the record, I am not much of a campaign manager. The presidential candidates I championed--Gene McCarthy and Ralph Nader--never got into the White House without a pass. But we are not talking trivial stuff like politics here. This is important. The National Baseball Hall of Fame. Gil Hodges was important. He belongs.

Controversy has invaded the village of Cooperstown, N.Y., on the site of an old Native American settlement beside pristine Lake Otsego, a ribbon of blue water amid green, uncluttered hills. First came the messy Pete Rose matter. Did this arrogant churl, a compulsive gambler and a convicted income-tax cheat, deserve selection? A blow for character struck home when Rose was barred.

Then Bill James, the baseball statistician, challenged the judgment and knowledge of the newspapermen who annually vote on eligible candidates. Like congressmen, these people make mistakes, but most do their level best reasonably well. Finally, and this is where Hodges comes in, charges of politics were directed against the so-called Veterans Committee, a small, select group empowered to choose people initially overlooked. These complaints led to the recent creation of a mammoth body--every baseball person, every broadcaster, every newspaper sportswriter in the Hall--to vote periodically on such veterans as Hodges. The youngest member of the Ubergroup, Kirby Puckett, is 41. The oldest, Al Lopez, is 93. The multi-generationalism suggests little unanimity. As one Hall of Fame insider, himself a veteran, told me (asking that I not use his name), “Everyone wants to vote for people from their own time. Hodges has good overall support so I can see him getting in before much longer. After that we could go for 10 years without agreement on any other veteran.”

Gilbert Ray Hodges was born in Princeton, not the college town, but a community in southwestern Indiana’s coal-mining country. Gil remembered that his father, Big Charlie Hodges, rode down to deep veins in order to support his family and died slowly, one body part at a time. An accident cost an eye. Another cost some toes. At 54, still mining, he badly injured a knee. As he lay in a hospital recovering from surgery, an embolism stopped his heart.

“Did you want to go down to the mines?” I asked Gil one day as we were driving to Shea Stadium. Hodges paused. He knew how to use silences. Then, very softly, yet very intensely, “I didn’t want to go down. I didn’t want to ever work down there.”

Beating the mine shafts was his hope and baseball became his escape. I never saw Hodges, or his great Dodger teammates, Pee Wee Reese or Jackie Robinson, play ball with anything other than utmost dedication. Perhaps the only good thing that can be said of the Great Depression is that it was a powerful motivator.

Hodges could play third and catch but when he settled in with the Brooklyn Dodgers during 1948 a rotund recruit from the Negro Leagues, Roy Campanella, was moving in behind the plate. Hodges switched to first base and that is where he stayed. He made the All-Star team as a first baseman eight times.

Hodges, first of all, cast a sense of strength. He stood almost 6 feet 2, weighed 200 mightily muscled pounds and possessed such huge hands that Reese used to say, “He’s the only feller who could play first base just fine without a glove.”

After playing cards one night, Hodges returned to his compartment on a train and found Dick Williams reading in the lower berth. As a utility player, Williams had not been assigned the lower. “How’d you do at cards?” Williams said.

Hodges smiled briefly. Then he slipped both arms under Williams, 190 pounds himself, and without visible effort lifted him into the upper bunk.

The wit was dry and thoughtful. In the Brooklyn dugout once, a lot of Dodgers had been saying a lot of things very fast, and I stepped back into the runway to make some notes. Hodges approached me from behind and a huge hand lightly tapped my shoulder. “Why are you taking notes here,” he asked, “instead of in the dugout?”

“Because,” I said, “when some of the fellers see my pencil, they stop talking.”

Gil nodded. “But there are also fellers who won’t start talking until they do see your pencil.”

One night in Chicago a mechanic was working on an engine of a chartered plane and Hodges and I stood chatting on the tarmac waiting to board. At length the man closed his tool kit and walked away from the aircraft saying, just audibly, “Oh, the hell with it.” Hodges reached him in a few strides, clamped a great hand on the mechanic’s shoulder and said, “The hell with what?” Before he let the mechanic go, Gil, to general relief, had gotten a full explanation.

He married a Brooklyn girl, Joan Lombardi, and settled in Flatbush, a rarity, a Dodger actually raising his family year-round in Brooklyn. Whenever he hit a home run at Ebbets Field, crossing home plate he blew a kiss to Joan. There was nothing theatrical in the gesture, just a brief expression by a strong man who was deeply in love with his wife. He wasn’t mercenary. Some winters he sold Buicks in a dealership on Flatbush Avenue to help feed the family and the checking account. “Gil,” says Buzzie Bavasi, the Dodger general manager for so many triumphant years, “was a GM’s dream. Never a problem. Always ready to play. After 1954, his best year, he came into my office to get his next contract out of the way. He said he was looking for $25,000. I had him down for a little more than that but I didn’t want him to think I was going soft.”

Bavasi told Hodges, “Twenty-five Gs is too much, but you’re a horse player and so am I. I’m going to put five numbers into this hat. The odds say you’ll get what you want or more.” Hodges nodded. Bavasi put the numbers into the hat. Hodges picked and came up with $27,000.

“He left my office thinking he’d put one over on me,” Bavasi told me. “I’m sure he’s looking down right now and when he reads your story he’ll start laughing. Because I never did tell him that every number in that hat was the same: $27,000.”

Hodges hit 370 homers, four in a single game, and batted .273 across 18 seasons, with time out of baseball during World War II to help storm Okinawa. The numbers are almost identical with those of Tony Perez, who already is in the Hall and was not equal to Hodges as a defensive first baseman. Those huge, mining-town hands also were deft.

At 39, Hodges signed to manage a terrible Washington team. Amid a lot of losses he learned that four players had been breaking his midnight curfew, carousing late. “I know who you are,” he said at a team meeting. “You are each fined $100. But I also know some of you are married and I don’t want to embarrass anyone. On my desk there’s a cigar box. At the end of the day, I’m going to look into it and I expect to see $400 there. Then the matter will be closed.” At the end of the day Hodges looked into the box. He found $700.

He took over the Mets in 1968 and the team finished ninth. Next season, Hodges’ Mets won the pennant and the World Series. Most of the universe agreed, this was a miracle. The Brooklyn (almost) native had returned.

During September 1968, Hodges suffered what he described as “pain like a drill boring in my chest.” It was not excruciating but neither did it go away. “Did I know what it was?” he said. “I suppose so. Yes. Did I want to know what it was? No.” He had suffered a heart attack of “mild” proportions. He missed very little work time and when he returned, he continued to hit fungoes, jog, do calisthenics and, unfortunately, smoke. “I’m perfect,” he told me, “except for a few mental hang-ups.”

“Such as?” I said.

“You have one of those things, you don’t forget it.”

The man was all work ethic. After the coronary, he could have looked for a front-office sinecure but chose to go on managing a big league team, contending with 25 bounding egos, dealing with the New York media. That is what he was doing, and doing well, when the second heart attack killed him.

The rules at Cooperstown say that selection is to be based on character, integrity, sportsmanship and one’s contribution to his team. I’m sorry about Gene McCarthy and Ralph Nader. Even knowing the risk that my endorsement carries, I still suggest that Gill Hodges should enter the Hall in a landslide.

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Roger Kahn, the author of “The Boys of Summer” and other baseball books, writes periodically for The Times.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

The Case for Hodges

Gil Hodges’ candidacy for Baseball’s Hall of Fame would seem to be legitimized by his status as the National League’s dominant first baseman of the 1950s, the only decade not to not have a representative first baseman enshrined in Cooperstown.

During a nine-year stretch from 1949-57, Hodges averaged 32 home runs, 108 runs batted in and batted .283. He was named to the NL team for the All-Star Game in eight of those nine seasons.

A look how Hodges compares to other National League first basemen who were active during his career:

*--* Player Years Games Hits HR RBIs Avg Orlando Cepeda* 17 2,124 2,351 379 1,365 297 Gil Hodges 18 2,071 1,921 370 1,274 273 Ted Kluszewski 15 1,718 1,766 279 1,078 298 Johnny Mize* 15 1,884 2,011 359 1,337 312 Willie McCovey* 22 2,588 2,211 521 1,555 270

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*elected to Hall of Fame

Hodges may be victim of a belief that a representative number of his Brooklyn teammates, immortalized in Roger Kahn’s book, “The Boys of Summer,” have already been voted into the Hall of Fame:

*--* Player Years with Dodgers Year Elected Jackie Robinson 1947-56 1962 Roy Campanella 1948-57 1969 Duke Snider 1947-62 1980 Pee Wee Reese 1940-58 1984

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Two other Dodgers from that era have also been elected, although Sandy Koufax didn’t hit his stride until the team had moved to Los Angeles, and Tommy Lasorda, a pitcher on the 1954 and ’55 teams, earned his berth later as a manager.