From top left, clockwise: Buck O’Neil, Marvin Miller, Gil Hodges, Danny Murtaugh and Billy Martin Photo: AP (5)
There will be a gathering in Cooperstown on Sunday, and four men will offer up speeches and hear one last roar for the players they used to be. They are all worthy inductees: Randy Johnson, John Smoltz, Pedro Martinez, Craig Biggio. This is day is about them, and there will be plenty to say about them.
But this is also a day when it’s right to remember those who aren’t there, too. And, no, this doesn’t mean the likes of Mike Piazza and Tim Raines and Jeff Bagwell, among others, who have become the flashpoints of the baseball writers’ votes every year. It doesn’t mean Joe Jackson, who may or may not have been a major contributor to the Black Sox but for now stands as one who was, and must therefore be kept out.
Pete Rose: We could have a whole column — a whole week of columns — about him.
There are plenty of people who aren’t in the Hall for whom a case can be made. These are the five who I would reserve my strongest words of support for:
1. Gil Hodges
We’ve been here a hundred times before, and we shouldn’t rest until this injustice is corrected, if it takes 50 more years. Not only was Hodges a borderline Hall of Famer as a player — at the moment he retired, in 1963, Hodges’ 370 home runs were the most by a right-handed hitter in the history of the 87-year-old National League — but he also managed the 1969 Mets. Separately, you could argue his merits; together they make him a no-brainer. Which indicts every single voter who ever has overlooked him, and continue to do so.
2. Buck O’Neil
The Hall of Fame never has erred more profoundly than the winter of 2006. In order to better represent the old Negro Leagues, it had a special vote to induct a plethora of them, and selected 17 — and somehow didn’t induct O’Neil, who was a very good player, who was a successful manager, who was the first African-American coach for the Cubs in the early ’60s, and was singularly responsible for keeping the Negro Leagues alive in the national consciousness for much of his 94 years. It was such a galling omission, I still type about it with enough force to kill my keyboard.
3. Marvin Miller
There are plenty who still blame Miller for all they consider wrong about the modern game, but the truth is he was a visionary who by himself helped correct a century worth of wrongs against professional players, who dragged baseball into the 20th Century, and who beat two generations of greedy owners at their own game in bargaining rooms. Not enough modern players have a full grasp of who Miller was or why they should make a unanimous case for his inclusion every time his name is on the ballot.
4. Billy Martin
Too much of what we remember of Billy is the cartoon Billy — his face beet red arguing with umpires, the barroom fights and saloon tales. Buck Showalter, for one, can tell you chapter and verse just what a brilliant baseball man he was. It would’ve helped if he had won more than just the one title with the Yankees, and his five separate tenures in The Bronx don’t help his cause. But he took over underachieving teams everywhere he went — Minnesota, Detroit, Texas, New York and Oakland — and immediately made every one of them winners. That is not a coincidence.
5. Danny Murtaugh
The irony is, if Murtaugh had spent even a portion of his career in New York and not in Pittsburgh, he already would be in. Murtaugh not only had a terrific record with the Pirates (1,115-950), a team that had been awful for most of the three decades before his arrival in 1957, he won two titles — one, in 1960, against a thoroughly unbeatable Yankees team; one, in 1971, against a thoroughly unbeatable Orioles team. He added four division titles. He’s actually one of those guys that makes you say, “Wait, Danny Murtaugh isn’t in the Hall?”
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