Mets induct David Wright into team Hall of Fame, retire No. 5
"I went straight from the airport to the ballpark and I couldn't wait to see what number I was going to be," Wright said at a press conference Saturday. "That spring I was 72, and I would have been perfectly happy with 72. But later on I found out that Charlie Samuels, the old equipment guy, gave me 5 because of Brooks Robinson and George Brett."
Wright, who debuted against the Montreal Expos on July 21, 2004, appeared to be on track to join Robinson and Brett as a Hall of Fame third baseman when he hit .301 with 222 homers, 876 RBIs and an .888 OPS through his first 10 seasons.
But Wright played just 211 more games while battling chronic back, shoulder and neck injuries as well as a diagnosis of spinal stenosis. He went more than two years between big league appearances before concluding his career with a pair of cameos in September 2018.
"There was nothing that I could do to do the thing anymore," Wright said. "It took a while for my brain and my heart to kind of match up with that. But I think that very, very few athletes get the ending that they want — that storybook ending. I certainly wouldn't call mine a storybook ending, but it's better than 99% of what athletes get and I'll forever be thankful for getting that opportunity."
Wright, the Mets' most recent captain and the only player in team history to have his number retired after spending his entire career with the club, expressed his gratitude throughout a speech that capped a half-hour ceremony emceed by broadcaster Howie Rose.
Wright, emerging from the third base side of Citi Field, walked to a gold-plated third base, stood atop the bag and blew kisses to the sellout crowd. In an appropriate Mets touch, a plane taking off from nearby LaGuardia ascended into view moments after his No. 5 was unveiled high above the left field seats.
The 42-year-old married father of three, praised throughout his career for his ability to connect with stars and everyday people alike as well as his appreciation of Mets history, mentioned late media relations executive Shannon Dalton Forde and late team photographer Marc Levine during his press conference.
Near the end of his speech, he also thanked the Wilpon family, who owned the team his entire career.
"If you would have told a young David Wright to close his eyes and imagine this day, I would have said you're crazy, no way, impossible," said Wright, a Virginia native who grew up rooting for the Mets while attending their Triple-A games in Tidewater. "And then I would have went out in my backyard in Virginia and hit off a homemade tee with balls that were falling apart at the seams until it got dark outside to prove you right.
"Thank you so much for allowing me to live out my dream in front of you each night. I love you so much. Let's go Mets."
Wright is the 35th member of the Mets' Hall of Fame and the 11th individual to have his number retired, joining managers Casey Stengel and Gil Hodges as well as Tom Seaver, Mike Piazza, Jerry Koosman, Keith Hernandez, Willie Mays, Darryl Strawberry and Dwight Gooden as well as Jackie Robinson, whose No. 42 is retired throughout Major League Baseball.
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New York Times
39 minutes ago
- New York Times
The 3 preseason San Francisco Giants predictions I wish I'd made
I once made a prediction that was accurate and amusing enough to be included on my Wikipedia page. Because of this, you might assume that I'm good at predictions. I am not. That was the only good prediction I have ever made. I am better at fixing transmissions than I am at making predictions, and you don't want me within 50 feet of your car. Advertisement It's probably for the best that I don't remember any of the predictions my corporate overlords forced me to make before this season, because I'm sure they're already shot to heck. What I do remember, though, are the educated guesses and half-baked hunches about the Giants that I had before the season. Some of them came close to happening. If I had any courage at all, I would have published them as predictions and ended up looking smart. I didn't. They're only the preseason predictions I wish I made. To be fair, I at least hinted at the idea in a predictions article, but that was even more wishy-washy than my normal stuff. These were the actual words that were in my brain all winter: This dude might struggle something fierce. Every time I clicked on his Baseball Savant page, it was like a blinking red siren. He wasn't just making weak contact; he was making some of the weakest contact in the league. He wasn't just swinging and missing; he had some of the worst strikeout and whiff rates in the league. Then there was his batted-ball profile, which has him as one of the most extreme pull hitters in baseball. It all adds up to the profile of a hitter the league will catch up with. Then you get to the evidence that the league already did catch up to him at the end of his breakout season: His OPS for September of last season was under .700, and his strikeout-to-walk ratio was all cattywampus. It's a shame, because there's so much already right with him as a player. His speed, instincts, pull-side power and versatility are all helpful to a major-league team right now, which helps explain why Baseball-Reference's WAR still has him as the fourth-most valuable position player on the Giants this season, behind only Matt Chapman, Mike Yastrzemski and Willy Adames. He's still young, and there's still time for him to make the adjustments he needs to. Advertisement It was always unlikely for him to repeat what he did last year, though. It was unlikely for him to come close, even. That's pretty much what's happened. His OPS vs. lefties is 22 points lower than his OPS against right-handers this year, which is both great and horrible news, but his overall production is roughly the same. His adjusted OPS was 25 percent better than the National League last season, and it's 22 percent better this season. He's still as streaky as hitters get, but he's at least shown that last season's second half was just a slump, not a result of the league solving him. The caveat to all this is that I did not see the defensive calamity coming. There have been rough defensive patches for Ramos throughout his Giants career, but nothing like the rough defense he's shown all season. Ramos is between Fitzgerald and Christian Koss in WAR this season, according to Baseball-Reference, which gives you an idea of just how much Ramos' defense is hurting him. And I can't disagree with the numbers, either. They match the eyeball test, and the eyeballs hurt. Still, the offense is a welcome not-surprise. Ramos is a healthy part of a balanced lineup, just like he was last year. Not only is that welcome for this season, but the Giants can start expecting it for future seasons, too. I'd imagine there's quite the generational split among Giants fans when it comes to expectations for pitching prospects. In one corner, you have the old guard, the ones who spent decades expecting doom. Between the Bob Knepper trade in 1980 and Matt Cain's debut in 2005, there wasn't a more dangerous job on the planet than 'exciting young Giants pitcher.' Every time a pitcher would start to fly, they'd fly too close to the sun on shoulders made out of wax. Can you believe there was a time when the Giants had five starting pitchers in the top-100 prospects, including the best pitching prospect in baseball? Only one of them lived up to expectations, and only after he was traded for A.J. Pierzynski. It was always doom for the young pitchers. Doom, doom, doom. Advertisement And in the other corner, you have newer fans, who watched the Giants thrive beyond their wildest dreams because of young pitching. They understand that pitching is a cruel profession, and they know that success can be fleeting, but they're not terrified of young pitchers in general. Sometimes they work. Look at Logan Webb over there. Came up, got good, stayed good for a long time. What's the big deal? That happens with young pitchers sometimes. I'll always be the one in the first example, though. It doesn't surprise me when other teams develop pitchers. The Mariners had a couple seasons where they were consistently making homegrown pitchers out of glowing dirt they dug up behind old Boeing test grounds, and that made sense to me. When it comes to the Giants, though, I always hold my breath. Young pitchers, you say? Sounds risky. There was a point this season where the Giants had too many young pitchers. They sent an incumbent starter to the minors. They had a battle for the one and final spot in the rotation. They had to use starting pitchers as relievers because, well, there were just too many young pitchers. I was scared for them. 'There's no way it will work,' the oldest, crustiest lobe of my brain croaked. And I nodded in agreement. For these were promising young Giants pitchers we were talking about. Except this prediction makes it in here because it's both correct and incorrect. Yes, Hayden Birdsong is caught in a developmental maelstrom right now, and Kyle Harrison is currently on the Pawtucket Red Sox, but Landen Roupp has been stellar. It's been enjoyable to watch his changeup develop as the season progresses, and you can see the curveball become even more effective the less he has to rely on it. Sometimes it's better to be wrong. Maybe there's a way to scoop this lobe of the brain out and replace it with something more optimistic. 'Oops! All Lincecums!' or something like that. I wish I were more wrong in public about the Giants' plan to rely on young pitchers, which I was quietly skeptical about. If the Giants make the postseason this year, young pitching will be a major reason why. Sometimes young pitchers end up helping, and they don't have to stop for a long time. (Top photo of Tyler Fitzgerald: Emilee Chinn / Getty Images)
New York Times
39 minutes ago
- New York Times
Hall Plaques: When posting for posterity in Cooperstown, oddities abound
COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. – Every member of the National Baseball Hall of Fame gets the same canvas: A plaque measuring 15½ inches by 10¾ inches, with a portrait and a precious few lines of text. The words are timeless tributes in bronze, definitive descriptions of greatness meant to last. 'It is very hard, when you're talking about what these people have done, to sum up an entire career in 80 to 100 words,' said Josh Rawitch, the president of the Hall of Fame, which will induct five new members on Sunday. 'It has definitely become a very important part of what we do, trying to tie that up neatly because we know it will last forever.' Advertisement The plaque gallery is hallowed space for visitors, but for those who work there, it is also a passageway from the library atrium to the main offices. Multiple times a week, on his way from here to there, Rawitch will pause on that brisk walk, stop at one plaque and study it. There are 346 now, plus the bases for this year's class: Dick Allen, Dave Parker, CC Sabathia, Ichiro Suzuki and Billy Wagner. It's a lot to know, and Rawitch, a longtime team executive who took the Hall job in 2021, is naturally curious. He's also a former writer – two years covering teams for – who appreciates the challenge of posting for posterity. 'Todd Helton was the first time we put OPS on there,' Rawitch said, referring to the Colorado Rockies first baseman inducted last summer. 'And I remember the conversation where we were discussing: has this statistic become significant enough that people don't need an explanation of it? And it has. So I think as stats become more widely accepted, it becomes easier to put something on a plaque as opposed to having to try to explain to somebody what OPS means.' On-base plus slugging percentage is essential to Helton's story; he fell short of traditional benchmarks like 3,000 hits and 500 homers, but ranks among the top 25 in history in OPS. In the Hall's judgment, that term can stand alone. This wasn't the case at the other end of the gallery, where you'll find Cy Young. Elected in 1937 and inducted in the first ceremony in 1939, Young worked a record 7,356 innings but merits just 33 words on his plaque. One line is spent on a rather elementary definition: 'Pitched Perfect Game May 5, 1904, No Opposing Batsman Reaching First Base.' Surely by the 1990s, fans wouldn't need such reminders of baseball basics, right? Well, consider Mike Schmidt's plaque, from 1995. It ends by noting that he won 10 Gold Gloves 'for fielding excellence.' Schmidt's plaque happens to be positioned directly below that of Steve Carlton, his teammate for many years in Philadelphia. Likewise, Tom Glavine is directly beneath Bobby Cox, his manager in Atlanta, and beside Greg Maddux, his fellow Braves starter. The gallery is full of charming quirks like that: 'Smiling' Mickey Welch is not smiling; Ernie Lombardi – said to have used an 'interlocking golf grip' on his bat – is smartly depicted with his hands up near his chin. And check out Robin Yount's cap: the Brewers' clever logo faked out the sculptor, who missed the 'm' hidden in the ball-in-glove emblem. The early plaques offer a solution to the more modern problem of cap selection. Several inductees who starred in more than one spot – Catfish Hunter, Maddux, Roy Halladay, Mike Mussina, Fred McGriff and others – are shown with a blank cap, an unfortunate workaround, since they never actually wore that style. A better idea would be no cap at all, like Mel Ott, a career Giant who shows off his wavy locks, or dapper Hugh Duffy, who mainly played for the 'Boston Nationals.' Advertisement Duffy is credited with only one specific feat, but it's something else: a .438 average (now recorded as .440) in 1894 that 'was not to be challenged in his lifetime.' Several other plaques highlight a single, herculean achievement: Old Hoss Radbourn pitching the final 27 games of the 1884 season for Providence, Harry Wright hitting '7 home runs in game at Newport, KY. in 1867,' and so on. Then again, perhaps even more plaques boast of quaint accomplishments: – Tommy McCarthy is called a 'pioneer in trapping fly balls in the outfield.' (Isn't that illegal?) – Bobby Wallace is cited for handling 17 chances, an A.L. record for a shortstop, on June 10, 1902. – Sandy Koufax's plaque says nothing about his breathtaking World Series performances, but Johnny Evers' shared record for 'making most singles in four game World Series' is immortalized in bronze. – Connie Mack 'received the Bok Award in Philadelphia for 1929.' What's that? It's a local community-service prize (I'm a Philly native, but I still had to look it up) and it consumes one of just three sentences describing baseball's most enduring manager. It's alternately fascinating and baffling. Take Pie Traynor, a third baseman whose legacy should need no embellishment. A career .320 hitter who drove in 100 runs seven times, Traynor is hailed as 'one of few players ever to make 200 or more hits during a season, collecting 208 in 1923.' But 200-hit seasons were hardly rare – 10 players did it in 1923 alone. Then there's Joe DiMaggio. He did a lot of memorable things, didn't he? Yet two of his six sentences cover rather mundane feats for a player of his stature: 'Hit 2 home-runs in one inning, 1936. Hit 3 home-runs in one game (3 times).' Wow. DiMaggio had memorable nicknames – 'Joltin' Joe' and 'The Yankee Clipper' – but you won't find them on his plaque. Nor will you find 'Lefty' for Robert Moses Grove, 'Red' for Urban Clarence Faber or 'Heinie' for Henry Emmet Manush. James E. Foxx is called 'Jimmy,' not 'Jimmie,' as he was known, or 'Beast,' a truly underrated and fitting monicker. Advertisement Nicknames seem to pop up everywhere else, though – and, man, are they weird. Joe 'Ducky' Medwick, a Triple Crown winner, is called 'Ducky Wucky' in bronze. Dave Bancroft (a four-time league leader in putouts at shortstop!) is 'Beauty,' Jake Beckley, who never led the league in walks, is 'Old Eagle Eye.' More recently, players' nickname lines display the shortened version of their formal names. Michael Joseph Piazza was known as 'Mike.' James Edward Rice went by 'Jim.' And Joseph Paul Torre? They called him 'Joe.' A couple of decades ago, though, 'Rodney Cline Carew' stood on its own. So did 'George Thomas Seaver,' 'Robert Gibson' and so on. Rawitch isn't sure how the current style came about. 'You want the full name on there,' he guessed, 'but you also want people to be able to go back and know what they were actually called when they were playing.' It's haphazard, to be sure. But, given the consistent look of the plaques from the very beginning, it's a sweeping evolution hiding in plain sight. Around the mid-1980s, roughly, the wording became more descriptive, illuminating not only what the players did, but how. Call it the era of adjectives. And in baseball, there are only so many to go around. Clutch: All of these players (and possibly more) are described as 'clutch' – Richie Ashburn, Harold Baines, Jim Bottomley, George Brett, Bobby Doerr, Paul Molitor, David Ortiz, Tony Perez, Billy Williams and even Tony Lazzeri, even though Grover Cleveland Alexander's plaque, across the room, devotes half of its space to 'striking out Lazzeri with bases full in final crisis at Yankee Stadium' in 1926. (Side note: it was not the 'final crisis' for Alexander and the Cardinals in Game 7. The Lazzeri strikeout came in the seventh inning of a game that actually ended with Babe Ruth being caught stealing! Truth is strange.) Advertisement Intense: Brett showed 'ceaseless intensity,' while Carl Yastrzemski displayed 'graceful intensity.' Jack Morris was an 'intense competitor,' like Dick Williams, while Earl Weaver managed 'with intensity.' Quiet: If you didn't say much, that's definitely worth celebrating. Walter Alston and Billy Williams are both 'soft-spoken' (the first words on their plaques), while Doerr was a 'quiet leader,' Lazzeri showed 'quiet proficiency,' Ryne Sandberg practiced 'quiet leadership,' Hilton Smith was 'quiet but confident' and Bill Mazeroski had a 'quiet work ethic.' Competitor: By definition, everyone who competes in a game is a competitor. You're really special, though, if you're called a competitor on your plaque, like Carlton, Morris, Jim Palmer, Gaylord Perry, Nolan Ryan, Dick Williams and Jud Wilson. Intimidate: Really great players might scare the opposition. All of these folks are cited for intimidation – Jim Bunning, Don Drysdale, Goose Gossage, Randy Johnson, Ryan, Willie Stargell and Dave Winfield. Respect: Lots and lots of Hall of Famers are respected. It's part of the deal. But when you're an umpire, well, it's virtually required. You'll find that all of these arbiters commanded respect: Al Barlick, Nestor Chylak, Jocko Conlan, Cal Hubbard, Bill McGowan and Hank O'Day. The handful of Hall staffers who draft and edit the wording are aware of all this. 'Really you don't want to just repeat the same words for every single guy,' Rawitch said. 'So part of the challenge for the team here is to figure out: how do you say it without sounding very much like someone else who has similar statistics?' That effort is reflected in the array of different, lively descriptions of pitch types. In the last 20 years or so, the tired, repetitive language has given way to all of these punchier descriptors: 'Bat-shattering' (Lee Smith), 'blistering' (Roy Halladay), 'confounding' (Pedro Martinez), 'crackling' (Randy Johnson), 'exploding' (Gossage), 'mystifying' (Trevor Hoffman) – and, perhaps the best, 'cruel and knee-buckling' (Bert Blyleven). Advertisement Only three plaques, by Rawitch's count, have ever been changed: Jackie Robinson's, to reflect his larger impact; Bob Feller's, to correct an error in his years of service, which were interrupted by World War II; and Roberto Clemente's, to properly order his name (it's 'Roberto Clemente Walker,' not 'Roberto Walker Clemente'). Mostly, though, the words you see in 2025 will be the same as you'll see in 2125. There's always more to the story – in the museum, in the library, on your phone – and some plaques, like Carl Hubbell's, invite you to do your own research. But on baseball's most sacred ground, brevity is forever. (Top photo of the HOF Class of 2024 (from left) Jim Leyland, Adrián Beltré, Todd Helton and Joe Mauer: Jim McIsaac / Getty Images)
New York Times
39 minutes ago
- New York Times
Sliders: For new Baseball Hall of Fame class, growing the game means rethinking the way in
Welcome to Sliders, a weekly in-season MLB column that focuses on both the timely and timeless elements of the game. COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. – Billy Wagner broke his right arm twice when he was 5 years old. He started throwing with his left hand instead and soon realized it was loaded with thunderbolts. Wagner's 100 mph heat was a rarity in his time and led him, eventually, to a Hall of Fame induction ceremony this weekend in Cooperstown, N.Y. Advertisement Baseball may be a game of imitation, but breaking your dominant arm while hunting for velocity would be extreme. 'I would avoid that path,' Wagner said last week, on a Zoom call with reporters. 'I mean, that's a little painful.' The sad fact is that too many aspiring pitchers shred their arms, anyway. When Wagner and CC Sabathia — who also goes into the Hall on Sunday, with Ichiro Suzuki, Dick Allen and Dave Parker — consider the future of their craft, the wide-ranging impact of youth development concerns them. 'I think some of these guys are coming into the game broken,' Sabathia said, adding that the 'insane' outbreak of Tommy John surgery starts with overuse at the younger levels. 'That was something that my dad fought against for me for a long time. He recognized that my arm was special, (and) he never let anybody pitch me more than one time on a weekend.' Sabathia then outlined his plan for his 14-year-old son, Carter, who is 6-foot-2, 170 pounds and throws 85 mph. 'If I put him in the Perfect Game circuit right now, we'd be flying around everywhere, every weekend for him to pitch, and I won't do it,' Sabathia said. 'He plays third base, he plays center field, and he only pitches here with his local team in Jersey, and we'll get reps that way…. He's going to play other sports, and he's going to be as diverse an athlete as possible.' Wagner — whose son, Will, is an infielder for the Toronto Blue Jays — has coached high school baseball in Virginia for years. He sees the same problems as Sabathia. 'When they get to the major-league level, they're running out of what we call runway,' Wagner said. 'And so they're injured because they've done all this massive training to get to that point, to chase their dream.' He added: 'At the lower levels, there needs to be more joy in what we're doing to grow the game. It's not a job. We don't need to take lessons every single day to make the perfect swing. The swing comes because you're out in the backyard throwing up rocks and hitting them off a bat. You're playing sandlot baseball, you're playing Wiffle ball.' Advertisement The rising expense of youth baseball has made it harder for lower-income families to afford. That's part of a multifaceted issue affecting the makeup of MLB rosters, which included just 6.2 percent Black players on opening day, down from a peak of more than 18 percent in the 1980s. Sabathia is the first Black AL/NL starter elected to the Hall since Fergie Jenkins in 1991, and the third, with Jenkins and Bob Gibson, to record 3,000 strikeouts. Of the 20 pitchers with a 20-win season since Sabathia last did it, in 2010, only David Price is Black. 'I'm excited to be able to get up there and talk to (Fergie) about what it means, (but) the one thing that keeps crossing my mind, though, is like: who's next?' Sabathia said. 'I feel like, through the Players Alliance and some of the efforts that we're putting together for this next generation, I almost feel even more responsible now to be on guys about being that next Black Ace, whether it's Taj Bradley or now Chase Burns or Hunter Greene, or whoever else. I don't want to be the last Black pitcher to win 20 games, be in the Hall of Fame, to do all these things.' Sabathia has stayed involved in MLB as part of the Commissioner's Ambassador Program, a group that has caused 'tension and an awkwardness' with the union, as The Athletic's Evan Drellich reported this week. To Sabathia, the open exchange of ideas is all positive. 'You can go to Rob (Manfred) and talk about whatever kind of problems you have,' Sabathia said. 'That's something that we didn't have when I was playing. I never got a chance to have the commissioner come and sit in the clubhouse and kind of go over what's happening during the season. So I'm trying to do whatever I can to help grow the game and point the game in a positive direction.' The other living inductee this weekend, Suzuki, now serves as a special assistant to the chairman of the Seattle Mariners. He suits up before many games, refining his technique so he can help current players with theirs. To Suzuki, preserving the immeasurable aspects of baseball is vital to the essence of the sport. Advertisement 'Baseball is a game of human beings playing against human beings, and to have the passion and the energy that is created by that is something that I really hope is still part of the game,' he said through an interpreter. 'That's what I really value and is very important to me.' Hobby shops line Main Street in Cooperstown, with treasures great and small, so it's fitting that baseball cards helped build the museum at the end of the block. The Hall of Fame was around long before the memorabilia craze of the late 1980s and early 1990s, of course. But as Marq Evans explains in 'The Diamond King,' a compelling documentary released this year, a surprisingly profitable relationship between Donruss cards and the Hall brought a windfall that paid for new administrative offices and an expansion of the library. Evans set out to tell the story of Dick Perez, the prolific artist who painted more than 400 portraits for a series of 'Diamond Kings' cards that appeared in Donruss sets from 1982 to 1996. Along the way, he learned how several connections — like the puzzle pieces within each pack — combined to grow the Hall of Fame. 'The Hall was a place I had wanted to go to my entire life, but it's hard to get to from Eastern Washington, where I grew up,' Evans said. 'So it was just really fascinating to hear that this artist and this company, Perez-Steele Galleries — and really the Diamond Kings — played such a part in making the place as magical as it is.' Perez began painting portraits of Hall of Famers for the Hall to sell as postcards in 1979. The next year, a federal judge ruled against Topps' monopoly of the baseball card industry, allowing Fleer and Donruss to sell cards starting in 1981. Bill Madden — a New York Daily News writer who also worked with Donruss and keenly followed the collectibles business — knew of Perez's Hall of Fame postcards and thought something similar could work for Donruss. Frank Steele was friendly with the Hall's then-chairman, Ed Stack, and negotiated a deal between the card company and the museum. Advertisement The Hall would make Perez its official artist, endorse the fledgling card company and receive an escalating scale of royalties from every pack sold. Nobody knew how lucrative the relationship would be. 'The first year with Donruss, in 1981, they sold like $1 million worth of cards, and the Hall of Fame got some royalty off that, which was very small,' Evans said. 'And then just a couple of years later, they were doing like $80 million in sales — and not only, of course, is the royalty off that a much larger number, but the higher it went, the royalty percentage also went up. So all of a sudden, the Hall of Fame has a ton of money that they did not expect to have.' Eventually, the oversaturation of the card market led to Donruss' demise. But Perez's work continues, and the Diamond Kings' legacy survives in the form of a permanently endowed internship program now in its 25th year. Peggy Steele, who owned and operated Perez-Steele Galleries, said that 33 alumni are returning this weekend to help with induction ceremonies. 'We always felt like you give back where you make it,' she said. 'That's where the Hall continues to benefit. If we hadn't had that relationship, it never would have happened.' Tom Hamilton was born in Wisconsin in 1954, a year after Major League Baseball arrived in Milwaukee. The Braves would leave for Atlanta while Hamilton was still in grade school, but the Brewers arrived in his high school years, giving Hamilton a new team — and another set of broadcasters — to follow. Hamilton, this year's Ford C. Frick Award winner for broadcasting excellence, has spent 36 seasons bringing the Cleveland Indians and Guardians to his radio listeners with gusto and verve. But his formative influences are all from Wisconsin: Earl Gillespie, Merle Harmon, Bob Uecker, Gary Bender and Eddie Doucette. 'Those were five incredible radio play-by-play guys in the three sports that I did: basketball, football and baseball,' Hamilton said recently. 'I didn't realize it, but it was like grad school.' Advertisement Here are some thoughts from Hamilton on each of the five voices who set him on his path to Cooperstown. Earl Gillespie: 'I got to do University of Wisconsin football with him for one year, and for me, that was like winning a jackpot. He was a guy that I had grown up — I don't want to say emulating, but a guy I had so much respect and admiration for as a broadcaster because he did the Braves. When they went to Atlanta, he wanted to stay back in Wisconsin. Then he did the Packers and Badgers on radio. So to do a year of University of Wisconsin football with Earl was kind of like: 'I'm playing center field next to Hank Aaron.'' Merle Harmon: 'Listen to Merle Harmon's football calls. He was the voice of the Jets when Joe Willie (Namath) won the Super Bowl. He was really good. He initially was the No. 1 guy for the Brewers, and Bob was the No. 2 guy. And the only reason Merle gave up the Brewers (was because) he was going to do the Olympics for NBC in 1980. He had to give up the Brewers to do it.' Bob Uecker: 'Well, he was so funny — none of us can be that — but I don't think Bob's ever been given credit for how good he was at play-by-play. He was phenomenal, to the point that when I started going out on my own and doing games, I had to make sure I wasn't imitating Bob — you know, 'get up, get out of here, gone!' There's only one Bob. But I think because he was so accomplished in everything else and is noted for the movies, the beer commercials, Johnny Carson, I don't think he got enough recognition for being an incredible play-by-play guy on radio.' Gary Bender: 'He was at Madison, he was a sports anchor, but he did Badger football and Packer football. And then he went from Madison to be the main guy for CBS. He did the Final Four, the North Carolina State-Houston game. And the one thing about those four guys — Earl, Merle, Bob, Gary Bender — they were as good of people, if not better, than they were broadcasters. And they were incredible broadcasters.' Eddie Doucette: 'I never got to know Eddie, but he was doing Milwaukee Bucks basketball on radio when they had Lew Alcindor and Oscar Robertson. And Eddie, oh my god — energetic creativity. He's the one that came up with the 'jack-knife jumper' and 'into the low post in the toaster to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.' He came up with Bobby 'The Greyhound' Dandridge, and the 'sky hook' for Kareem. I've never been that creative, but those are all terms he used. That's why I always said about Hawk (Harrelson): 'When people are imitating your calls or your vocabulary, that sets you apart from everybody.'' The 75 percent threshold for election to the Hall of Fame serves two purposes. It's a high enough figure to be a landslide, but low enough so a few misguided voters can't influence the outcome. The result is what matters — in or out? The rest is just details. Advertisement Of course, one detail of Ichiro Suzuki's election has generated plenty of conversation: He fell a single vote short of joining Mariano Rivera as the only unanimous electees to Cooperstown. That very fact shows that there's always been a lot of curious, stray votes among the hundreds in each election. The point is that Suzuki cleared 75 percent. And while there's no excuse for even one voter to pass over such a decorated candidate, remember that writers used to be really, really stingy. Consider the case of Yogi Berra, who hit 30 homers twice and batted .300 four times, qualifying him for the center square of last Saturday's Grid. Berra did pretty much everything else, too: three MVP awards, 10 World Series titles, 15 years in a row as an All-Star, the life of a legend. Yet when Berra first came before the Baseball Writers' Association of America, for the 1971 election, only 242 of 360 voters checked his box — 28 shy of election. Could you imagine? In fact, nobody was elected on that 1971 ballot, which featured 16 players who eventually would get plaques. 'Sure I'm disappointed,' Berra told Dick Young of the New York Daily News. 'But then, DiMag didn't make it his first year, either.' At the time, only four candidates had been elected on the first ballot since the initial class of 1936: Bob Feller, Jackie Robinson, Ted Williams and Stan Musial. Some fairly decent players — Jimmie Foxx, Mel Ott and, yes, Joe DiMaggio — were forced to wait their turn. Players now must wait five years to be included on the ballot, but DiMaggio, who retired after the 1951 World Series, was deemed eligible in 1953. Yet the writers made him get in line behind Dizzy Dean and Al Simmons, who both made it on their ninth try. DiMaggio fell 81 votes short. In 1954, DiMaggio missed by 14 votes, with Bill Dickey (ninth ballot), Rabbit Maranville (14th) and Bill Terry (14th) getting the call. DiMaggio finally made it in 1955, and Berra got in easily on his second try, in 1972, with newcomer Sandy Koufax and 300-game winner Early Wynn, who had been denied three times. 'It is great to make it, whether it takes one, two, three or four years,' Berra said then. 'It doesn't matter.' It's been 10 years since a newly elected Hall of Fame duo matched up precisely with their years in the game. Randy Johnson and John Smoltz, from the class of 2015, both started in 1988 and finished in 2009. Now it's CC Sabathia and Ichiro Suzuki, who made their MLB debuts in 2001 and played their final games in 2019. Advertisement When speaking about Suzuki, Sabathia often mentions a game that served as a fulcrum in his career. On July 30, 2005, with Cleveland, Sabathia took the mound in Seattle after one of his worst starts ever: an eight-run shelling in Oakland. It brought his ERA to 5.24 and prompted a meaningful bullpen session with Indians pitching coach Carl Willis. 'I was trying to learn an out pitch,' Sabathia recalled last week. 'I was getting to two strikes and I was getting a lot of foul balls. I couldn't get a strikeout. And we went down to the bullpen in Oakland and he taught me how to throw a cutter, and it came out like an 82 mph slider. And I was like, 'Oh, this thing is good. I'm taking this into the game.'' Against Suzuki in Seattle, however, Sabathia's new cutter/slider met its match. 'I throw him a slider, (he) hits it off the window in Safeco,' Sabathia said, referring to a second-level restaurant at the Mariners' ballpark, then known as Safeco Field. 'I was like, 'All right, you know, that's Ichi. I could keep throwing this thing.' Comes back up later in the game, I throw it to him (on a 1-1) pitch, he takes it deep again. 'But that ends up being, like, the best pitch of my career, right? It changed my career, being able to throw that pitch. And he just peppered it off the window.' Sabathia was right about his new pitch. He lost that day in Seattle but went 9-1 over the final two months in 2005, a stretch that marked the beginning of a 7 1/2 year prime. Before that start in Seattle, Sabathia's career ERA was 4.26. From August 2005 through the end of the 2012 season, it was 3.10. All he needed was to weather Suzuki's two homers and keep his confidence in the new pitch – which, apparently, was easy to do. After all, as Sabathia said, 'That's Ichi.' (Top photo, l-r, of Suzuki, Sabathia and Wagner in January 2025: New York Yankees / Getty Images)
