Staff Columnist
Can a nice guy finally get to Cooperstown?
How to helpYou can help put the late Gil Hodges into the Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, N.Y., says Joe D'Agostin, a Connecticut fan who is crusading for Hodges' induction. He suggests sending a letter to one or all of the members of the Hall's Veterans Committee, which will announce its newest selections March 2.
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On a day in 1958, when the Brooklyn Dodgers became the L.A. Dodgers, postman Herman Alevy found a new name on his Long Beach route:
Gil Hodges.
For Alevy, a Dodger fan who grew up in L.A. listening to radio recreations of Brooklyn games, having the team's star first baseman as a postal customer was pure bliss. It got even better. Arriving with the mail one day, Alevy heard, "Hi, I'm Gil Hodges."
Later, on a Sunday morning, they ran into each other at a gas station. "What are you doing today?" Hodges asked. "Watching you guys on TV," said Alevy. "Want to go to the game? There will be four tickets waiting for you in my name."
That was the first of 27 games Herman and Polly Alevy and their children, Scott and Gail, attended that season - all on Hodges. "We sat with the players' families," Alevy recalls. "(Pitcher) Don Drysdale's grandparents were sitting behind us. It was the first time they had seen Drysdale play professionally."
Says Polly, "His grandmother wanted to know if Drysdale was a good player."
Although Hodges played with the Dodgers through 1961, he moved his family back to Brooklyn after the 1958 season. "It's very difficult to keep moving the children from one school to another," he later explained in a letter to Alevy.
But their friendship endured. "He'd still call me from his hotel," says Alevy, "and ask if I wanted to go to games."
Alevy gave Hodges a ride one day. "After that, my kids would never sit in the front seat because that was where 'Gil, the King' had sat."
Dodgers lose two
When Hodges joined the Mets in 1962, Alevy, of Lakewood, became a Mets fan. He still is.
Hodges next managed the Washington Senators for 5 years, then took over as Mets pilot in 1968. A year later, he guided them to a World Series victory.
Then came the day Alevy still has difficulty discussing, April 2, 1972. "We were watching television and heard the announcement," he says, his words faltering. "Gil had died of a heart attack on a golf course in Florida. I was devastated. I cried."
It was two days from what would have been Hodges' 48th birthday.
To Alevy, this was certification of the adage that good people often die young. "Gil never had an unkind word for anybody. He was never even thrown out of a game. He was a great father, a great husband. When he moved here, he worried if the fans would like him. He wanted to be liked. He wanted to be accepted."
Now 77, Alevy is consumed by one hope: to see his late friend elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y.
A terrible wrong
The fact that Hodges is not in the Hall is not merely an oversight, but a travesty, says Alevy. Hodges' statistics as a player and manager suggest Alevy is right: 370 lifetime home runs (30 or more in six seasons, four in one game), seven consecutive seasons with 100 or more runs batted in, a lifetime batting average of .273, and an average of .333 on eight National League All-Star teams.
Alevy is not alone in his view. Across America, Hodges still has rabid fans, like Joe D'Agostin, who describes himself as "self-appointed coordinator of a quest to get Gil elected".
, Citing Hodges statistics, D'Agostin says, "No individual who has ever made such contributions to a team has been denied a presence in Cooperstown."
Those contributions included three Golden Glove awards and a .993 fielding average. "He was so smooth around first base that he was often accused of not touching the bag," says D'Agostin.
So committed to the Hodges crusade is D'Agostin that between September and November, he wrote 1,200 letters urging others to support the candidacy of Number 14. The recipients were fans who through the years have attended Dodger fantasy baseball camps in Vero Beach, Fla.
"You look back at that great Brooklyn team, and Hodges was as much a cornerstone as Duke Snider or Jackie Robinson or any of those guys who are now in the Hall of Fame," says the Press- Telegram's Gordon Verrell, a former president of the Baseball Writers Association of America.
Was he too nice?
Given the statistics and such accolades as Verrell's, why isn't Hodges in the Hall of Fame?
"I think Gil's passing away at an early age has a lot to do with the fact that he is not (in Cooperstown)," says Glenn Gough. "He had so much ahead of him after winning the 1969 Series with the 'Amazin' Mets'."
Gough, of Monroe, La., is president of Dugout Memories Inc., an organization of Brooklyn Dodger buffs. The group supports Hodges' candidacy. Gough also suspects Hodges' modest, low-key style as a player and manager may have worked to his detriment.
"He was not outspoken, but got the job done on and off the field. Many lives were touched by his presence. With the money and self-gratification of present athletes, many in the baseball world would like to see Gil's induction as a way of professing what the Hall should represent."
There are two ways for a player to be inducted. One is to be elected by the Baseball Writers Association, as Nolan Ryan, Robin Yount and George Brett were this past week. A player becomes eligible for consideration 5 years after retiring and can be reconsidered for as long as 15 years.
Then, after another gap of 5 years, a player can be elected by the Hall of Fame's Veterans Committee, which this year will announce its choices on March 2.
Nearly made it
While bridges and ball fields have been named for Hodges, some doubt he will ever make it to the Hall of Fame. Yet he has come closer than anyone without actually being elected. At various times, he earned more votes than 15 players who subsequently were elected.
In 1992, the margin was heart-breaking. The late Roy Campanella, a Hodges teammate, was seriously ill and could not attend the Veterans Committee meeting. Hodges missed induction by one vote.
Like Gough and D'Agostin, Alevy has earned a reputation as a drum-beater for Hodges. In 1997, when Petersburg, Ind., Hodges' boyhood home, unveiled a bust of the player, Alevy received a phoned invitation to the ceremony from the town's mayor, Randy Harris. "How did you get my name?" Alevy asked. "Oh, it's around," said Harris.
Alevy has a 1996 note from widow Joan Hodges. "Hope some day we will see each other in Cooperstown," she wrote.
The retired postman clings to that hope, but concedes that his idol's chances diminish each year.
"If he does get in," Alevy says, "You're going to hear me. I'm going to explode. I'm going to go straight up into the air."
You can write to individual members or the committee as a whole. In either case, the address is the same: c/o Baseball Hall of Fame, 25 Main Street, P.O. Box 590, Cooperstown, NY. 13326-0590
The members of the committee, which will announce its choices March 2 are: Ted Williams, Pee Wee Reese, Yogi Berra, Stan Musial, Buck O'Neil, Monte Irvin, Bill White, Juan Marichal, Joe Brown, Buzzi Bavasi, Hank Peters, Allen Lewis, Ken Coleman, Leonard Koppett, Jeorme Holtzman and Robert Broeg.
Tom Hennessy's column appears Sundays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. He can be reached at (562) 499-1270, or via email by clicking here