Nearly 20 years ago, I was teaching English at a brand-new high school in New York City.* Because the school was new, everyone had grand plans and visions for what the school would be and what it would offer its students; in this, its second year, the school had brought in its first Physical Education teacher (and de facto Athletic Director), and part of his vision was for the school to compete interscholastically in the City’s Public School Athletic League (PSAL). Although it was a very small, specialized performing-arts high school with a disproportionately-female population, the A.D. and I were sanguine about fielding a boys’ baseball team.
[* — I wasn’t there for very long; it turned out to be a deeply-corrupt place run by wholly-despicable people, but that’s a story for another day...]
At some point during the school year, when this vision appeared to be approaching reality thanks to the A.D.’s efforts with the PSAL, he asked me how I felt about coaching boys’ varsity baseball, and without hesitation I said Yes, absolutely. We started spreading the word, recruiting players, ordering equipment, designing uniforms, figuring out where we were going to practice and play home games in the various City parks near and around the school’s location, and lining up the various training sessions, coaching clinics, and CPR courses I (and the girls’ softball coach) would have to take to be certified as coaches in time for the season.
Suffice to say it was one of the most exciting times of my teaching career; coaching baseball was always a dream of mine but I could never even sniff that opportunity in the large, established, comprehensive high school where I had taught for four years previously. This was a chance not only to put my love of the game to work, but to build a program literally from the ground up.
I remember the first coaching clinic I went to; the instructor asked each of us which past or current sports coach we would most like to emulate, or be compared to. As we went around the room with each person present naming his or her preference, I thought about it for a moment and when it came to be my turn, I announced without hesitation:
“Gil Hodges.”
The instructor responded with an eyebrow-raise of surprise and approval, as though he were not expecting that response from anyone but was pleased to hear it from someone.
A few years prior, at my previous school, the English department had a box full of 64 paperback copies of Roger Kahn’s The Boys of Summer, one of the greatest books about baseball ever written, about the author’s experience covering the legendary Brooklyn Dodgers of the early 1950’s and catching up with some of the ballplayers — Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, and more — 20 years later. My colleague in charge of the book room told me these books were going to be thrown out, but I said, “No, I’ll take them.” So I took them, and used them every year around the start of the baseball season.
“You may glory in a team triumphant,” wrote Kahn in the book’s prologue, “but you fall in love with a team in defeat.” Those Dodgers were awesomely good, beloved by their fans and their community, and groundbreaking in terms of integrating baseball — but were just unable to beat the mighty Yankees in the World Series (losing in both years that Kahn covered the team, ‘52 and ‘53, having lost in ‘47 and ‘49 as well with the heartbreak of ‘51, Bobby Thompson’s “Shot Heard ‘Round the World,” in between). When they finally reached the top of that mountain in 1955 Kahn’s days covering the team were long over. Three years later they were gone to L.A.; two years after that, Ebbets Field fell to the wrecker’s ball.
You can’t read The Boys of Summer and not fall in love with those Dodgers, as a team and as individuals. It was the heartbreak, as Kahn wrote, that made you love and admire them even more. Duke Snider was one of the greatest players of his era; Pee Wee Reese was a prince; Roy Campanella, a pioneer; and Jackie Robinson was, well, Jackie Robinson. But with each reading of The Boys of Summer the man I came to admire most of all was the one core member of that team who, unlike the four I just mentioned, was not in the Baseball Hall of Fame: first baseman Gil Hodges.
As a longtime Mets fan born more than a decade after the Dodgers left Brooklyn, I knew of Hodges as the manager of the 1969 “Miracle Mets,” whose number 14 hung on the wall at Shea Stadium and who died suddenly of a heart attack right before the 1972 season. The more I read about Hodges, both in Kahn’s book and elsewhere, the more I came to understand who he was and why he was so revered by his teammates and by the players he managed. Sure, he was probably the greatest right-handed-fielding first baseman of all time, one of the best right-handed power hitters of his generation, and an absolute RBI machine (driving in over 1,300 runs on about 1,900 hits), but he was so much more than that. He was a fierce yet humble competitor; played his heart out, but never argued with an umpire, never ejected from a game or even cussed on the field by most accounts. On the field he was big, sure-handed and strong; off the field he was humble, congenial, and kind. He was a war hero, earning a Bronze Star in the Battle of Okinawa, who never talked about his war-heroism. He may have been the only Dodger never to get booed at Ebbets Field. He played the game, and lived the game, with dignity and class that have seldom if ever been equaled.
And that’s without taking into account how his 1969 Mets have described him as a manager, taking a team that had never finished above ninth place in the National League to a world championship. Ed Kranepool said of Hodges, “he was a strict disciplinarian, but he was a great leader,” and it was “because of his leadership that we … went from the last-place laughingstock to a championship team in ’69.” Art Shamsky marveled at Hodges’s ability to get players to think of the team first; “when he talked, we listened.” Jerry Koosman said, “He left a lifetime impression with each of us. He shined. He made us all shine.” Rod Gaspar said of the 1969 World Series celebration, “Gil stayed out of the limelight. He wanted us to enjoy it. ... Gil wanted us to get the credit. He called us ‘his boys.’” And Tom Seaver always and often credited Hodges with turning those boys into men. "He brought what we as young athletes, professional athletes, were missing, which was the understanding of the definition of professionalism."
That’s who I wanted to be, as a coach. I couldn’t hope to equal the man.
At our first team meeting, I gave each of the boys a copy of The Boys of Summer, which I still had from my previous school. For years by then I’d been assigning that book to my English classes (although I couldn’t do it at that school, for reasons I’d rather not get into), and had also been assigning an article about Hodges for a persuasive-writing/Regents-preparation unit, the task being to read the material and make a case for why Hodges belongs — or does not belong — in the Baseball Hall of Fame. It became a crusade for me, an injustice among other injustices that had grabbed my interest back then. And like everything else that grabs my interest, I wanted everyone else to know about it too.
When we ordered the uniforms, I deliberately excluded #14; although I could have worn it myself, I preferred to “retire” the number in Hodges’s honor, as the Mets did. I had picked up a round Mets #14 patch in Cooperstown the previous summer, and sewed it onto the left sleeve of my jersey. I put Hodges’ picture up on the fence behind the bench during every game. I emphasized to the players what I saw as Hodges’s core values — dignity and class — throughout the season, and renamed the end-of-school-year award for excellence in sportsmanship, effort, dedication, &c., the Gil Hodges Award.
I can’t say for sure how much or how well I was able to impart Hodges’ influence, along with my own, to those boys, who are well into their 30s by now. I remember that first year, after the last game of the season, played not far from where Ebbets Field once stood, I gathered them round, read to them aloud from the prologue of The Boys of Summer, and wept because I would miss them so much. I coached them for three years, until all of the players I started with graduated, then moved on to other career paths.
I wonder if any of them thought of me last night, or today, when they learned that Hodges has finally been granted the honor that he always so richly deserved and, like his Dodgers, had come so close to attaining so often that its very elusiveness had become a tragedy in itself:
Gil Hodges is a Hall of Famer. At last.