With Hodges, HOF infield finally complete

There was an infield once, was there ever. They were something to see, those Cincinnati Reds of the 1970s, the team known as the Big Red Machine. The infield would have had four future Hall of Famers in it: Johnny Bench, Tony Perez, Joe Morgan and Pete Rose. But Rose isn’t in the Hall of Fame, so there were only three Hall of Famers in that infield, for one of the best baseball teams of all time.

A half-century before that, there was the infield for the 1927 New York Giants, four of whom wound up in the Hall. Bill Terry and Rogers Hornsby made it via the regular ballot; later, Travis Jackson and Freddie Lindstrom joined them, voted in by the Veterans Committee.

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And now there is another Hall of Fame infield like that, the Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1950s, the Boys of Summer, one of the most beloved baseball teams of them all, even if they only won one World Series in the end. The late Gil Hodges finally made it to Cooperstown this weekend, the end of a long baseball journey for the family of a great baseball player, manager and man who died too young and was ignored by the voters and the various committees acting as gatekeepers for Cooperstown for far too long.

So now, at long last, he takes his rightful place beside Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella and Pee Wee Reese. There are four Hall of Famers from that infield at Ebbets Field, with another Hall of Famer, Duke Snider, the Duke of Flatbush, in center field.

And always remember that the other member of that infield, Billy Cox, was one of the best defensive third basemen of his time, maybe the best ever. The best line about Cox was the one about him going to the line and stuffing doubles in his glove.

That was some infield they had in Brooklyn. That was some baseball time. And Hodges was a huge part of it. He played a beautiful first base and he knocked in more than 100 runs for seven consecutive seasons before he finally retired with 370 lifetime home runs. He was already a giant of baseball in New York City before he became the man who managed the Miracle Mets of 1969 all the way to the Canyon of Heroes.

And then he was gone a few years later, two days shy of his 48th birthday, from a heart attack.

“He was,” Jackie Robinson said at the time, “the core of the Brooklyn Dodgers.”

Now, they are all together in Cooperstown, in memory and in spirit: Jackie at second, Gil at first, Pee Wee at short and Campy behind the plate. And Cox, who really did keep stuffing doubles in his glove. There have been other infields in baseball history. There has never been a better or more accomplished one than that one. Or one more loved.

“People always talk about what a great ballplayer Gil was,” Snider told me one time. “But that’s not the way I remember him. I remember a truly great man. And if they forgot between when he retired and when he started managing, those ’69 Mets sure made people remember.”

“We couldn’t have done it without [Gil Hodges],” Tom Seaver said more than once.

Campy, Hodges, Jackie and Pee Wee. Again: There have been other infields to remember. Never one better than this. There was as much romance attached to them -- and to that team -- as there would be later with the Knicks of Walt "Clyde" Frazier, Willis Reed, Bill Bradley, Dave DeBusschere and Earl "The Pearl" Monroe. Journalist Pete Hamill once referred to that team as the “Basie band of basketball.”

But then Pete, a child of Brooklyn who would later talk about Jackie Robinson integrating the stands at Ebbets Field as much as he did Major League Baseball, would add, “But they had nothing on my Dodgers, on a summer afternoon.”

And finally, for all of them, for the Dodgers and their fans, came 1955, when they finally beat the Yankees to win it all. Their first baseman, in the end, was right there for them when they needed him most, after starting out 1-for-12 in the World Series. Hodges hit a two-run homer to put the Dodgers ahead in Game 4, and later drove in a run as Brooklyn won, 8-5. He scored the Dodgers’ first run in Game 5, another they went on to win.

Then, in Game 7, still the greatest sports day in Brooklyn history, Hodges drove in Campanella to put the Dodgers ahead, 1-0, and later hit a sacrifice fly. Those marked the only Brooklyn runs on the day they became baseball champions of the world. The last out that of the game was Reese throwing Elston Howard’s grounder across the diamond to Hodges.

Now, nearly 66 years later, Hodges makes it to Cooperstown. He joins the other members of that Dodgers infield who made it before him. It turns out that the last out in ’55 wasn’t the end of the story for the Boys of Summer. Hodges making the Hall is.