Enshrining Gil in our own way

In the summer of 2002, Jon Newman and I decided to tie our fortunes together by severing our umbilical cord to The Martin Agency and finding a place to hang a shingle of our own.

Our first question: what would we put on that shingle?

We bandied about some ideas, quickly determining that we didn’t want to name our inchoate agency after ourselves – thereby forestalling any discussion about top billing.  Nor were we inclined to come up with some catchy name that we might someday regret, pretty much like anyone who’s ever gotten a lower-back tattoo. No, what we needed was a name that reflected an intersection of our lives, something with meaning and relevance and resonance…

Jon and I both spent our “wonder years” in the shadow of the Big Apple – he among the future Springsteen groupies of New Jersey and me perhaps running into a boyhood Jerry Seinfeld, who grew up likely making wry observations one town over on Long Island. While we lived on either side of Queens, we both made regular summer pilgrimages to Flushing to watch our beloved Mets. I wanted to be Ron Swoboda while Jon did his best Art Shamsky imitation on schoolyard diamonds.

Our greatest reverence, however, was reserved for the manager of the 1969 Mets, the Dodger great Gil Hodges, who took a rag-tag group of mostly nobodies and taught them how to win – to win so much that the team he skippered so masterfully that summer won 100 games, eight more than the second-place Cubs and an “amazin’” 27 games more than the year before when the Mets took ninth place in the National League, just squeezing by the lowly Astros by a game. Counted out prior to the start of the Series, the Mets dispatched the Orioles in five games, and long-suffering fans poured onto the field to celebrate – a 45-year-old memory still embedded vividly in my mind.

Gil, of course, knew how to win from his own playing days in Brooklyn. He helped the Dodgers to seven National League pennants and two World Series titles. He won three Gold Gloves, was named to eight All Star games, drove in more than 100 runs in seven straight seasons and hit more than 20 homers for more than a decade straight. His 370 home runs are more than were hit by Hall of Famers Ralph Kiner, Joe DiMaggio, Yogi Berra, Hank Greenberg, Johnny Mize and many others. How many more homers might he have hit had his professional career not been delayed by his service in the Marine Corps during World War II, for which his country honored him with the Bronze Star?

And yet, despite these heroics – on and off the field – Gil Hodges has never been elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, and given the vote just taken by the Golden Era Committee, it’s likely now he never will.

It’s disappointing, and the modest Gil shrine that we have built at our Shockoe Bottom offices – photos and baseball cards, Shea Stadium seats and even a 1962 Aqua-Velva point-of-purchase display – is a far cry from the honor that he deserves.

In the 1952 World Series, Gil endured an 0 for 21 hitless streak, a miserable slump that continued the following spring. One Brooklyn priest took to the pulpit to entreat his flock to “say a prayer for Gil Hodges.”

More than a half-century later, we still are.