The Gil Legacy at Hodges
In October 1969, I was a seventh grader at Weldon E. Howitt Jr. High School in Farmingdale on New York’s Long Island. I lived two miles from the school, just a few feet from qualifying for a bus. But the 20-minute walk each way was rarely a chore, mostly a chance to cluster with other “walkers” for the trek home, our books tightly bound by those rubber straps with hooks on the ends of them. No one had backpacks back then.
Never did those two miles seem so long as that October. That was the year that the Mets, the team that had lost 89 games the year before, plopping them deservedly in ninth place in the National League, made a late-season charge to pass the Cubs, trounce the Braves in the first League Championship Series only to find themselves, lo and behold, in the World Series against the heavily favored Baltimore Orioles.
In those days, World Series games were played during the day. Occasionally you’d get a cool PE teacher who had a transistor radio and would give you updates to the score of the game, but once that final bell sounded, it was time to sprint home to try to catch a few remaining innings. I think I would have outraced Forrest Gump in speeding my way down Heisser Lane to Sullivan Avenue. The streets were filled with kids just like me, running with abandon toward their home TVs. I have a vivid memory of getting home in time at the end of Game 4 when Ron Swoboda made this leaping catch. The Mets would win it on a bunt play in the bottom of the 10th behind a strong outing from their ace, Tom Seaver. The next day they’d become World Series champs.
That memory was among the highlights of my childhood, and so it was as well for a 9-year-old kid from Bayonne, N.J. whom I would meet 32 years later and with whom I would begin this abiding partnership. When it came time to name our inchoate little agency, we looked for an intersection of our lives, a mutual touchstone. We found it in that 1969 World Series, and with little more thought, agreed to honor the manager of that heroic bunch of rag-tag kids who brought the Series trophy home to Queens. Gil Hodges had been a beloved former Dodger great, winning the hearts and affections of people around the country.
When Cleon Jones was hit on the shoe by a pitch in the fifth and deciding game, the umpire ruled at first that the ball had simply hit the dirt. But when the ball rolled into the Mets dugout and Hodges noticed a smudge of shoe polish on it, he showed it to the umpire who reversed his call and awarded Jones first base. Only by virtue of Gil’s integrity would that be possible.
And so as the Mets prepare to take the field for their franchise’s fifth World Series, we at The Hodges Partnership celebrate it with an extra measure of pride and sentiment. It’s a fitting occasion to honor and remember the man who brought the Mets its first championship, and the one that will always be the most special.
Here’s a fitting tribute.
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