Baseball Hall of Fame

Trade of base burglar Brock swiped the Cubs’ future, made Cards champs

By George Castle, CBM Historian
September 8, 2020

Lou Brock in the Polo Grounds, where in 1962 he slugged a 460-foot homer to center.

Lou Brock in the Polo Grounds, where in 1962 he slugged a 460-foot homer to center.

The true measure of Louis Clark Brock goes far beyond his Hall of Fame status, 938 stolen bases — including 14 in the World Series and an NL record 118 in 1974 – along with 3,023 hits.

The complete tally is Brock’s baseball intellect. He was a true student of the game whose bottom line was striving to improve. And those “smarts,” as baseball second-sight was once called, radically affected the fortunes of the Chicago Cubs and St. Louis Cardinals, the two teams to which Brock will always be tethered now that he has passed into the ages at 81, less than a week after worthy foe Tom Seaver.

Ever since June 15, 1964, one of the most infamous days in Cubs history, Brock has been the biggest ghost in the franchise timeline, the all-encompassing “What if?” that took away MVP-style production along with heart and soul from sports’ most star-crossed team.

The Cubs were a slow, ponderous team, and not just on the basepaths. A substandard baseball organization starved for both financial and intellectual capital by Phil Wrigley, likely baseball’s most affluent owner in his time, and then for decades by the Tribune Company could not nearly put together a championship-caliber team for an impossibly long time. All the while when the Cubs could advance just one base at a time, they had squandered away base burglar Brock and Bill North, two-time American League stolen-base king.

Three-hundred miles down Route 66/I-55 and in a more tropical climate, the Cardinals quenched their own 18-year pennant drought by stealing Brock from the Cubs in exchange for aching right-hander Ernie Broglio. Both team and man were simultaneously freed from shackles. Brock stole 33 bases and batted .348 in two-thirds of the remaining 1964 season, as if afterburners were suddenly affixed to Gussie Busch’s franchise. Busch paid decently, for the time, and Brock well-earned his pay leading the Cards to two World Series triumphs and three pennants to round out the Sixties.

STORY >>

Category Chicago Baseball History Feature Tags , , ,
 

Injuries, not alcoholism, shortened the career of Dick Allen

By David J. Fletcher, MD, President, Chicago Baseball Museum
May 18, 2020

Last week, noted baseball writer and Hall of Fame prognosticator Jay Jaffe, author of The Cooperstown Casebook wrote a column for ESPN entitled “Every NL team’s best player not in the Hall of Fame — and should he get in?” [1]

Dick Allen belongs in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Photo courtesy of Dr. David Fletcher, M.D.

That story ignited a firestorm from Dick Allen supporters who  are trying to get him elected this December to the Baseball Hall of Fame when the Golden Days Era Veteran’s committee meets in Dallas at the Baseball Winter meetings.

“Dick retired because he had a bad Achilles tendon suffered in 1974 while playing with the White Sox. In fact he told the Phillies that before they made the trade for him in 1975. They didn’t care, they didn’t let the media know he was injured nor the opposing teams. They wanted him to bat 5th to protect Schmidt and Luzinski.  Ultimately it worked in 1976 when the Phillies won their first Championship of any kind since the 1950 Whiz Kids,” stated former Philadelphia Phillies groundskeeper named Mark “Froggy” Carfagno, who has since 2013 run a nonstop crusade to get Dick Allen elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Visit the Dick Allen belongs in the Hall of Fame FaceBook group…

Reading that Allen’s alcohol issues shortened his career was another gut punch to Froggy, who had endured the pain in San Diego when Allen in December 2014 received 11 of 16 votes — or one short of the number required for election to the class of 2015 via the Golden Era committee.

Since that painful day in December 2014, Froggy has continuously campaigned for Dick Allen, now 78 years old and failing health, to get elected him to the National Baseball Hall of Fame the next time the Golden Days era committee met.

STORY >>

Category Chicago Baseball History Feature Tags , , , ,
 

Divergent personalities Smith, Baines now linked by HOF induction

By on December 13, 2018

Lee Arthur Smith and Harold Baines cannot be more unlike as personalities.

To say Big Lee is raucous, riotous and ribald is putting it mildly. Stick around the man-mountain of a Giants roving minor-league pitching coach even a few minutes, and you’re likely to be doubled over in laughter. If Smith keeps the discourse to a hard-R rating, he’s keeping it clean by his standards. Good ol’ country hardball was his ticket to the majors. Despite his numerous big-league travels, he still identifies as a Cub and desires to be enshrined as a Cub.

Baines?  He’s known to everyone as Harold, we almost forget his last name. Baines used one or two words where a sentence might have been appropriate. Chicago radio talk-meister Les Grobstein once rated Harold practically his worst interview, and not because of any Dave Kingman-style hostility. He just didn’t fill up sound bites for mic jockeys.  And, like Big Lee, Harold put on a slew of uniforms, yet is as loyal a White Sox figure as they come with his number retired and statue in the outfield.

New Hall-of-Famer Baines always a fan favorite shows off his 2005 ring

Smith and Baines are now bound forever by pending induction into the Hall of Fame. Despite their contrasting personal styles, their links did not begin with the uncommon dual voting-in Dec. 9 by the Today’s Game Era Committee, the latest incarnation of the Hall of Fame Veteran’s Committee. That panel went many long years without choosing anyone while frustrating Ron Santo, only opening the door with a guilty conscience posthumously for Santo. To wave in two at one time is an old-school CBS-Radio net-alert bulletin.

Smith and Baines were both recruited from off-the-main-road small towns by fellow Hall of Famers. Buck O’Neil found Big Lee in tiny Castor, La., making him the No. 2 Cubs draft choice in 1975. Bill Veeck himself discovered Baines in Easton, Md., on the state’s quaint Eastern Shore where Baseball’s Barnum had established his getaway home. Harold was picked No. 1 by the Sox in the 1977 draft.

STORY >>

Category Chicago Baseball History Feature Tags , , , , , , ,
 

Good guy Jim Thome punches express ticket to Hall of Fame

By on January 25, 2018

A patient man at the plate, Jim Thome did not have to wait one extra second to gain entrance into the Hall of Fame.

Move over, Leo Durocher. Nice guys do finish first. And on his first year of eligibility, Thome finished third when voting totals were  announced Jan. 24 after Chipper Jones and Vladimir Guerrero to garner nearly 90 percent of the vote. All-time closer Trevor Hoffman slipped in as the fourth 2018 inductee.

Thome was  baseball fan who mimicked childhood idol Dave Kingman’s swing long before he slugged the first of 612 career homers. But after already touring Cooperstown with father Chuck Thome, he’ll enjoy sports’ greatest museum in his next visit as a fan as much as a fresh inductee.

“There were so many, many things,” he said in a teleconference about the Hall’s top attractions. “Walking through the front doors gives you chills enough. Going into the basement and putting on the white gloves and touching Babe Ruth’s items…and Lou Gehrig’s. The Hall of Fame is so magical. It’s the greatest place there is. One day doesn’t do it justice. You need to spend two or three to truly understand the great things in their place. It’s truly special.”

Jim Thome (right) and fellow former Sox Mike Huff at the Bulls/Sox Academy in Lisle, Ill. in 2013

Character should count for a lion’s share of an inductee’s votes. Thome is the pride of Peoria, who grew up as a Cubs fan in the central Illinois city and starred for the White Sox from 2006 to 2009. He had baseball good-citizen status in gobs.

 

STORY >>

Category Chicago Baseball History Feature Tags , ,