Sliders: For new Baseball Hall of Fame class, growing the game means rethinking the way in

New York Times

6 days ago

Welcome to Sliders, a weekly in-season MLB column that focuses on both the timely and timeless elements of the game.
COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. – Billy Wagner broke his right arm twice when he was 5 years old. He started throwing with his left hand instead and soon realized it was loaded with thunderbolts. Wagner's 100 mph heat was a rarity in his time and led him, eventually, to a Hall of Fame induction ceremony this weekend in Cooperstown, N.Y.
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Baseball may be a game of imitation, but breaking your dominant arm while hunting for velocity would be extreme.
'I would avoid that path,' Wagner said last week, on a Zoom call with reporters. 'I mean, that's a little painful.'
The sad fact is that too many aspiring pitchers shred their arms, anyway. When Wagner and CC Sabathia — who also goes into the Hall on Sunday, with Ichiro Suzuki, Dick Allen and Dave Parker — consider the future of their craft, the wide-ranging impact of youth development concerns them.
'I think some of these guys are coming into the game broken,' Sabathia said, adding that the 'insane' outbreak of Tommy John surgery starts with overuse at the younger levels. 'That was something that my dad fought against for me for a long time. He recognized that my arm was special, (and) he never let anybody pitch me more than one time on a weekend.'
Sabathia then outlined his plan for his 14-year-old son, Carter, who is 6-foot-2, 170 pounds and throws 85 mph.
'If I put him in the Perfect Game circuit right now, we'd be flying around everywhere, every weekend for him to pitch, and I won't do it,' Sabathia said. 'He plays third base, he plays center field, and he only pitches here with his local team in Jersey, and we'll get reps that way…. He's going to play other sports, and he's going to be as diverse an athlete as possible.'
Wagner — whose son, Will, is an infielder for the Toronto Blue Jays — has coached high school baseball in Virginia for years. He sees the same problems as Sabathia.
'When they get to the major-league level, they're running out of what we call runway,' Wagner said. 'And so they're injured because they've done all this massive training to get to that point, to chase their dream.'
He added: 'At the lower levels, there needs to be more joy in what we're doing to grow the game. It's not a job. We don't need to take lessons every single day to make the perfect swing. The swing comes because you're out in the backyard throwing up rocks and hitting them off a bat. You're playing sandlot baseball, you're playing Wiffle ball.'
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The rising expense of youth baseball has made it harder for lower-income families to afford. That's part of a multifaceted issue affecting the makeup of MLB rosters, which included just 6.2 percent Black players on opening day, down from a peak of more than 18 percent in the 1980s.
Sabathia is the first Black AL/NL starter elected to the Hall since Fergie Jenkins in 1991, and the third, with Jenkins and Bob Gibson, to record 3,000 strikeouts. Of the 20 pitchers with a 20-win season since Sabathia last did it, in 2010, only David Price is Black.
'I'm excited to be able to get up there and talk to (Fergie) about what it means, (but) the one thing that keeps crossing my mind, though, is like: who's next?' Sabathia said. 'I feel like, through the Players Alliance and some of the efforts that we're putting together for this next generation, I almost feel even more responsible now to be on guys about being that next Black Ace, whether it's Taj Bradley or now Chase Burns or Hunter Greene, or whoever else. I don't want to be the last Black pitcher to win 20 games, be in the Hall of Fame, to do all these things.'
Sabathia has stayed involved in MLB as part of the Commissioner's Ambassador Program, a group that has caused 'tension and an awkwardness' with the union, as The Athletic's Evan Drellich reported this week. To Sabathia, the open exchange of ideas is all positive.
'You can go to Rob (Manfred) and talk about whatever kind of problems you have,' Sabathia said. 'That's something that we didn't have when I was playing. I never got a chance to have the commissioner come and sit in the clubhouse and kind of go over what's happening during the season. So I'm trying to do whatever I can to help grow the game and point the game in a positive direction.'
The other living inductee this weekend, Suzuki, now serves as a special assistant to the chairman of the Seattle Mariners. He suits up before many games, refining his technique so he can help current players with theirs. To Suzuki, preserving the immeasurable aspects of baseball is vital to the essence of the sport.
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'Baseball is a game of human beings playing against human beings, and to have the passion and the energy that is created by that is something that I really hope is still part of the game,' he said through an interpreter. 'That's what I really value and is very important to me.'
Hobby shops line Main Street in Cooperstown, with treasures great and small, so it's fitting that baseball cards helped build the museum at the end of the block.
The Hall of Fame was around long before the memorabilia craze of the late 1980s and early 1990s, of course. But as Marq Evans explains in 'The Diamond King,' a compelling documentary released this year, a surprisingly profitable relationship between Donruss cards and the Hall brought a windfall that paid for new administrative offices and an expansion of the library.
Evans set out to tell the story of Dick Perez, the prolific artist who painted more than 400 portraits for a series of 'Diamond Kings' cards that appeared in Donruss sets from 1982 to 1996. Along the way, he learned how several connections — like the puzzle pieces within each pack — combined to grow the Hall of Fame.
'The Hall was a place I had wanted to go to my entire life, but it's hard to get to from Eastern Washington, where I grew up,' Evans said. 'So it was just really fascinating to hear that this artist and this company, Perez-Steele Galleries — and really the Diamond Kings — played such a part in making the place as magical as it is.'
Perez began painting portraits of Hall of Famers for the Hall to sell as postcards in 1979. The next year, a federal judge ruled against Topps' monopoly of the baseball card industry, allowing Fleer and Donruss to sell cards starting in 1981.
Bill Madden — a New York Daily News writer who also worked with Donruss and keenly followed the collectibles business — knew of Perez's Hall of Fame postcards and thought something similar could work for Donruss. Frank Steele was friendly with the Hall's then-chairman, Ed Stack, and negotiated a deal between the card company and the museum.
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The Hall would make Perez its official artist, endorse the fledgling card company and receive an escalating scale of royalties from every pack sold. Nobody knew how lucrative the relationship would be.
'The first year with Donruss, in 1981, they sold like $1 million worth of cards, and the Hall of Fame got some royalty off that, which was very small,' Evans said. 'And then just a couple of years later, they were doing like $80 million in sales — and not only, of course, is the royalty off that a much larger number, but the higher it went, the royalty percentage also went up. So all of a sudden, the Hall of Fame has a ton of money that they did not expect to have.'
Eventually, the oversaturation of the card market led to Donruss' demise. But Perez's work continues, and the Diamond Kings' legacy survives in the form of a permanently endowed internship program now in its 25th year. Peggy Steele, who owned and operated Perez-Steele Galleries, said that 33 alumni are returning this weekend to help with induction ceremonies.
'We always felt like you give back where you make it,' she said. 'That's where the Hall continues to benefit. If we hadn't had that relationship, it never would have happened.'
Tom Hamilton was born in Wisconsin in 1954, a year after Major League Baseball arrived in Milwaukee. The Braves would leave for Atlanta while Hamilton was still in grade school, but the Brewers arrived in his high school years, giving Hamilton a new team — and another set of broadcasters — to follow.
Hamilton, this year's Ford C. Frick Award winner for broadcasting excellence, has spent 36 seasons bringing the Cleveland Indians and Guardians to his radio listeners with gusto and verve. But his formative influences are all from Wisconsin: Earl Gillespie, Merle Harmon, Bob Uecker, Gary Bender and Eddie Doucette.
'Those were five incredible radio play-by-play guys in the three sports that I did: basketball, football and baseball,' Hamilton said recently. 'I didn't realize it, but it was like grad school.'
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Here are some thoughts from Hamilton on each of the five voices who set him on his path to Cooperstown.
Earl Gillespie: 'I got to do University of Wisconsin football with him for one year, and for me, that was like winning a jackpot. He was a guy that I had grown up — I don't want to say emulating, but a guy I had so much respect and admiration for as a broadcaster because he did the Braves. When they went to Atlanta, he wanted to stay back in Wisconsin. Then he did the Packers and Badgers on radio. So to do a year of University of Wisconsin football with Earl was kind of like: 'I'm playing center field next to Hank Aaron.''
Merle Harmon: 'Listen to Merle Harmon's football calls. He was the voice of the Jets when Joe Willie (Namath) won the Super Bowl. He was really good. He initially was the No. 1 guy for the Brewers, and Bob was the No. 2 guy. And the only reason Merle gave up the Brewers (was because) he was going to do the Olympics for NBC in 1980. He had to give up the Brewers to do it.'
Bob Uecker: 'Well, he was so funny — none of us can be that — but I don't think Bob's ever been given credit for how good he was at play-by-play. He was phenomenal, to the point that when I started going out on my own and doing games, I had to make sure I wasn't imitating Bob — you know, 'get up, get out of here, gone!' There's only one Bob. But I think because he was so accomplished in everything else and is noted for the movies, the beer commercials, Johnny Carson, I don't think he got enough recognition for being an incredible play-by-play guy on radio.'
Gary Bender: 'He was at Madison, he was a sports anchor, but he did Badger football and Packer football. And then he went from Madison to be the main guy for CBS. He did the Final Four, the North Carolina State-Houston game. And the one thing about those four guys — Earl, Merle, Bob, Gary Bender — they were as good of people, if not better, than they were broadcasters. And they were incredible broadcasters.'
Eddie Doucette: 'I never got to know Eddie, but he was doing Milwaukee Bucks basketball on radio when they had Lew Alcindor and Oscar Robertson. And Eddie, oh my god — energetic creativity. He's the one that came up with the 'jack-knife jumper' and 'into the low post in the toaster to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.' He came up with Bobby 'The Greyhound' Dandridge, and the 'sky hook' for Kareem. I've never been that creative, but those are all terms he used. That's why I always said about Hawk (Harrelson): 'When people are imitating your calls or your vocabulary, that sets you apart from everybody.''
The 75 percent threshold for election to the Hall of Fame serves two purposes. It's a high enough figure to be a landslide, but low enough so a few misguided voters can't influence the outcome. The result is what matters — in or out? The rest is just details.
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Of course, one detail of Ichiro Suzuki's election has generated plenty of conversation: He fell a single vote short of joining Mariano Rivera as the only unanimous electees to Cooperstown. That very fact shows that there's always been a lot of curious, stray votes among the hundreds in each election.
The point is that Suzuki cleared 75 percent. And while there's no excuse for even one voter to pass over such a decorated candidate, remember that writers used to be really, really stingy.
Consider the case of Yogi Berra, who hit 30 homers twice and batted .300 four times, qualifying him for the center square of last Saturday's Grid. Berra did pretty much everything else, too: three MVP awards, 10 World Series titles, 15 years in a row as an All-Star, the life of a legend.
Yet when Berra first came before the Baseball Writers' Association of America, for the 1971 election, only 242 of 360 voters checked his box — 28 shy of election. Could you imagine? In fact, nobody was elected on that 1971 ballot, which featured 16 players who eventually would get plaques.
'Sure I'm disappointed,' Berra told Dick Young of the New York Daily News. 'But then, DiMag didn't make it his first year, either.'
At the time, only four candidates had been elected on the first ballot since the initial class of 1936: Bob Feller, Jackie Robinson, Ted Williams and Stan Musial. Some fairly decent players — Jimmie Foxx, Mel Ott and, yes, Joe DiMaggio — were forced to wait their turn.
Players now must wait five years to be included on the ballot, but DiMaggio, who retired after the 1951 World Series, was deemed eligible in 1953. Yet the writers made him get in line behind Dizzy Dean and Al Simmons, who both made it on their ninth try. DiMaggio fell 81 votes short.
In 1954, DiMaggio missed by 14 votes, with Bill Dickey (ninth ballot), Rabbit Maranville (14th) and Bill Terry (14th) getting the call. DiMaggio finally made it in 1955, and Berra got in easily on his second try, in 1972, with newcomer Sandy Koufax and 300-game winner Early Wynn, who had been denied three times.
'It is great to make it, whether it takes one, two, three or four years,' Berra said then. 'It doesn't matter.'
It's been 10 years since a newly elected Hall of Fame duo matched up precisely with their years in the game. Randy Johnson and John Smoltz, from the class of 2015, both started in 1988 and finished in 2009. Now it's CC Sabathia and Ichiro Suzuki, who made their MLB debuts in 2001 and played their final games in 2019.
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When speaking about Suzuki, Sabathia often mentions a game that served as a fulcrum in his career. On July 30, 2005, with Cleveland, Sabathia took the mound in Seattle after one of his worst starts ever: an eight-run shelling in Oakland. It brought his ERA to 5.24 and prompted a meaningful bullpen session with Indians pitching coach Carl Willis.
'I was trying to learn an out pitch,' Sabathia recalled last week. 'I was getting to two strikes and I was getting a lot of foul balls. I couldn't get a strikeout. And we went down to the bullpen in Oakland and he taught me how to throw a cutter, and it came out like an 82 mph slider. And I was like, 'Oh, this thing is good. I'm taking this into the game.''
Against Suzuki in Seattle, however, Sabathia's new cutter/slider met its match.
'I throw him a slider, (he) hits it off the window in Safeco,' Sabathia said, referring to a second-level restaurant at the Mariners' ballpark, then known as Safeco Field. 'I was like, 'All right, you know, that's Ichi. I could keep throwing this thing.' Comes back up later in the game, I throw it to him (on a 1-1) pitch, he takes it deep again.
'But that ends up being, like, the best pitch of my career, right? It changed my career, being able to throw that pitch. And he just peppered it off the window.'
Sabathia was right about his new pitch. He lost that day in Seattle but went 9-1 over the final two months in 2005, a stretch that marked the beginning of a 7 1/2 year prime. Before that start in Seattle, Sabathia's career ERA was 4.26. From August 2005 through the end of the 2012 season, it was 3.10.
All he needed was to weather Suzuki's two homers and keep his confidence in the new pitch – which, apparently, was easy to do. After all, as Sabathia said, 'That's Ichi.'
(Top photo, l-r, of Suzuki, Sabathia and Wagner in January 2025: New York Yankees / Getty Images)