LIFE Baseball Hall of Fame

There’s an avid sense of community among Baseball Hall of Famers, due in part to their collective understanding of what it means to play the game at such an exceptional level for so long, as well as for the not unrelated realization that there are so very few of them. Seventy-six living members by the Hall of Fame’s November 2020 reckoning. In early April there were 82. “I don’t want to keep posting the passing of another @baseballhall friend,” tweeted Dave Winfield, Hall of Fame 2001, on October 12. “With Joe Morgan today, it’s just too much. We’re talking about extraordinary people and great players we’re losing.” Some years ago, early 2010s, I rode to a charity event in a large limousine with five such Hall of Fame players—Johnny Bench, Wade…

The flower shop Lou Brock opened in 1969 in the St. Louis suburb of Clayton was called the Flower Shop, not Lou Brock’s Flower Shop, because its proprietor didn’t think his day job as one of the best players in baseball had much to do with his side-line selling plants. Brock and botany were both associated with green grass, deep roots and—for a few years, anyway—ivy. But Brock saw only one parallel between his two worlds. “It grows,” he said of his shop and its inventory. “And I grow with it.” Brock spent years on the soil—standing 15 feet off first base, poised to steal second—and bloomed anew every spring. He thrived in summer, powered by sunshine, a pair of red birds on his chest. Like those Cardinals, the Gateway Arch,…

Thank you Mr. Commissioner for the kind introduction. Ladies and gentlemen, it’s a pleasure to be here this afternoon to join in all the festivities and to rub shoulders with some of the greatest players who have ever played major league baseball. You know the dream of every professional athlete is to leave his mark upon his chosen sport. The desire of every professional athlete is to blaze a trail so long and wide that it would take a person to perform at a Hall-of-Fame level just to measure up. The Hall of Fame has been described by many as a museum for greatness. It also has been described as a place for those players who stepped into the pressure of the moment and emerged as heroes, and that their feats…

His windup was a distinctive piece of choreography, ending with him firing the baseball with such force it seemed his body might go with it, before his momentum took him toward first base, momentarily off-balance, as if pulled by a magnet. And yet the lasting image of Bob Gibson includes no motion at all. It is of Gibson standing perfectly still on the mound, glaring in at the batter with his St. Louis Cardinals cap pulled down to just above his eyes. “Bob Gibson’s demeanor,” Tim McCarver, his long-time catcher, once said, “was as menacing and terrifying as any athlete I’ve ever come across in any sport.” Gibson, who died of pancreatic cancer at age 84, will be remembered not just for throwing heat but for exuding it, intimidating batters…

Thank you. First of all I’d like to thank the members of the Baseball Writers’ Association that voted for me. I would also like to thank my family. A number of them are here, all of them couldn’t come because there aren’t enough hotel rooms. I also would like to thank a great number of people that came from Omaha. There might be 20 or 30 people that drove up. And just for them caring, that many people came that far. It is extra special. I really feel uncomfortable talking about myself—unless it’s in a smoke-filled room. So I won’t spend too much time talking about myself. No one ever gets to the Hall of Fame without the help of a lot of people and what I would like to do,…

Joe Morgan knew he was appreciated by Cincinnati Reds fans, but not how deeply until 20 years after he had won his first of two straight National League Most Valuable Player awards. It was 1995 and Morgan was in Cincinnati as a broadcaster with ESPN. Nineteen ninety-five is also the last year that the Reds won a postseason series. In Morgan’s first five seasons with the Reds (1972–76), they won five, including two World Series. When the Jumbotron video board at Riverfront Stadium showed Morgan in the ESPN booth early that evening, a buzz began in the crowd. He looked up, and that buzz swelled to a roar and a standing ovation as the crowd saw Morgan’s luminous smile. “They didn’t forget,” said Morgan, who’d just assumed they had. Morgan, who died on October…