2. Hodges was the best first baseman in baseball over a 12-year period . Hodges Ranks, 1948–59
No.
All MLB
First Basemen
Home Runs
344
2
1
RBI
1,186
2
1
Total Bases
3,184
3
1
Extra-Base Hits
669
3
1
Runs
1,032
3
1
Hits
1,781
4
1
WAR
44.3
13
1
3. Hodges also was the best first baseman of his time on defense.
He won three Gold Gloves and would have won more—but the award did not begin until 1957. Hodges won the first three handed out, beginning when he was 33 years old.
4. Hodges engineered the greatest upset in baseball history.
The Mets had never won more than 73 games entering 1969. With an offense that ranked next-to-last in OPS, Hodges expertly deployed platoons at several positions and led the Mets to 100 wins and one of the most iconic Cinderella stories in pro sports. The Mets ran down Hall of Famer Leo Durocher’s 92-win Cubs team, then went 7–1 in the postseason while taking out the 93-win Braves and the 109-win Orioles of Hall of Famer Earl Weaver.
5. Hodges was an innovator. He popularized the five-man rotation, which became an industry standard. He did so to protect and develop young pitchers such as Seaver, Nolan Ryan, Jerry Koosman and Tug McGraw, all of whom were between 21 and 25 years old when Hodges joined the Mets. Those four pitchers threw a combined 85 seasons in the major leagues.
6. Hodges has the most Hall of Fame support of any player not elected.
In BBWAA voting, Hodges received more votes than 27 eventual Hall of Famers 146 times. Hodges is the only player to get 50% support from the writers and pass through the Veterans Committee and still not be elected to the Hall—and he did so four times .
7. Hodges had enough votes to be elected in 1993, only to be denied by a technicality. Hodges and Leon Day received 12 of the 16 votes (75%, the threshold for enshrinement) by the 1993 Veterans Committee, only to have committee chair Ted Williams disallow the vote of Roy Campanella because Campanella, one of Hodges’s former teammates, did not attend the meeting in person. Campanella was in the hospital and would be dead in three months.
With Campanella’s ballot rejected, Hodges and Day fell one vote short (73.3%, 11 of the 15 votes). Two years later, the committee elected Day but not Hodges. Instead, it also elected Richie Ashburn. Hodges was on the same writers’ ballot as Ashburn 14 times and received more support than Ashburn every time. And it wasn’t even close. Hodges received twice as many votes as Ashburn across those 14 writers’ ballots, 2,773–1,274.
