Last year I got this email from Craig Muder, the Director of Communications National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum:
Dear Mark,
Thank you very much for your note.
Please understand that the Hall of Fame is not—and never has been—involved in electing candidates for enshrinement. The Baseball Writers’ Association of America (BBWAA) and the committees on managers, umpires, executives and long-retired players are the only bodies that elect eligible candidates to the Hall of Fame.
Election to the Baseball Hall of Fame is the greatest honor in all of sport. Only a little more than one percent of all the 23,000-plus men who have played Major League Baseball are enshrined at the Hall of Fame.
Joe Judge had a wonderful big league career and remains eligible for Hall of Fame election… Joe Judge would be considered in Classic Baseball Era election since he spent the entirety of his career in that era. To write a letter of support for Joe Judge to the Historical Overview Committee, you can use the following address:
Historical Overview Committee
Baseball Hall of Fame
25 Main Street
Cooperstown, NY 13326
All letters of support for any candidate are made available to the Historical Overview Committee should they ask to see them. Only letters sent by standard mail can be accepted.
Thank you again for your interest in the Baseball Hall of Fame. We hope to see you soon in Cooperstown!
Sincerely,
Craig Muder
Director of Communications
National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum
I’ve been trying to get my grandfather Joe Judge into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame for decades, and Craig Muder’s nice and formative note has encouraged me to try a new angle: I’m appealing directly to Joe Posnanski for help. Posnanski is one of America’s best-know baseball writers, the author of Why We Love Baseball, The Baseball 100, and my favorite, The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O'Neil's America. Posnanski’s forthcoming book is Fifty Seasons: Stories of the Baseball Years That Echo. In it Posnanski praises, with two entries, Barry Bonds, who cheated using steroids. It’s coming out in March.
Posnanski is also the author of “The Outsiders,” a list of the best baseball players who are not in the Hall of Fame.
It’s insane that my grandfather Joe Judge is not on that list.
Joe Judge played major league baseball for 20 years, and then coached at Georgetown University for another 20 years. He played first base for the Washington Senators from 1915-1930, and then for the Brooklyn Dodgers and Boston Red Sox during his last two years in the bigs. In his 18 years in major league baseball, he had a .298 batting average, 2352 hits, 433 doubles, 1037 RBIs, 1500 double plays, and led the American League in fielding five times. He hit .385 in the 1924 World Series.
My grandfather wasn’t the kind of person who got into any scandals or drew a lot of attention to himself. Family, friends, and sportswriters all described him as polite, soft-spoken, and humble. A 1925 article in Baseball magazine described him as “the sheet anchor of the Washington infield.” Off the field, Judge was apparently the most sober and even-tempered man in any room. Relatives, players he coached, journalists—everyone with whom he came in contact—described him the same way: a gentleman.
My grandfather’s career took place in the “dead ball era”—that is, before the 1920s. He learned to play a game that was about singles, bunts, fielding, and defense—not the home run derby that baseball became in the 1920s with the arrival of Babe Ruth. Ruth was a gigantic talent and an outsized personality, but he was also the forerunner of today’s spoiled brat athlete. “The route to the common man’s heart is paved with ribaldry and excess,” baseball historian Harold Seymour wrote of Ruth’s hold on baseball fans. “What English king was more famous than Henry VIII?” One reporter noted that “Ruth is just a great, big, overgrown boy. He loves a good time, and… there are always scores of admirers on hand to see that it does not suffer any pangs of ennui.”
Joe Judge once wrote about the Hall of Fame in the pages of Sports Illustrated. (The article was, in fact, written by my father, who at the time was a writer for Life magazine.) Called “Verdict Against the Hall of Fame,” it was published in 1959.
“The Hall has lost some of its meaning and much of its glory in recent years,” it read. My grandfather named players who were in the Hall for inappropriate reasons. Players like Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers, and Frank Chance were in simply because of the ring of their double-play combination, Tinker to Evers to Chance. Tinker’s lifetime average was .264, Evers’ was .270. The article pointed to catcher Ray Schacht, lifetime average .253, and shortstop Rabbit Maranville, who never once hit over .300. The essay then blasted the growing tendency to favor players with more personality than talent: “To be a credit to the game of baseball, a man need not have got off a record number of wise cracks or assembled a record number of feature-stories. There are a lot of colorful palookas.”
He went on:
In my day, by the time the infield was finished spitting tobacco juice and licorice and rubbing the ball down with mud, especially on a dark afternoon, the ball would come at you looking like a clump of coal. A great hitter would lay the wood on it regardless of the side it was thrown from or the stuff on it. That same man could steal the base that made the difference. He was fast enough so that the hit-and-run and bunt-and-run were always possible. And when he got back to his position he would come up with a great catch, the great save, the great throw that meant winning instead of losing.
Today many so-called sluggers couldn’t steal a base if they were alone in the park. They are not expected to throw too well or run too fast as long as they can belt the ball out of the park when their one moment of usefulness arrives. The idea of being a team member sometimes is lost completely, and what we have is an association of specialist businessmen investing their specific talents and carefully watching their own special interests, upon which they hope to declare a dividend the following year.
On May 1, 1931, Joe Judge took himself out of a game in Boston. He had his appendix removed the following day. He was 36, and the operation ended his career. He bought a restaurant in D.C. and then took a job coaching ball at Georgetown University, a job he loved. In 1959, he was forced to retire because he was 65. By then, baseball was broadcast on television and Grandpa could watch from home.
My father used to say that Gramps was exactly like the old man watching the Nats losing in the beginning of Damn Yankees—razzing the players on his TV and trying to show the generation that pushed him out how to play the game. There’s evidence he actually was that character—Douglass Wallop, the author of the book that would become the play and movie Damn Yankees, dated my Aunt Dorothy—Joe Judge’s daughter. Why isn’t this man in the Hall of Fame?
My grandfather died after suffering a heart attack while shoveling snow on March 11, 1963. The papers reported the news, calling him “The greatest of all the Senators’ first basemen.” Columnist George Clifford of the Washington Daily News summed him up: “Joe Judge was not a character in the clownish, bittersweet fashion of sports. The stories about him become legends simply because of his ability.” Perhaps the best line to summarize my grandfather came from Sam Rice, the great Senators outfielder. Upon learning of Judge’s death, Rice said, “There was no play he couldn’t make.”