COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. – Membership in baseball's most exclusive fraternity comes with its perks and privileges. And just being able to add "HOF" to his autograph is worth plenty of bucks for a Hall of Famer at appearances for the rest of his life.
Still, it’s the camaraderie that’s mentioned most often when Hall of Famers are asked about being enshrined at Cooperstown.
Former Braves pitching greats Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine – along with their beloved Braves manager, Bobby Cox — joined the fraternity a year ago when they were inducted in the Hall of Fame Class of 2014. Now John Smoltz, their longtime teammate and “Big Three” pitching partner, will join them when he’s inducted Sunday with an elite Class of 2015 that includes multi-Cy Young Award winners Randy Johnson and Pedro Martinez and 3,000-hit club member Craig Biggio.
“It’s pretty special. I mean, look at the hat I’m wearing,” said Kansas City Royals legend George Brett, wearing a ballcap with “Reg-gie!” on the front in white letters during Saturday’s Hall of Famers’ golf outing at a course adjacent to the stately Otesaga resort. He got the cap Friday from the man himself, Reggie Jackson, whose Yankees beat Brett’s Royals in two of three American League Championship Series matchups over a four-year span through 1980.
“I hated Reggie when he played for Oakland,” Brett said. “I hated Reggie when he played for Baltimore. I hated Reggie when he played for the Yankees. I hated Reggie when he played for the Angels. Now he’s one of my best friends here (at Cooperstown). I saw his hat yesterday and I said, ‘Where’s my hat?’ He says, ‘You wouldn’t wear it.’ I said, bull, I’ll wear it tomorrow in the golf tournament. And I’ll wear it at home.
“It’s a really special group of guys (in the Hall of Fame). I think once you get here – I didn’t know Glavine, and I didn’t know Maddux; I never faced those guys. But I played golf with them yesterday and it was a lot of fun.”
Fifty-three of the 69 living Hall of Famers are expected to be at Sunday’s ceremony, sitting in rows directly behind the new members of their fraternity. For most of them, Induction Weekend in late July is something they never miss.
“It’s a lot calmer, for sure,” Glavine said of his second Induction Weekend. “Last year it seemed like between things you had to do for the Hall of Fame, leading up to it; all the family you had here, you’re trying to run around and get to see everybody, make sure everybody’s set and comfortable and doing their thing — it was a lot more stress in that regard. This year it’s just kind of been my wife and I show up, and what time are we going to eat dinner and what time’s our first cocktail? So it’s been pretty good.”
Like Maddux and Glavine, Smoltz was elected in his first year on the ballot, receiving 82.9 percent of the votes, easily surpassing the 75-percent requirement. If the camaraderie is as great as other Hall of Famers say, imagine what it must be like as for these three longtime teammates, who became close friends during their decade together as arguably the greatest starting trio in modern baseball history. Twelve months after Maddux, Glavine and Cox were enshrined, Smoltz joins them.
“To come full circle with them and Bobby….” Smoltz said, smiling. “I know this (2015) class is special. I mean, it’s a great class that I’m going in with. But to get with my teammates and complete that whole circle is pretty cool. We fed off each other (as pitchers). We had a blast.”
When asked what it would mean to have Cox at the ceremony and as a fellow Hall of Famer, Smoltz, who will try to keep his speech to the allocated 18 minutes, said he could easily spend most of it thanking and praising his former manager.
Cox was the GM who traded for Smoltz when he was a Tigers minor leaguer, and Cox was the manager who kept him in the rotation after Smoltz went 2-11 with a 5.16 ERA at the All-Star break in 1991 (Smoltz went 12-2 with a 2.63 ERA after the break).
“I could spend 15 minutes on Bobby,” Smoltz said. “There’s not enough time to thank him, and the admiration and respect I have for him. I think it goes without saying, nobody in the history of the game has been affected like I have by a dual-role person – as a general manager who got me over here, and a manager who stuck with me in the worst of times, in a 2-11 (start) when everyone else wanted me down in the bullpen. You think about that one little decision, if he’d not stuck with me, and how everything would have shifted.
“His ability to know his players and know their personalities and what makes them tick made him unique and stand above the rest. Look, I make no bones about it, no chance I have a 20-year career with Atlanta — I would have been somewhere else if not for Bobby.”
Smoltz said Cox was the main reason he re-upped with the Braves after the 2001 season instead of taking a more lucrative multi-year offer from the Yankees, who wanted him in his preferred role as a starter. The Braves wanted him to continue in the closer rule, which he’d moved to out of necessity after returning from Tommy John surgery during the 2001 season.
“I was called a lot of stupid names, (and asked) ‘why aren’t you going to X,’ or ‘why aren’t you going here? It doesn’t make sense,’”Smoltz said. “That wasn’t going to guarantee me my happiness. I gave up a lot of money to stay four different times, and I don’t regret any second of it. When you know who you play for, and you’d run through a wall for a guy, and the environment was so perfect for me and my family, that even changing roles — which was something that I didn’t want to do at the beginning — became as good as it could be.
“You know, the confidence that Bobby exudes in people – no one else has it. Every plyer goes through a slump. Every player loses confidence. And when your manager somehow instills that in you, you look at him like, are you crazy? And it helps you get through it. To a man, I’ve had people say, you just have no idea what it’s like to play for that guy until you do it, and you see him fight for every one of his players.”
