Talk:Gil Hodges

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I worked with the late ex-major league pitcher George "Red" Munger. George and I were very close. Our offices were adjacent and we spent many hours talking about baseball. We exchanged gifts for Christmas every year and I still remember his birthday every year October 4th, or as he called it CB day (10-4). When he passed away in 1996 at the age of 79 the presiding priest used a story that I had told him in has remarks. It was about George and Jackie Robinson. He picked Jackie off second for the third out of the 8th inning before delivering a pitch to the plate...in a tied game in which he was pinch hit for in the ninth and the Cardinals won as a result . Under current rules would he be the winning pitcher of a game in which he did't deliver a pitch to the plate?

I only go into such detail on my relationship with George is to set up George's comment on Gil Hodges. He said that Gil was the greatest catcher. The only player he would compare him to was Johnny Bench. However, Campy could not play another position beside catcher and Gil was a fabulous first baseman. His question (as well as mine) is that had Hodges been "The Catcher" of his generation and won the 1969 Series, how long would he have been in the Hall of Fame?

If he was a catcher, with those offensive numbers in that era, he would have been elected on the first ballot for which he was eligible. As it is, there are two firstbaseman with comparable statistics, who were elected to the Hall (Perez and Cepeda), and it's a damned shame that Gil wasn't put in before them, AND before he died. I think some of it had to do with his not-so-warm relationship with the New York sportswriters. Gil was not very talkative as Mets manager, gave them few quotes to work with, even in that championship year of 1969. Many times reporters would storm out of his office after games, angry because they couldn't get a usable "line" from him. All these years later, I don't think the current crop of eligible voters even know who he is, or how he dominated the NL at 1B for six or seven years during the late 40's and early to mid 50's. I hope he makes it into the Hall next year. This man has deserved it for 50 years and has been denied so many times. If Whitey Herzog got in for winning just one world series as a manager, then Hodges belongs there too because of his superior playing career AND the World Series he won as manager of a ballclub with a .242 team batting average in 1969. --167.206.169.66 (talk) 17:59, 20 June 2013 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 167.206.169.66 (talk) 17:01, 20 June 2013 (UTC)

Name

I changed his birth name from Hodge to Hodges as shown on [www.gilhodges.com/bio.htm www.gilhodges.com], the official website for him. Is there anything supporting the name 'Hodge', or was it a typo?

It's certainly a typo -- "Hodges" is correct. Andrew Szanton 4/06

Au contraire-- My father, Orville Melvin Graves, Jr., played second-string catcher behind Gil in highschool in Princeton, Indiana. My father told me that Gil's true surname was Hodge. --Thomas Graves 04:52, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

I know there's been a lot of debate about this among baseball historians; Baseball-Reference [1] gives his birth name as Hodge. MisfitToys 20:53, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

According to http://bioproj.sabr.org/bioproj.cfm?a=v&v=l&bid=20&pid=6399 - "Gil Hodges was born Gilbert Ray Hodge on April 4, 1924, in Princeton, Indiana, in the state's southwestern corner, just north of Evansville. The origin of the discrepancy between his birth name of Hodge and the name by which he became well known is unclear. His parents were Irene and Big Charlie. When Hodges was seven years old, the family moved from Princeton 30 miles north to Petersburg."

As an aside, if Hodges was starting at catcher for Princeton High School when he was six years old, well either he was some kind of prodigy or Princeton didn't have much of a team that year. ;-) I'm originally from Petersburg and my great-grandpa used to tell stories about watching Gil play football and basketball in high school so I just had to get that little dig in. Orpheus42 11:59, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

If the article lead is only going to have one last name (which is probably better, having both variations seems clunky), shouldn't it be Hodge as that was his legal birth name and was never actually changed throughout his life? Is there a general policy on names when a person is commonly known by one name as opposed to his actual legal name? Gilbert Raymond Hodge was his legal name, and it was never changed. As far as I'm aware, no one really knows why he was and is commonly known as Gil Hodges. Orpheus42 08:10, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

If it was never changed from Hodge (and there seems to be no evidence that it remained Hodge), I can't help wondering why his gravestone gives the name as Hodges (and for that matter, why his official site would clearly indicate his parents' name was Hodges). Sources generally state his full name as Hodges with a birth name of Hodge, so without additional evidence I believe that's the route we ought to take. FWIW, the 1944 Sporting News Guide lists his name as Gilbert R. Hodges; he had played one game for the 1943 Dodgers, which was his only pro appearance to that point. Social Security records listed his name as Hodges (do an advanced search at http://ssdi.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/ssdi.cgi and enter his last name with Indiana as the state of issue, along with April 1972 as the year/month of death). I don't know what military records would show, but the Social Security record seems like a reasonable source. MisfitToys 22:25, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Formatting and Style

“22:16, 4 April 2008 MisfitToys (Talk | contribs) (26,072 bytes) (nationality must always be noted in intro of bio articles) (undo)

“21:01, 5 April 2008 MisfitToys (Talk | contribs) (26,072 bytes) (rv; this is standard accepted formatting for baseball bio articles; the phrase Major League Baseball must always be capitalized and linked) (undo)”

Before saying what I was thinking, I checked the page for formatting baseball articles at WikiProject_Baseball, and guess what? Your rules don’t exist. Not the “standard accepted formatting,” not the capitalizing and linking of Major League Baseball (“always linked”?!), and certainly not using the abbreviation “NL,” instead of the term.

So, I figured this is your own horrible style, and checked out one of the baseball articles you listed in boldface as having worked on. Guess what? Not even you mentioned nationality. So, what gives? Please don’t make up rules, or strive to make baseball articles unreadable. 24.90.201.232 (talk) 03:47, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

Please consult Wikipedia:Manual of Style (biographies)#Opening paragraph and Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Acronyms and abbreviations, and also have a look at some of the featured articles for baseball players (such as Sandy Koufax and Lee Smith). Major League Baseball is a proper noun (see Wikipedia:Manual of Style (capital letters)), the formal name of an organizational entity, and thus should be capitalized (just as National Football League is). When only part of the phrase is used, perhaps as an adjective rather than as a noun, it should not be capitalized (e.g. "major league debut", "major league record", "the major leagues"). I realize that you're perhaps new to Wikipedia, and therefore unaware of standard policies and approaches to style and format, but you should familiarize yourself with some of these basics before changing things to suit your own liking. Even given that, if you don't think the style is appropriate, it would be more helpful to ask why articles are written that way rather than just announcing your opinion that the style is lousy and changing it. (Also, I believe that all the baseball bios for deceased players that I've boldfaced on my user page state the nationality in the opening sentence; those for living players may have instead included the birthplace along with the birthdate to indicate nationality.) MisfitToys (talk) 02:01, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

External links modified

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"Senators improved each year" in the lead

It's a stretch to say the team improved each year (the wins in '65 and '66 were 70 and 71), so I'd prefer if we just stated the more factual "win totals went up each year" - which they did, even if it was barely true in '66 and they had a really low bar to clear each year. Fred Zepelin (talk) 05:55, 3 February 2024 (UTC)