Tuesday Trivia: Earliest Top 10 HOF Ballot No-Go

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Originally Posted by G1911

Hank Gowdy? I’m not sure if he was top 10 but he got awfully high in the 50’s votes and was a popular candidate at about the right time.

Correct! Hank Gowdy came in 10th place on the 1955 BBWAA (35.9%) ballot and 10th the following year (25.4%).

Gowdy is known for a few things:

1) He was a star in the Boston Braves' "miracle" 1914 season. The Braves had won only 69 games in 1913 and won just 3 of their first 20 games in 1914, but managed to win 94 games and force a World Series with the heavily favored and defending Champion Athletics. As recounted by SABR, Gowdy went 3-for-3 with a single, a double, and a triple, and he and first-baseman Butch Schmidt, the two slowest men on the team, executed a successful double steal to help win Game 1. In Game 3, Gowdy led off the tenth inning with a blast into the center-field bleachers for the Series' only HR, igniting a rally that tied the score. In the 12th Gowdy got his third hit and second double of the game, a bullet to left field. Running for him, Les Mann scored the winning run on a wild throw. In the Game 4 finale, Gowdy went 3-for-4, giving him a .545 average for the Series. Perhaps as a result of his stellar postseason performance at the plate, the new nickname of “Hammering Hank” appeared in the press the following season, becoming the first MLB player to have the moniker, of course followed by Hank Greenberg and Hank Aaron.

2) Gowdy was the first MLB player to enlist in WW1. Again from SABR The United States entered World War I in April, and on June 1 (during a rain delay) "Gowdy became the first active major leaguer to enlist, joining the Ohio National Guard. (Eddie Grant had enlisted in April, but he had retired as a player.) The big catcher reported for duty six weeks later and was overseas by early 1918. Gowdy served with distinction in the famed Rainbow Division, so-named by General Pershing because it had the uncanny luck of being surrounded by rainbows during the heavy combat it faced. Arriving in the Lorraine region of France in March, Gowdy endured trench warfare in its most brutal sense as the Germans made their fierce last effort to overrun the Allies on the Western Front. He carried the colors for the Fighting 42nd and returned to the United States a genuine hero, as popular in Boston as the mayor himself."

3) Gowdy was the goat (in a bad way) of the 1924 World Series at Griffith Stadium vs. Washington. In the 12th inning of Game Seven, with one out and no one on, Washington’s Muddy Ruel popped up a routine fall ball, but after Gowdy tore off his mask and tossed it to the ground, he promptly stepped in it (literally and figuratively). “I thought my foot was being held in a bear trap,” he later recalled. Gowdy staggered around and couldn’t reach the ball. Given new life, Ruel doubled and later scored the winning run of the Series. Sportswriters, calculating the winning team’s share, called Gowdy’s misfortune “a $50,000 muff.”

After retirement, Gowdy went on to coach for the Giants and the Cincinnati Reds during the 1930s, then joined the army as a major in World War II, becoming the chief athletic officer at Fort Benning, Georgia, where the baseball diamond is now called Hank Gowdy Field.