With Gammons, Hall makes the write call
Our own Peter Gammons gets the J.G. Taylor Spink Award at the Hall of Fame tomorrow. On the day that Wade Boggs and Ryne Sandberg are inducted, Gammons takes his rightful place in Cooperstown.
It's about time. Gammons has done more to influence the way major league baseball is covered than any columnist or beat guy of the last half-century. He is, and forever will be, the de facto commissioner of baseball. He is to our craft what Ted Williams was to his: When Gammons walks through a press box, any scribe who knows history should point and say, ''There goes the greatest baseball writer who ever lived."
Hyperbole? Maybe. Men named Ring Lardner, Grantland Rice, Damon Runyon, Red Smith, Dick Young, and Harold Kaese certainly established a standard of excellence and served as role models for generations of baseball writers. But Gammons, who started at the Globe June 10, 1968, changed everything about baseball coverage and his innovations and style spawned a legion of like-minded writers who bring you the game stories and notes today. They are Gammons Youth, even though some of them might have never read him.
The shame is that Gammons today is most famous as a television analyst and commentator for ESPN. He writes for ESPN's websites and ESPN The Magazine, and you can find him in Baseball America, but most young baseball fans know him solely for his TV work. That would be like knowing the late Joe DiMaggio only as a pitchman for Mr. Coffee, or knowing Bob Cousy only as a color analyst on Celtics broadcasts.
Fortunately, a lot of people who read these pages are old enough to remember when Gammons was the Globe's Red Sox beat guy and master of the Sunday notes column. For those who missed it, may I suggest a trip to the Boston Public Library. Get any summer month between 1972 and 1986 (skip '76 and '77, when Gammons went to Sports Illustrated for the first time) and start reading Gammons's daily game coverage. You won't be able to stop.
Gammons was at the top of his game when the Red Sox were at the top of their game. His lead from Game 6, 1975 (Carlton Fisk walkoff game), is the Boston baseball equivalent of Rice's ''Four Horsemen" story about the 1924 Notre Dame backfield (Outlined against a blue, gray October sky . . . "). After Fisk hit the homer, Gammons typed eight pages in 15 minutes, starting with, ''And all of a sudden the ball was there, like the Mystic River Bridge, suspended out in the black of morning."
Days later, after the Red Sox were defeated in Game 7, Gammons wrote, ''We have postponed autumn long enough now. There are storm windows to put in, wood to chop for the whistling months ahead. The floorboards are getting awfully cold in the morning, the cider sweet. Where Lynn dove and El Tiante stood will be frozen soon, and while it is now 43 years for Thomas A. Yawkey and 57 for New England, the fugue that was the 1975 baseball season will play in our heads until next we meet at the Fens again."
Wow. Just reading that paragraph makes the hair on my arms stand up. No one writes like that in the sports pages anymore and as good as he is on the plasma TV, it is a tremendous loss that Gammons now delivers his stories on television. At the top of his newspaper game, Gammons scorned TV guys as ''barking dogs and frauds." Alas, he ultimately joined them and our readers are poorer for it.
As for those Sunday notes columns that you now read on every sport in just about every major league town in America, Gammons just about invented the genre. Young was doing something similar and smaller in New York, but it was Gammons (and his pal, young Bob Ryan on basketball) who pioneered the Sunday notes page, which grew to become a must-read in New England and throughout the industry.
Gammons was also first to deftly incorporate pop culture and rock music lyrics into his daily coverage. He managed to be informative, hip, and funny. Readers got a little Warren Zevon and Lowell George sprinkled in between the hits, runs, and errors.
There was plenty of substance to accompany the unique and much-copied style. No one worked the trenches harder than Gammons. He was first at the ballpark, last to leave, and his phone bills outweighed his salary. He got everything firsthand. It's easy and lazy for writers to repeat stuff they hear from other writers. We've all done it. But Gammons got (and continues to get) his information from players, coaches, managers, general managers, scouts, and owners.
Not much more needs to be said. He was born and raised in Groton, graduated from North Carolina, married the lovely Gloria from Hingham, still plays guitar, requires almost no sleep, loves Pocasset and the Cape Cod League, rarely wears socks, has Billy Beane on speed dial, and has been at the top of his game for more than three decades while mentoring dozens of young writers and inspiring hundreds more. And the best of his multimillion words on baseball appeared on these pages. You can look it up.
The Spink award is presented ''for meritorious contributions to baseball writing." That's Gammons. A true Hall of Famer.
Dan Shaughnessy is a Globe columnist. His e-mail address is dshaughnessy@globe.com. 