“If they don’t want me, they don’t want me,” is what he said to me in Bradenton about 10 minutes before baseball’s Hall of Fame finally offered him his rightful invitation. “I’ll survive just fine no matter what.”
And Bill Mazeroski meant what he said. He would have been just fine if, once again, the smoothest second baseman in the history of the game was again refused entry because, truth be told, “Maz” didn’t need it. Not at all.
And that’s because he hit the home run. THE home run.
Even though the best-of-seven 1960 World Series was tied 3-3, the Yankees had outscored the Pirates, 46-17, heading into the final game, and when the eighth inning of the tiebreaker began, “Gotham” possessed a 7-4 lead.
The “Battlin’ Buccos” though, scored five in the bottom half of the inning to go ahead, 9-7, only to watch the Yanks tie it up with two more in the top of the ninth. The Yankees’ right-handed reliever Ralph Terry then started the bottom of the ninth inning for New York, and a milli-second after he threw his second pitch to a man named Mazeroski …
“CRACK!!”
“Maz” had won eight Gold Gloves, appeared in 10 All-Star games, and was a member of two World Series championship teams by the time he was surrounded by his Pirates family in the cafeteria at Pirate City in March 2001. He had been denied for 15 years by voting members of the Baseball Writers Association before his nomination fell to a “Veterans Committee” of former players, and that’s when the guys “who had been there” and “done and won that” served up some justice.
That’s why Mazeroski’s phone rang that March morning.
“Hello,” he said quietly. After listening to someone speak for about 10 seconds, he mumbled, “OK.”
“Maz” then hung up his flip phone, wiped away some tears, and softly said, “I’m in.”
And then, on August 5, 2001, “Maz” joined HOF classmates Kirby Puckett and Dave Winfield in Cooperstown, and the humblest man you could have ever met on Planet Earth couldn’t even get through his acceptance speech.
“Maz” was an unassuming human who loved the game of baseball, the people of Pittsburgh, his friends and family, and he used to brag about catching “the biggest” catfish using chicken livers in the Ohio River. Bill always insisted he was “honored” to be an East Ohio kid raised in a one-room home who became “something out of nothing,” as he used to profess.
No matter when or where he and I would see and greet each other through the years, “Maz” always asked, “How’s everyone back home?”
That’s because, no matter his success, his fame, or THE home run, Bill Mazeroski was very proud to be one of us.
Rest in peace, No. 9, and thank you for you.
