My Favorite Baseball Player DUGOUT CHAT Tom Magedanz - 05.03.2000

On my bookshelf at home, I have an eight-inch "sports figurine" of Chicago White Sox second baseman Nellie Fox. I've had it for forty years. Most of us at one time or another had a favorite baseball player. It's a part of our childhood that we can look back on as a memory and hopefully as a positive role model. Most kids my age did the rational thing and picked Mickey Mantle, Ted Williams, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Stan Musial, Warren Spahn, or Sandy Koufax. That was apparently too simple for me. When I tell people nowadays that my boyhood baseball idol was Nellie Fox, they often say, "Who?"

Well, Nellie Fox began his major league career for the Philadelphia Athletics in 1947 and became a regular in 1949. He had two mediocre years, hitting around .250. In 1951 he was traded to the White Sox and with instruction from coach Doc Cramer and manager Paul Richards, he hit .313 and was on his way to a standout, if unlikely, major league career. He was a twelve-time American league All-Star. An outstanding fielder, he won three Gold Gloves and would have won more except that the Gold Glove awards didn't begin until 1957. He was American League MVP in 1959, leading the White Sox to the pennant for their only World Series appearance to this day since the 1919 Black Sox scandal. Fox holds the record for consecutive games by a second baseman (798), which also puts him at tenth on the all time consecutive games list for all players. He was the third most difficult player in major league history to strike out, collected 2663 major league hits and a lifetime batting average of .288. During the decade of the 1950s, Richie Ashburn of the Phillies led the major leagues in hits. Trailing Ashburn by 38 hits for the decade lead was Nellie Fox. And in each of the ten-year periods 1951-60, 1952-61, and 1953-62, the major league hit leader was Nellie Fox not Ted Williams, not Stan Musial, not Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays, the hit leader was Nellie Fox. He compiled a solid career, certainly not in the top rank of superstars, but a solid major league player for many years.

I'm not sure what originally drew me to Nellie Fox. When I was 10 and still on the farm (1960), I was on my first baseball team. I was small and my Dad suggested I play second base and that I might try to do it like Nellie Fox (this was just a few months after Fox's 1959 MVP season). I started to check for him in the box scores and magazines and acquired most of his baseball cards. I learned that he had overcome some obstacles to be a major leaguer. He was only 5'9" and weighed 150 lbs. He was not a fast runner, not a base stealer, did not have a particularly strong throwing arm, and he had absolutely no power 35 home runs in 19 years. Today, a player with no power, a mediocre 60 yard time on the stopwatch, and unable to light up the radar gun with his throwing arm wouldn't even be considered for a pro contract. Nellie Fox apparently did it by force of will and sheer hustle. Refusing to come out of games, playing hurt, constantly working on his game, a fierce competitor, coming early and staying late, and never failing to hustle, he made himself into a better player than he should have been.

And, apparently Nellie Fox was a decent human being as well. In 1958 he became the highest paid player in White Sox history; $42,000. He used the money to buy a bowling alley so he could quit working in the clothing store during the off-season. In 1964 Fox was traded to the Houston Colt .45s, his last season as a regular player. I found I could pull in a St. Louis radio station after dark on the family car radio. The station broadcast Cardinals games (with announcers Jack Buck and Harry Caray), and when the Cardinals played Houston, I'd go out to the car to listen for Nellie Fox. In 1965 the Colts built the Astrodome, became the Astros, and hired Fox as a player-coach. Fox, even though he still hoped to play, spent weeks working with a rookie second baseman who would take his job. The rookie, Joe Morgan, had idolized two ballplayers as a kid: Jackie Robinson because of his historic contributions to baseball and to the Afro-American community, and Nellie Fox, who, like Joe, was small and hustled and "played the game the way it was supposed to be played." Joe Morgan, with help from his favorite player, went on to a Hall of Fame career with the Big Red Machine.

Nellie Fox stayed on with the Astros as a coach and then coached for Ted Williams when Williams managed the Washington Senators and Texas Rangers. Fox left baseball when diagnosed with cancer in the mid-1970s. He died in December 1975 at the age of 47 in Baltimore, Maryland.

The question of the Hall of Fame for Nellie Fox was long and involved. He always received a large number of votes, but never quite enough for election. Too many home run hitters. In 1985, his final year of eligibility, he was two votes shy (out of 400 cast) of the 75% required to get in the Hall. His percentage was 74.6%, and rounding up is not allowed. His family had to wait another ten years for him to be eligible for consideration by the Veterans Committee. In 1997, 22 years after his death, he finally made it to the Hall of Fame. I won't forget watching the induction ceremony on ESPN, the speech by Fox's widow and seeing Joe Morgan in the crowd, in
sunglasses, tears streaming down his face. Finally having Nellie Fox in the Hall of Fame was a bit of childhood closure for me after all these years, and I could feel some vindication remembering all those kids who picked home run sluggers and wondered what I saw in Nellie Fox.

How do we, and our kids, chose our heroes? I don't know, but all things considered, Nelson Fox wasn't a bad choice. As my family was preparing to move off the farm to Aberdeen in August 1960 when I was ten, we spent a day there looking for a place to live. Downtown, in the window of a hobby shop at the corner of 6th and Main, I spotted a display of Hartland plastic figurines of baseball players. Mickey Mantle, Ted Williams, Yogi Berra, Babe Ruth, Eddie Matthews, Warren Spahn, Willie Mays...and Nellie Fox. My Dad had given me a dollar, so I went inside and inquired. The owner said "$1.98." I must have been a sorry sight, because his next words were, "Okay, how much do you have?" I said, "Well, I got a dollar." He said, "It's a deal." Occupational hazard in the toy business. My Dad went back and tried to pay the guy but he wouldn't accept the money. In 1960 a deal was a deal. My Nellie Fox figurine stands proudly on my bookshelf and is worth quite a lot more than $1.98, but it's not for sale.