COOPERSTOWN, NY – The unofficial Hall of Fame greeters stand together in bronze next to the ticket booths in the museum lobby. They are multicultural monuments of strength, sacrifice and service: Lou Gehrig, Jackie Robinson and Roberto Clemente.
“These three represent so much more than what they did on the field,” said Hall of Fame President Josh Rawitch. “It was the way they approached life off the field, to help other people, to show other people the way, and ultimately just to be the perfect example of what it means to have character and courage.”
The Hall of Fame will welcome seven new members Sunday, including three living: David Ortiz, Jim Kaat and Tony Oliva. All are recognized in the gallery with a plaque measuring 15½ inches by 10¾ inches, the standard size for all Hall of Famers – from Hank Aaron to Robin Yount – since the first induction ceremony in 1939.
The Separator is a statue to some. There is no voting on a statue’s worthiness, no formal process for obtaining one. In addition to pure excellence on the pitch, you also need a certain transcendence. As the saying goes, whoever knows, knows.
“Dave Winfield, he’s one of the few guys who doesn’t have a statue – and we make his life miserable,” Ozzie Smith said last fall on a podcast hosted by former major league player Bret Boone. “I say, ‘Come on Dave, don’t you have a statue?’ You should see his expression.”
In a recent phone interview, Winfield reluctantly confirmed that he is indeed missing a statue – and that colleagues mock him for it.
“Honestly?” Winfield conceded. “Yes.”
It makes sense for George Brett, a teammate of Winfield on nine American League All-Star teams in the 1980s. Brett has a statue atop the Kansas City outfield where he played for 21 seasons and is synonymous with the Royals franchise.
“A lot of these guys have played in so many cities,” Brett said. “Who’s going to have a statue of Winfield? He played in eight different teams.”
Six, actually, but that raises an interesting point: teams are more actively celebrating their past now, but many great players, particularly in recent decades, have been just passing through on the road to better deals elsewhere.
Since the stadium construction boom of the 1990s, nearly all teams have opened baseball-only parks, with many replacing community-owned multipurpose facilities not dedicated to individual monuments. The Philadelphia Phillies, for example, had generic athletic statues outside of Veterans Stadium, but in 2004 they christened a new park with tributes to Richie Ashburn, Steve Carlton, Robin Roberts, and Mike Schmidt.
Several older parks, such as Chicago’s Wrigley Field and Los Angeles’ Dodger Stadium, have recently been renovated to include public meeting spaces. The Dodgers gave Sandy Koufax a statue in her new spot in June, and the Cubs did the same to Fergie Jenkins in May.
Koufax only played for the Dodgers, and while Jenkins fielded mostly for the Cubs, he recorded nearly 2,000 innings with other teams. However, Gaylord Perry streaked to seven teams in 12 seasons after his first decade with the Giants, who still made his bronze medal appearance in 2016.
Perry joined Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Juan Marichal and Orlando Cepeda – all Hall of Famer teammates from the 1962 National League pennant winners – at the gates of San Francisco’s Oracle Park. Jenkins, who had a similar group of star teammates later in the decade, took notice.
“I was like, ‘I wonder when they’re going to put me in a statue at Wrigley Field with three of the best players I’ve played with?'” said Jenkins, who is inductee with Perry and Rod Carew was recorded in 1991. “I lived with Ernie Banks for three years and played with Billy Williams and Ron Santo for seven years – and believe me, it’s an honor to be among them.”
Sculptor William Behrends created all of the Giants statues, as well as those in San Diego (Tony Gwynn and Trevor Hoffman) and Minor League Park in Brooklyn (Robinson and Pee Wee Reese). His latest work was unveiled at Citi Field on opening day: Mets stalwart Tom Seaver in his famous double-life-size drop-and-drive delivery.
“When you get off the subway and see it for the first time, you’re far from it,” Behrends said. “It has to be present from afar. They want someone 100 feet away to see it and walk over to them. Larger spaces shrink sculptures; They put a strictly life-size sculpture in a large room and it looks less than life-size.”
The Seaver statue is the only one outside of a major league ballpark in New York. The Yankees feature Don Larsen and Yogi Berra – the battery behind the only perfect game in World Series history – in their museum at Yankee Stadium, and former owner George Steinbrenner stands guard in bronze next to the elevator in the Gate 2 lobby. But the huge constellation of Yankees stars will receive plaques, or memorials, not statues, in an outside gallery behind the centerfield fence.
Some Yankees Hall of Famers — Reggie Jackson, Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, and so on — don’t have statues anywhere. Others have statues far from the Bronx: Babe Ruth at Camden Yards in Baltimore, near his birthplace; Joe DiMaggio at the National Italian American Sports Hall of Fame in Chicago; Mickey Mantle in his hometown of Commerce, Oklahoma and another at Minor League Park in Oklahoma City.
“The Giants took it a little easier on themselves,” Behrends said, noting that the franchise moved away from New York in the 1950s. “Mel Ott could have a statue, but they only portrayed people who got into the Hall of Fame as the San Francisco Giant, and there were only five of them, so that’s what they decided to do. But with the Yankees, where would you start?”
The Chicago White Sox — with a similarly long history but far less glorious years — have several statues in the park and honored the winners of the 2005 World Series with a memorial outside depicting pivotal games in photos and sculptures. In Cleveland, the late 1990s juggernaut is embodied in a statue of the well-travelled Jim Thome, who holds the franchise’s home run record of 337 — but his 400th is for the Phillies, his 500th for the White Sox, and his 600th for the Minnesota -Twins.
“It represents so much more: all the great players that we had in the ’90s, all these great playoff runs,” said Thome, who now works for MLB Network and the White Sox. “It was a championship-like team for a long time. We didn’t win a World Series unfortunately, but it represents all these guys: Kenny Lofton, Carlos Baerga, Sandy Alomar, Manny Ramirez, Albert Belle, Eddie Murray, Dave Winfield.”
Winfield, who had his best seasons with the Padres and Yankees, retired in 1995 with Cleveland. He won his only championship for the Toronto Blue Jays, who also have a statue of former owner Ted Rogers in front of their stadium with a collection of gargoyles representing the fans — but no player statues.
At least Winfield’s name appears behind the Kent Hrbek statue at Target Field in Minneapolis, on a storefront listing the Minnesota natives who played for the Twins. Voters sent Winfield to Cooperstown on the first try, but Hrbek garnered just five votes (out of 499) in his only year on the ballot.
However, Hrbek had intangibles: he played his entire career for his hometown team, lasting 14 seasons and matching his retired shirt number. A burly, gregarious slugger, he helped win two World Series while looking like a dude at the fisherman’s house next door by the lake.
The statue represents Hrbek’s moment of glory: he pressed the final putout into his glove and raised his arms in triumph after winning the Twins’ first championship in 1987. It’s everything a statue should be.
“My daughter goes to the stadium and takes her friends or her kids or her cousins and says, ‘This is dad; That was his favorite part of playing, winning the world title, catching the ball and jumping off first base,'” Hrbek said. “Hopefully this memory will last a long time – and give the pigeons a place to sit for a while and let them do their thing.”