Ted Williams Museum – Baseball: Past and Present

February 23, 2010August 11, 2019

Belated post-mortem on my chance to interview Will Clark

I have been remiss in posting the outcome of my opportunity to interview Will Clark at an awards dinner in Florida a couple of weeks ago. As some may have surmised, I did not attend the event or interview Clark, even by phone. I have not written about this until today partly due to my disappointment with how things played out, though the experience itself bears mention.

I’ll rewind for anyone who hasn’t heard the earlier iterations of this story. Back in November, I learned of a Hitters Hall of Fame at the Ted Williams Museum in Tampa, Florida. I also learned that this Hall of Fame honored players like Dale Murphy and Fred McGriff, but not Honus Wagner or Jackie Robinson. Curious, I called a listed number for the museum and reached the cell phone of the executive director, David McCarthy. After I subsequently sent McCarthy a link to my post, he emailed feedback and invited me to the annual awards dinner for the museum, set for February 13. At the time in November, I had just quit a sales job and had lots of free time but little income. I told McCarthy I would have to get back to him and figured, since I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, that I wouldn’t be able to afford the trip to Tampa.

The decision to pass became tougher, though, when I learned in January that my all-time favorite baseball player Will Clark would be honored at the dinner, along with Darryl Strawberry, Bert Blyleven and Dave Dravecky. As one of the stipulations for being honored is that a player attend the dinner, I figured I could interview all four men if I went. I contemplated asking my parents for the money, but a man I go to for advice stressed the importance of being self-supporting, and I couldn’t argue. I let McCarthy know in January of my financial uncertainty, and he said I could still come to the dinner, even with last-minute notice.

In the end, it wasn’t meant to be. The $350 I needed to make the trip remained an elusive pile of money that never materialized, simple as it sometimes seemed it should be. If I’d had a job last month or even a few weeks ago, I may have been able to justify going, but in this economy, work has been hard to come by. Granted, I’ve had some income from freelance writing the last month, but it didn’t seem right to commit funds to a trip when I couldn’t guarantee my next rent.

In the eleventh hour, I tried some last-ditch maneuvering to interview Clark by phone but that didn’t come off either. I spoke with the sports editor of the San Francisco Chronicle two days before the event and pitched a freelance idea about it. He passed. The following day, I inquired with McCarthy about doing a phone interview with Clark. McCarthy said Clark’s travel arrangements had been delayed by the bad weather in the South and that a phone interview looked uncertain but that he probably could have set something up in-person. At that point, I gave up.

There’s been a Catch-22 in all this. Had I not quit my job, I would have been able to afford making the trip, no question; but I probably wouldn’t have had time in the first place to interview McCarthy and build a relationship. The silver lining in all this, I suppose, is that McCarthy has essentially given me a standing invitation to the event. Mark McGwire may be on the bill next year. I hope I can make it.

February 3, 2010August 11, 2019

Technology to the rescue

I interviewed this morning for a sales position with a start-up in Mountain View and got to talking about the upcoming opportunity I have to interview Will Clark upon his induction into the Hitters Hall of Fame at the Ted Williams Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida on February 13. At this point, I still can’t afford a plane ticket, and I can’t justify taking out a loan or asking my parents for cash. Thus, my assumption has been that I will probably do a phone interview with Clark, if he’s willing, as well as interviews with the other honorees for the museum this year: Darryl Strawberry, Bert Blyleven and Dave Dravecky. It would be a major coup for this site, and Clark’s my childhood hero, though I know not to bank on anything.

I got to talking today with my interviewer, though, and she suggested I do a WebEx video conference or Skype video conversation with Clark. I hadn’t considered those possibilities, and I have to admit it sure beats an interview over my Metro phone. I also have a friend who works for WebEx and might be able to get me set up technically. The catch would be getting Clark in front of a web camera, though that might not be impossible. At the very least, he would have a way to see me during our talk.

Best case scenario, of course, is that I come up with the necessary funds, board a plane to Florida, get six or ten posts for this site out of the event and maybe even cover it for the San Francisco Chronicle. At least to me, in a perfect world, this is how things would play out. But I’m open to talking to Clark in any way possible.

Anyone who has ideas I haven’t mentioned is welcome to contact me, asap.

January 16, 2010August 11, 2019

The pitfalls of being broke

Back in November I wrote a post here about a Hitters Hall of Fame at the Ted Williams Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. For that piece, I interviewed the executive director for the museum, David McCarthy. After I published my post, McCarthy emailed me feedback and invited me to the museum’s annual induction dinner, to be held February 13. Having just quit my job at the time, I told McCarthy I would have to get back to him and figured I wouldn’t be able to go. It bummed me out, but that’s part of being an adult.

However, I heard that airline companies do deals after the first of the year, so I checked Travelocity a few weeks ago and saw airfare-plus-hotel packages starting at a few hundred bucks. After doing some budgeting, I thought I could afford the trip and called McCarthy to RSVP. Subsequently, though, I remembered a $300 check I wrote in December and realized I probably wouldn’t be able to go after all. I’m holding out hope for a windfall; if anyone has any ideas, I’m game.

This story gets better. When I called McCarthy to RSVP, the museum had announced Dave Dravecky would be added to a Pitcher’s Wall of Achievement. However, an inductee for the Hitters Hall of Fame hadn’t been decided. I suggested Mark McGwire, who hit 583 home runs and has a better career on-base percentage than Hank Aaron, Willie Mays or Al Kaline. This was about a week before McGwire admitted he used steroids during his career. McCarthy liked my suggestion, saying Ted Williams thought highly of McGwire.

After McGwire dropped his bombshell, though, I wondered if the museum would still honor him. I checked the museum’s web site last night and learned it won’t this year. Instead, the inductees into the Hitters Hall of Fame will be Darryl Strawberry and my all-time favorite player, Will Clark. I’m 26 and grew up in Northern California, coming of age when the first baseman nicknamed “The Thrill” starred for my San Francisco Giants. Even just thinking of him now puts a smile on my face.

One of the stipulations for any player to be inducted into the museum is that he attend the awards dinner. When I called to RSVP, I asked McCarthy if I would be able to interview Dravecky and he said yes. Thus, I’m reasonably sure that if I went to this event, I would get to interview Clark, probably Strawberry too. I contemplated asking my parents for the money and called a man I go to for advice. He stressed the importance of being self-supporting and I really can’t argue with him. I know the right thing to do here.

Thus, I left McCarthy a voice mail today, updating him on the situation and asking if I could do a phone interview with Clark and Strawberry if I can’t make the dinner. Ideally, I’ll be able to attend. Either way, though, this seems like an event worth writing about and even getting to talk to Clark over the phone would be, at the risk of sounding cheesy, a thrill.

(Postscript: McCarthy called me back a couple hours after I first posted this. He said he’d tried unsuccessfully to get in touch with McGwire through the Cardinals organization. McCarthy said he would still like to induct McGwire into the Hitters Hall of Fame and discussed maybe doing so next year. McCarthy also said he’d do what he could about ensuring a phone interview for me with Clark and said I could still come to the event, even with last-minute notice. Cool guy.)

November 12, 2009August 11, 2019

Hall of Fame: Fred McGriff, yes. Honus Wagner, no?

I ended my post yesterday with a joke about baseball creating a B-Level Hall of Fame where lesser candidates could be lionized. It could be located some place like Cleveland, feature a statue of Paul O’Neill or Kevin McReynolds in its promenade and celebrate perennial close-but-not-quite teams like the Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1940s and early ’50s or the Atlanta Braves of the ’90s.

Well, I have learned that such a place exists.

The Ted Williams Museum at Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, Florida, home of the Tampa Bay Rays, features a Hitters Hall of Fame. To be sure, it includes most of the greatest players the game has ever known: Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Willie Mays and Williams himself, among many others. It also features a couple of players who for all intents and purposes also belong in baseball’s other Hall of Fame, in Cooperstown, Pete Rose, Joe Jackson and Dom DiMaggio, who I once interviewed.

Curiously, though, while the Hitters Hall of Fame honors a number of players with slim to no Cooperstown prospects, including Dwight Evans, Don Mattingly, Dale Murphy and Fred McGriff, it currently excludes several Hall of Famers, chief among them Honus Wagner, Napoleon Lajoie and Jackie Robinson.

This made me curious. McGriff had a beautiful left-handed pull swing, no doubt, and broke the heart of my San Francisco Giants with his work for the Braves in the 1993 pennant chase, but Wagner had 3,415 career hits and a lifetime batting average of .327. Lajoie had a similar number of hits, a better batting average, and routinely went head-to-head with Cobb for the annual batting title (Cobb got a new car for prevailing one year.) Robinson is honored in the museum itself, but didn’t meet the center’s criteria for inclusion in the Hitters Hall. One knock against Robinson, a lifetime .311 hitter, could be that he had a relatively short big league career, but then, so did Dom DiMaggio. In fact, looking through an old book I have on the Hall of Fame, I was able to count player after player not in the Hitter’s Hall. There are probably dozens.

Granted, being in enshrined in Cooperstown doesn’t automatically equal being an outstanding hitter. Rabbit Maranville, a shortstop from the Deadball Era, made it in with a .258 lifetime clip. Also, I wondered if Williams had only wanted to include players he had personally seen hit and could vouch for, but then, what to make of the inclusions of Cobb, Ruth, and Jackson, among others?

Curious, I looked up the phone number for the museum and reached the cell of the executive director, Dave McCarthy. He explained that save for the top 20 hitters that Williams himself had selected, the criteria for induction was that a player had to be alive and able to attend an induction ceremony and that the museum was limited by having only 10,000-square feet. McCarthy also said the museum was much for fans, which could explain the presence of McGriff, who spent much of his later career in Tampa.

The policy made sense from a business perspective, and I’m happy that nice guys like Murphy could be honored. Murphy belongs in a Hall of Fame somewhere. Also, if I were Ted Williams, I’d probably have anyone I wanted in my Hall of Fame. Will Clark anyone? All the same, the baseball purist in me is a little confounded, even as McCarthy told me there were plans in the works to induct players like Wagner.