Pride of the Tigers:
Jack Morris and Alan Trammell enter the Hall of Fame with similar passion to playing days.
Jack Morris made peace with it long before he got the phone call. He had no choice, really. Whether or not the Hall of Fame was going to induct him was beyond his control.
So … he forgot. Or pretended to.
And he used each year he came up short in the Hall of Fame vote as a reason to look back on all the things that had gone right; on the life baseball had given him; on the ways in which rejection can make a person think about change.
Then, the phone rang about 5:45 in his hotel room in Orlando. He was there for baseball’s winter meetings, working for MLB.com last December. “Jack?”
“Yes.”
“You’re in the Hall of Fame.” Morris, who pitched 18 years in the big leagues, 14 of them for the Detroit Tigers, doesn’t remember much more about the conversation than that.
“I was in shock,” he said, sitting in a hotel lobby in Washington, D.C., earlier in July. “I was overwhelmed. I just wasn’t prepared for it. I just didn’t think it was going to happen.” Could you blame him?
For years, he’d come up short when the vote rolled around. So when his 15-year run on the ballot ended and he hadn’t made it, he figured he was out. Forever.
Until the Modern Baseball Era Committee voted him in. A committee made up of former players, executives and a handful of veteran journalists, a group, by and large, that had seen him play.
The vote wasn’t unanimous: Morris got 14 of 16 votes. But it was well beyond the 75 percent threshold to get in.
The fiery pitcher is best remembered for his 10-inning, Game 7 masterpiece that propelled the Minnesota Twins over the Atlanta Braves in the 1991 World Series. He’s also remembered for run-ins with the media, with teammates, with just about anyone who stepped near him when he’d lose his temper.
Morris acknowledged that he’d needed to “grow up” during his first, post-election interview in Orlando last winter and said maybe there were valid reasons he’d been kept out of the Hall of Fame all those years.
But whatever debate there was about his personality was overshadowed by the debate about his on-field performance.
From the moment he was placed on the ballot in 2000, his resume turned into a Rorschach test between the analytics crowd and the “I-know-what-Isaw” crowd, a battle between numbers and feel.
“There was a group of guys that thought there is no way you can put a guy into the Hall of Fame with a 3.9 ERA,” said Morris, who was 254-186. “Well, I can’t change that. In all honesty, I never once in my life pitched to an ERA. I was paid to win, paid to finish games.”
Despite that tug-of-war, Morris found equanimity in his peers, in thinking about guys who he thought were Hall of Fame worthy and hadn’t gotten in.
“They gave me peace,” he said. “Knowing that, ‘Hey, life’s OK.’ Then I started reflecting on what I had accomplished and reflecting on what I should I be grateful for … and I did. I started thinking about all the good things that came my way.”
Morris, 63, began to change other things about himself, too. He found it easier to apologize, to acknowledge the presence of people he’d cross paths with in his daily life, to thank the person carrying his luggage into his hotel room.
Though that inner roiling helped him carve out a legacy in a game he loves, taking stock of his legacy helped him relax.
“I had to change,” he said. “And I have.”