Safe by a Mile

FOURTEEN My Own Hall of Fame

fourteen My Own Hall of Fame A few years ago, about 1993, I got a phone call from a Denver-based sculptor named Raelee Frazier. She wanted to do a life-size bronze cast of my hands because a mutual friend with the Rockies had told her I had “great” baseball hands. At first I wasn’t really interested. She called me again and again, maybe about five or six times. Finally I relented and said I would go down and get this over with. So I went down to her studio in downtown Denver, down off Colfax and Emerson, to find out what she had in mind. Once I got there, I walked into the studio and saw all these bronze things she was doing. She was doing mannequins for museums, doing buffalo and soldiers from the western Civil War. She doing quite a bit of things for museums back east. I saw a broomstick handle in a corner, and typical of a former baseball player, I picked it up and started to swing it like a bat. When I got into my hitting stance, Raelee said, “Stop. That’s it! That’s exactly what I’m looking for.” I said, “What, with a bat?” She said, “Yes.” She then proceeded to talk me into having a wax cast made of my hands gripped around a baseball bat. I agreed, and she made a cast of my hands right then and there. I was surprised and pleased by how well they came out.They were actually lifelike casts of my hands. Then Raelee suggested that we expand the project to include casts of the hands of current major leaguers, but I reckoned that it would be difficult to get them interested right away. I supposed, instead, that it would be possible to get casts made of Hall of Fame hitters and sell the sculptures as lasting baseball memorabilia. “But who can contact Hall of Famers?” Raelee asked. “I can,” I said, “I played with some of them, played against some of them, managed some of them, scouted a bunch of them. I can approach them about the idea.” The more I thought about it, the more appropriate the idea seemed. After all, in baseball, players use their hands nearly all the time. Obviously pitchers, hitters, and fielders all 442 my own hall of fame use their hands, and even runners might have to use their hands sliding into a base. But the most important use of the hands is in hitting. The first thing I watched when I was a scout was to see if a guy had quick hands, strong hands, or whatever. The sculptures would preserve part of baseball history and make us some money. The first guy we convinced was Ralph Kiner, who was broadcasting for the Mets. I talked to Ralph about it, showed him my set of hands, and he was interested. I said, “We would like to do your hands.” He said, “OK.” I picked him up at the hotel in my pickup truck, took him out to Raelee’s studio, and made a cast of his hands. The next guy was Billy Williams of the Cubs, who I had managed and also was a bit responsible for getting a coaching job with Oakland. He is a wonderful guy, and so is Ralph. These Hall of Famers are all great guys. I talked Billy into doing it when I saw him in spring training and convinced him to come to the studio when the Cubs came in to play Colorado. Thus the Hitters’ Hands project was born. With Raelee’s artistic abilities and my contacts with the former players, we felt it was worth a try. I secured an outside investor to get the ball rolling, and we began the campaign of convincing the players. I had built a good measure of trust and friendship with the players, and this greatly facilitated the efforts. Indeed Al Lopez’s son, a lawyer, allowed his father to go ahead with the sculpture because my involvement with the project impressed him. The project started taking off. We traveled to where the ballplayer lived, or if he came into Denver with a ball club, we would sometimes arrange to get him to the studio. We would get permission from the player to use the model of the bat he actually used during his career. We’d get written permission to order bats from the Louisville Slugger people...