Technically they’re not Hall of Famers, but that shouldn’t take anything away from the high honors accorded Saturday in Cooperstown to writer Bill Conlin, broadcaster Dave Van Horne, and longtime baseball executive Roland Hemond.
Baseball Hall of Fame: Bill Conlin, Dave Van Horne, Roland Hemond Honored
Conlin is this year's recipient of the J.G. Taylor Spink Award. For 21 years, Conlin covered the Phillies as beat writer with the Philadelphia Daily News, in the days when beat writers still held that job for decades. Conlin recently recalled a story from his early days as a newspaper writer ...
And one other story was actually a year before I went on the baseball beat, 1965 I was filling in for (Stan Hockman) on a coast trip to Houston, San Francisco and LA and on a Sunday afternoon when the rest of the media corps had all gone to Las Vegas because Monday was an open day, I didn’t know anybody well enough to go with them to Vegas so I hung with the team.
We flew by Charter Constellation down to LAX and right into the middle of the Watts riots. And I wrote a story, there were seven African American and Hispanic-black players on the team and I interviewed all of them about what the implications were with the civil rights movement that was then in progress and still in its infancy and the whole ramifications of a riot of that magnitude.
And they gave me some tremendous answers and the story that I wrote was broken out on the front page of the Daily News and that was actually the first really attention that I got as a baseball writer and that was - you know, I can remember every detail of riding down the harbor freeway, being asked to crouch lower than the window levels because they were sniping at buses off the overpasses and that still is a very vivid moment in my career.
Of course, 1965 was a long time ago and these days Conlin is best known for railing against sophisticated baseball analysis, social media, and just about anything else invented after 1970. Still, he performed hard work for a long time and he performed it well, and he’s perfectly deserving of this fine honor.
Dave Van Horne is this year's recipient of the Ford C. Frick Award for excellence in broadcasting. Van Horne was with the Montreal Expos from the very beginning, broadcasting the franchise's first game on April 8, 1969. More than three decades later, when the Expos couldn't line up a partner for their English-language broadcasts, Van Horne called the entire 2000 season on the Internet. Before 2001, with the franchise still without a broadcast partner, Van Horne took the job as the Florida Marlins' lead play-by-play voice on radio, a role he still plays today (well, not today because he's in Cooperstown, but most days).
And finally, there’s Roland Hemond, the second recipient of the John Jordan “Buck” O’Neil Lifetime Achievement Award -- and the first whose name isn’t John Jordan “Buck” O’Neil -- “presented to an individual for extraordinary efforts to enhance baseball’s positive impact on society.”
Hemond began his career in professional baseball in the 1950s with the Milwaukee Braves, and would eventually serve with the Chicago White Sox, Baltimore Orioles, and Arizona Diamondbacks (for whom he currently serves as an advisor). Hemond was White Sox general manager in the 1970s and early '80s -- among other notable moves, he hired Tony La Russa as manager in 1979 -- and ran the Orioles in the late '80s and early '90s.
But Hemond’s not the O’Neil Award winner because of his front-office successes (though they no doubt helped). In Hemond’s case, we might think of this honor as a sort of Good Guy Award, as over the decades Hemond has built an immense of goodwill inside the sport, as a team executive but also as the president of the Association of Professional Baseball Players of America and as co-founder of the Professional Baseball Scouts Foundation.
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