Missed this earlier in the month. For you soccer fans out there, the veterans committee considers players for the Hall of Fame whom they feel the sportswriters have overlooked.When baseball’s Hall of Fame announced last Monday that a veterans committee had elected Joe Gordon, an All-Star second baseman for the Yankees during the Joe DiMaggio era, elderly fans who consider their gray hairs to be pinstripes nodded knowingly. But younger Yankees followers might have wondered, Joe Who?
Nearly 60 years since Gordon last played, he had been pretty much forgotten if not ignored, even by the Yankees. His name seldom appeared except when a Yankee was voted the American League’s most valuable player. Gordon earned that award in 1942 with a .322 average, 18 homers, 103 runs batted in and a dazzling glove for a pennant-winning team, even though Ted Williams won batting’s Triple Crown that season.
DiMaggio endured as the Yankee of that era, but Gordon once prompted his manager, Joe McCarthy, to say, “The greatest all-around player I ever saw, and I don’t bar any of them, is Joe Gordon.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/14/sports/baseball/14anderson.html?8dpc
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