Waiting is the hardest part for Hodges' family and fans

Joan Hodges tries not to build her hopes up too high.

Maybe that way, if disappointment and heartbreak rap once again upon the door of Gil Hodges' widow, they won't sting quite as much.

Her late husband, a slugging, smooth-fielding first baseman who helped the Dodgers win World Series championships in Brooklyn and Los Angeles, could be introduced today in Las Vegas as a baseball Hall of Famer, ending a long and sometimes painful wait for family, friends and fans.

On the other hand, he could be rejected again by the Veterans Committee of the National Baseball Hall of Fame, which this year considered a group of finalists that included Joe Torre, Maury Wills, Dick Allen, Jim Kaat, Tony Oliva, Al Oliver, Vada Pinson, Ron Santo and Luis Tiant.

As Joan Hodges knows from experience, nothing is guaranteed.

Asked what it would mean to see her husband enshrined at Cooperstown, the 82-year-old great-grandmother says politely but forcefully from her Brooklyn home, "I hope you don't misunderstand me, but I don't do this. I stopped doing this many years ago. Those are questions I just don't address anymore."

She pauses a moment before adding, "If he gets in, we'll be absolutely elated. If he doesn't, he's in mine and my children's hall of fame forever."

Why he's not in baseball's Hall is a subject for debate.

Supporters say that Hodges, who in 1969 managed the "miracle" New York Mets to a World Series championship and in 1972 died from a heart attack two days before his 48th birthday, belonged in Cooperstown years ago.

"It's beyond us why he hasn't been elected," says Marty Adler of Plainview, N.Y., founder and president of the Brooklyn Dodgers Hall of Fame and distributor of a bumper sticker -- "Cooperstown Needs Gil Hodges -- that plainly spells out his sentiment. "Some people say I'm so prejudiced toward the Brooklyn Dodgers that I can't accept the fact that he's just not good enough.

"But you're supposed to look at a player during his playing tenure, and in my honest opinion he was clearly the best first baseman of an entire decade."

No first baseman who played the bulk of his career in the 1950s, Hodges' heyday, has been elected to the Hall of Fame. Hodges hit 370 home runs, four in one game, and batted .273 over 18 seasons with the Dodgers and Mets, with time out of baseball during World War II to serve as an anti-aircraft gunner.