Veteran ‘ball writer’ Gerry Fraley will also have his moment in Cooperstown

COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. – The superstar from a St. Paul family of tremendous athletes is being inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame this weekend. That was a very good reason to again head to the most quaint of all citadels in American sports.

The eligible voters from the Baseball Writers Association of America surprised a good share of Minnesota’s sports followers by giving approval to Joe Mauer (young as Hall of Famers go) on his first attempt to reach 75% of this year’s 385 ballots submitted.

The surprised included me, self-described as “Old No. 5″ on the seniority list for all BBWAA members. I figured it would take a couple years of momentum building for Mauer to join American sports’ grandest club.

Canton is much appreciated as pro football’s mecca, yes, but this one started in 1936 with Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, Christy Mathewson and Walter Johnson as inductees.

That’s all you need to know about what joining this club means.

Mauer’s co-star for some of us in attaining recognition here this weekend is Gerry Fraley, a “ball writer” who headed to the big press box in the sky due to cancer in 2019.

The BBWAA had been around since 1908 — bringing together reporters covering major league teams for daily newspapers. When it was time to start a Hall of Fame and tie it to a National Museum, the writers were asked to cast the votes, with a maximum of 10 from the list.

Henry Edwards, a founder of the BBWAA and its secretary, came up with that list and counted the ballots. When there was some confusion about the system among writers, Edwards was quoted as saying:

“I am led to suspect that some of the electorate is very dumb.”

Nearly 90 years later, you can go to the internet five minutes after the annual results are announced, and that will be filled with that same sentiment from other media and the public.

While dodging those barbs annually, there is also a chance a few weeks earlier to elect a baseball writer to be honored with a certificate in the “Scribes & Mikemen” exhibit inside the museum.

This started in 1962 with J.G. Taylor Spink, the founder of The Sporting News. He died later that year and the BBWAA honor was named the Spink Award until 2021.

Seems as though J.G. had suggested in an editorial in 1942 that continuing segregation of Major League Baseball was in the best interest of all parties and … well, it’s now the Career Excellence Award.

Keeping a name off it is probably a safe way to go, considering the potential for most worthy candidates among sports writers to have gotten full of liquor one night and offended half a bar full of people.

Not the man we called “Frales.” He didn’t need liquid courage to offer candid thoughts.

He had the insight of a borderline genius in covering a team and went after a beat like it was fourth-and-goal at all times.

Which wasn’t a surprise, since he came out of a home of modest means in Clearwater, Fla., with a perfect math score on the SAT and as a football player, earning the chance to attend Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

Carnegie Mellon graduates don’t become ball writers, but this one did, and fiercely.

Paul Hagen was the BBWAA honoree at the Hall of Fame in 2013. He covered the Phillies for 25 years. Before that, he was in Dallas for a decade, missing Fraley’s arrival at the Dallas Morning News in 1989 by a couple of years.

Hagen has retired from the daily baseball grind, but he will be in Cooperstown this weekend to honor Fraley, a friend, although once with the potential not to be.

“I had been in Philly at the Daily News for a couple years, and there was an opening for a ball writer at the Inquirer,” Hagan said this week. “Frales was a serious candidate, and I had mixed emotions. The Inquirer was the engine that pulled the whole Knight Ridder [newspaper company] train in Philly, so getting Fraley would’ve been good in that way.

“I also was hoping Frales wouldn’t get it, because I knew there was no way our friendship would have survived. … Frales was constitutionally incapable of not disliking whoever he was competing against.”

Kind of like our guy Sid Hartman was in his heyday, although Sid also was constitutionally incapable of not disliking whomever was competing for his side.