Williams gets call for Hall
Forty years after guiding the Red Sox to the American League pennant in Boston’s “Impossible Dream” season, former manager Dick Williams has finally realized his own seemingly impossible dream.
Williams, 78, was voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame on Monday by the Veteran’s Committee.
“I’m just thrilled to death. There are no words to explain how I feel. This is the ultimate,” Williams said from his room at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel and Convention Center in Nashville, Tenn., site of baseball’s winter meetings. “I’m so lucky and so thankful.”
Williams, a strict disciplinarian who managed 21 years (1967-69, 1971-88) in the majors, led the Oakland Athletics to World Series titles in 1972 and 1973. He also guided the Red Sox to the pennant in his first season as a manager in 1967.
Williams, one of two managers to lead three franchises to the World Series and one of seven to win pennants in both leagues, flew to Nashville from Las Vegas on Monday after receiving a phone call informing him of his election.
“We cried all morning when we found out,” said Williams, who was waiting for the call with his wife, Norma. “We couldn’t believe it. And when we talked to the kids, we cried again.”
Norma Williams said the couple, which has lived in Las Vegas for the last 17 years, was told by Hall of Fame officials that if they didn’t receive a phone call at 7 a.m., Williams didn’t make it. When the clock hit 7:03 a.m., she said they thought “I guess we didn’t do it.”
“Then the phone rang and they congratulated him,” she said. “You can’t imagine the feeling. It’s just unreal.”
Williams, who missed election by a small margin in 1999 before a 2000 arrest for indecent exposure appeared to ruin his chances, is the only living candidate on the managers and umpires ballot elected for enshrinement.
Williams will be formally inducted on July 27.
Former Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley also was among five voted in.
Williams, who also had a 13-year playing career, was a member of O’Malley’s Brooklyn Dodgers from 1951-56 and was on the bench in 1951 when the New York Giants’ Bobby Thomson hit his “shot heard ’round the world.”
“I learned my baseball from the Dodgers — (Branch) Rickey baseball,” Williams said in an interview with the Review-Journal last summer. “That’s what I demanded my players do, and if it wasn’t done, then I’d make changes.”
The fiery Williams also helped turn around the Montreal Expos in the late 1970s and pushed the San Diego Padres to their first National League pennant in 1984.
Williams retired as manager of the Seattle Mariners in 1988, when his demanding, no-nonsense style failed to work with modern players.
“I couldn’t manage these days. I wouldn’t last a week. I’d blow my crock,” he said last summer at Cashman Field, where he serves as a color analyst for 51s’ Sunday home games on KENO-AM (1460).
Williams also said he “absolutely” deserved to be enshrined in the Hall and sounded bitter that he hadn’t been elected, and didn’t expect to be.
“But that was before they changed the format,” he said Monday. “Nobody was going to get in that way.”
The Veteran’s Committee election process was changed in 2001 and again in July of this year, with the voting panel for managers and umpires reduced from all living members of the Hall to a 16-member group featuring 10 Hall of Famers, three executives and three veteran media members.
Each candidate who received 12 votes, or at least 75 percent of the vote, was elected, and Williams received 13. His longtime friend Whitey Herzog fell one vote short.
Contact reporter Todd Dewey at tdewey@reviewjournal.com or (702) 383-0354.
