“Of course, I remember Nellie Fox,” said Whitey Ford, the former star pitcher for the New York Yankees.
“How can I forget him? He was the toughest out for me. In 12 years I struck him out only once, and I still think the umpire blew the call.”
The late Nellie Fox, the scrappy second baseman, the catalyst of the Go-Go White Sox of the 1950s, will be inducted into baseball’s Hall of Fame Sunday, 32 years after he played his last game. He ranks among the top infielders in diamond history and still holds the major-league record for the most consecutive games, 98, without striking out.
Also to be inducted are Phil Niekro, the right-handed knuckleball pitcher who won 318 games during his 24-year big-league career; Tom Lasorda, longtime manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers; and Willie Wells, a slick-fielding shortstop who played on three pennant-winning teams during his 20 seasons in the old Negro leagues.
As baseball fans, including many Hall-of-Famers, began assembling here for the inductions, much of the talk centered on Fox.
“When I was inducted in 1990,” Joe Morgan said, “the only thing that could have made the day more perfect was if Nellie Fox and Jackie Robinson could have been here with me. I’ll never forget how (Fox) helped me when I was a rookie with the Houston Astros.
“Now I’ll have the pleasure being with Nellie when he goes in.”
Many baseball insiders have special memories of Fox, who won the American League’s Most Valuable Player Award in 1959 when the Sox last represented Chicago in the World Series.
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Jack Kuenster, the editor of Baseball Digest, traveled with the Sox for two decades when he was a baseball writer for the old Chicago Daily News.
“Opening Day in Detroit, in 1959, Nellie drove a ball into the right-field stands during batting practice,” he recalled. “Everyone stopped what they were doing. They were surprised that Nellie had enough power to reach the seats. I was standing behind the batting cage. Nellie was laughing when he finished his round and he told me, `You’re going to see more of those.’ In a sense he was right. He homered during the game but only hit one more the rest of the season.”
Jim Landis, star center-fielder on the ’59 Sox, was among Nellie’s teammates here for the inductions. “Nellie was great guy and a great ballplayer,” Landis said. “He was the glue that kept us together.”
Fox liked the ponies and was constantly betting on the horses. One day, many years ago, the Sox were in Miami for a weekend exhibition series with the Baltimore Orioles. On a Saturday, during breakfast at the McAllister Hotel, he discovered a young baseball writer who was going to Hialeah Park for an afternoon at the races.
It was the day of a big feature race, and Fox asked the writer if he would make a wager for him. The scribe agreed and Fox gave him $6 to bet across the board on Jay Fox, who was named in his honor.
As sometimes happpens, the writer was so swept up in the day’s events he forgot to place the bet. The winner of the race, seemingly, was a Calumet horse with Steve Brooks up. But Brooks committed a foul in the stretch, and his horse was disqualified. And up went the number of Jay Fox, who was part of an entry that had finished second. Jay Fox was a long shot and paid $134 for a $6 win, place and show bet.
The writer was running on empty and had to borrow the money from a colleague, and when he walked into the White Sox clubhouse before the night game, the players cheered. Fox had told them of his bet.
I gave him the $134. He smiled, patted me on the back, and said, “I should have bet $10 across the board.”