Does this sound like a Hall of Famer to you?
A guy who drove in more runs than Mantle or DiMaggio?
A guy who had more hits than Ted Williams or Lou Gehrig?
|  | | Tony Perez hit a critical home run off Bill Lee in Game 7 off the 1975 World Series. Carlton Fisk is the catcher. |
A guy who was an unquestioned leader on every team he ever played for?
A seven-time All-Star who knocked in more runs over the quarter-century that spanned his era (1965-89) than anyone but Reginald M. Jackson?
And a guy who played in five World Series -- and hit cleanup (for the ultimate champs) in Game 7 of maybe the greatest World Series ever?
Look at Tony Perez's career that way, and you can't help but ask: How the heck could this man ever have needed nine elections to get himself elected to the Hall of Fame?
Oh, we know the answers. We've heard them enough from our fellow voters: He never led the league in any major category (despite several close calls). He didn't hit 400 home runs (finished with 379). He hit just .279 lifetime. Yadda, yadda, yadda.
But the essence of Tony Perez was greater than his numbers. And Sunday, he has an appointment in Cooperstown to prove it.
"He always had a knack of being the guy who either broke the game open or nailed the game shut," Perez's fellow inductee, Carlton Fisk, said this winter. "It seemed like he was always driving in big runs."
And that, friends, is what Tony Perez did. Game after game. Year after year. Team after team. So the numbers in that RBI column kept mounting, until he had more RBI than Mike Schmidt or Ernie Banks, more than George Brett or Willie McCovey, more than all but 17 men in history.
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Perez on Sparky Anderson
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"He showed me faith as a hitter and a clutch hitter. And he knows I was the guy, or one of the guys, that is going to drive in the runs for him. And he knows he just let me play and do my things when I got men on base. He never asked me to bunt, and I appreciate that -- because I don't know how to bunt. But I drove in the runs, and that is what he wants."
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The home-run hitters made more money, made more headlines. The local singles hitter stirred up more dust. Tony Perez just knocked in runs. In Perez's thesaurus, RBI was simply a synonym for "winning."
"The first thing I wanted when I got to the ballpark was to win," Perez said the other day. "And every time I had the tying run or the winning run on base, I wanted to do something. I think that was my job -- to drive in runs -- I guess because that's the way we played as kids. ... We (never) played for fun. We played to beat you."
Maybe it was a coincidence that Perez's teams always seemed to get better after he arrived and then seemed to get worse after he departed. But his teammates never saw it that way.
Braves coach Pat Corrales, who played with the Big Dog in Cincinnati, once summed up Perez's place on the old Big Red Machine this way:
"You'd read the paper the next day, and Rose would say this, and Morgan would say that, and Bench did such-and-such. Then, way down in the story, you'd read: 'By the way, Tony Perez won the game with a base hit.' "
But while Perez always seemed to be the star standing in the shadows, he never complained. Not then. Not now.
"I never think about shadows," he said. "Those guys were my teammates. I love them. And I know it wasn't their fault. It wasn't mine, either."
Back then, he didn't have the ego or the ease with the language to keep up with the bright-light crowd around him. So he did his thing when it mattered most -- when the games turned on his at-bats.
They say his numbers don't look so dazzling when measured against the numbers of today. But let's think about that again.
Try to find any active player with as many RBI as Tony Perez (1,652). Can't do it. Current active leader: Cal Ripken (1,614 and holding).
Try to find any active player who ever drove in 90 runs 11 seasons in a row, as Perez once did. Can't do that, either. Only Albert Belle (nine), Mike Piazza (seven) and Dante Bichette (six) even have done that six or more years in a row.
In fact, no hitter in the last 50 years ever matched that streak. Not Aaron. Not Mays. Not Frank Robinson. Not Reggie.
Finally, all of that registered on the Hall of Fame voters last winter. It took more elections for the Big Red RBI machine to get in than it had taken any player since Don Drysdale made it on his 10th try in 1984. And the last position player to wait that long was Duke Snider, who got elected on his 11th shot in 1980.
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Perez on Carlton Fisk
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"He showed me he can play and go out there every day as a catcher. And that is something you don't give to every catcher. You have to be a guy who loves the game and wants to play."
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But in a way, that's almost fitting. It's the story of Tony Perez's career. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting to be a hero. And then cashing in when the time was right.
Not so long ago, Perez took that trip to Cooperstown, walked through the Hall of Fame museum, looked at those plaques on the wall. And then it hit him: Come Sunday, his name, his plaque would join them on that wall.
"When I walked in there, in that room where all the plaques are, and I saw those plaques and saw the names and the players that are there," he said, "I feel something. You know, you feel something in your arms, in your body -- a feeling, a special feeling, where you say, 'I want to be there, too. I want to be on that wall -- and I'm gonna be there. Forever.' "
Jayson Stark is a senior writer at ESPN.com. | |
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