Whatever Happened to Gomer Hodge?

HAROLD “GOMER” HODGE

• Second Base, Third Base, First Base, 1971
• Best (only) season: 1971, 80 games, .205 batting average, 1 home run, 9 RBI
• Indians career: 80 games, .205 avg., 1 home runs, 9 RBI

The years have not been kind to Harold “Gomer” Hodge since his departure—actually, his unwilling “retirement”—from professional baseball, after he was fired as a minor-league coach for the Montreal Expos in 2001.

“They never told me why; they just let me go,” Hodge said from his home in Rutherfordton, North Carolina, where he was born and raised, and was a star baseball, basketball, and football player at Spindale High School in the early 1960s. Rutherfordton is about 60 miles west of Charlotte.

“I’d like to get back in [base]ball, but I can’t because of my health,” said Hodge. He has been on total disability for several years, primarily because of problems with his back and other ailments. “I can’t do much of anything anymore.”

At the time of our interview, Gomer was in the early stages of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), also known as “Lou Gehrig Disease.”

Though his given name was Harold, Hodge was nicknamed “Gomer” by his minor-league teammates because “some of my northern buddies thought I sounded like that guy on television, Gomer Pyle,” he said. Gomer Pyle was a character on the old Andy Griffith television show, played by actor-singer Jim Nabors, who later starred in his own TV show, Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.

Though his major-league career consisted of only one season (1971), Hodge is still a favorite of Tribe fans of that era because, well, primarily because he was such a charismatic, pleasant, unpretentious, and extremely likable character.

He played first, second, and third base. “But my best position,” Gomer said, “was hitting.”

Hodge’s popularity took off after back-to-back pinch-hitting appearances. On Opening Day in Detroit, April 6, 1971, Gomer singled for a run against the Tigers’ Mickey Lolich. In the Tribe’s next game, the home opener in Cleveland against Boston on April 8, Gomer pinch-doubled and scored the Indians’ first run in the eighth inning. He remained in the game at second base and, in the bottom of the ninth, delivered a two-out, two-run single for a 3-2 Tribe victory.

Three days later, in the Indians’ fourth game, Hodge came through again as a pinch hitter, this time with an eighth-inning double as the Indians again beat Boston, 7-2.

It gave Gomer four hits in his first four official at-bats, after which he chortled in a post-game interview, “Gollee, fellas, I’m hitting 4.000,” a remark that will always remain his legacy.

Unfortunately, Hodge’s—and the Indians’—season went into rapid decline thereafter, though Gomer enjoyed one more day in the limelight. On September 3, he smashed a home run, his only one in the major leagues, in Boston over Fenway Park’s infamous left-field wall, again as a pinch hitter.

When the season ended with the Indians mired in sixth place, tying a franchise record for futility—102 losses—Hodge, whose batting average had shrunk from “4.000” to .205, was demoted to Portland of the Class AAA Pacific Coast League.

“They said they wanted me to go down and concentrate on playing one position,” said Gomer. “After a little while they asked me to be a player-coach, and I knew right away they didn’t have any plans to call me back, but that was OK. I figured if they thought enough of me to want me to be a player-coach, that was pretty good.”

He was right. Hodge remained a minor-league player-coach and eventually a manager in the Indians farm system through 1976, when he was fired. He went home to Rutherfordton, where he helped his father on the farm and tried to forget about baseball.

But in 1981, Bob Quinn, then the Indians’ farm director, called and asked Hodge if he wanted to manage Waterloo, Iowa, in the Class A Midwest League. “I sure did,” said Gomer. “But first I asked Quinn why they fired me, and he said, ‘Because you had a horse-bleep record, didn’t you?’ which I did. All I could figure was that he must have thought I got smarter working on my dad’s farm.”

Maybe he did. He won the Manager of the Year award in the Midwest League in 1981 and 1983. It also was in Waterloo that Hodge met his first wife, Deborah, though he was reluctant to talk about her, even to mention her by name.

“We were married almost twenty years … She told me I’d never catch her cheating on me, but I did and she left me with about $20,000 in bills,” he said. They had two children, son Nicholas and daughter Morgan. Hodge and his second wife, Linda, a probation officer in Rutherfordton, were married in 2002.

Gomer went on to work in the minor leagues in various positions as a manager, coach, and hitting instructor for the Milwaukee Brewers, Boston, and Montreal. He even coached teams in Australia and Mexico until back and hip problems curtailed his physical activities. He was forced to retire in 2001.

The highlight of his career? “There were lots of them,” he said, somewhat surprisingly considering that he spent only one year in the major leagues. (It took him eight seasons in the minors to get there, and he spent three more as a player-coach in the Indians farm system from 1972 to 1974.)

“My biggest thrill was when [manager] Alvin Dark called me into his office during spring training on April 3, 1971,” he said. “I remember the date because that was my 27th birthday and I was afraid he was going to tell me I was going back to the minors. Instead he told me I made the team. It was the best birthday present I ever got.

“When people ask me how many home runs I hit in the big leagues and I say one, they laugh. But then I tell them, ‘I bet you wish you’d been able to hit one,’ and they don’t laugh any more. I hit my home run over the Green Monster in Boston. It wasn’t a game winner, but it was a home run … it sure was. And those four pinch hits were pretty good, too.

“I still have a fan club in Cleveland. It’s not too big anymore, but I still get letters from fans who want my autograph. I always sign ‘Gomer’ for them, but I’m Harold to everybody down here.”

Something else that Gomer remembers with pride, though it didn’t happen during his playing days, was a scouting assignment in the winter of 1992-93 that he made while working for the Expos.

“They sent me to the Dominican Republic with another of their scouts to look at some players,” said Hodge. “I found a 17-year-old kid and told the Expos they should sign him. They did, and now he’s in the big leagues. I get a thrill reading about how good he is.”

That “kid” is Vladimir Guerrero, who became one of the best players in baseball, won the American League’s Most Valuable Player award in 2004 as a member of the Los Angeles Angels, and signed a $12.5 million contract in 2005.

”I’d like to have a couple hundred of that [salary],” said Hodge, who made $13,500 (the major-league minimum) in 1971. That [$13,500] is worth about one time at-bat today.

”I’m not bitter, just disappointed the way things turned out. Not because I didn’t make a bunch of money, but because I love baseball and I’d still like to be in it. If I sound like I’m sad, it’s probably because I have a bad cold and my nose is all stuffed up.

“When I played it was because we loved the game, not for the money. And the guys who are making all the money now, when they come out of the game I guarantee they won’t have enjoyed it as much as I did,” said Gomer. 

Hodge died on May 13, 2007, in Saluda, North Carolina.

 

Author’s Note

This article is excerpted from Whatever Happened to “Super Joe”? (softcover $14.95/294 pages), 2006, by Russell Schneider. Reprinted with permission of Gray & Company, Publishers. The book is available online from Amazon.com.