COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. – Three baseball lifers, each closely intertwined with a proud franchise and a passionate fan base, received career awards from the Baseball Hall of Fame on Saturday.
Though few threads directly connect Pat Hughes, John Lowe and Carl Erskine with one another, all three share a deep love for the sport and a drive to do right by it. In all three cases, that stems partly from a sense of duty, but perhaps more importantly from one word that Lowe used emphatically during of his acceptance speech: enthusiasm.
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“The more enthusiastically I dove into baseball,” recalled Lowe, though he could have been speaking for any of the honorees, “the more I would be rewarded.”
Hughes, a broadcaster for the Twins, Brewers and mostly the Cubs over a four-decade-plus career, received the Ford C. Frick Award for “major contributions to baseball,” the highest honor a baseball broadcaster can have bestowed. Lowe, who spent nearly three decades covering the Tigers, was named the 2023 recipient of the BBWAA Career Excellence Award. And Erskine, an outstanding player in his own right, was named this year’s winner of the Buck O’Neil Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to the game and society after his playing career ended.
Hughes and Lowe accepted their honors at the Glimmerglass Festival a few miles outside of downtown Cooperstown. Erskine was not able to travel from his home in Indiana, so his son Gary accepted his award. But “the Indiana Gentleman” did appear on screen, giving his thanks via a prerecorded video.
In his own way, each man formally joined not only a baseball-wide fraternity on Saturday, but a smaller one as well. Hughes followed in the footsteps of Cubs broadcasters Bob Elson, Jack Brickhouse and Harry Caray as a Frick winner. Lowe became the fourth BBWAA honoree to spend the bulk of his career in Detroit, joining H.G. Salsinger, Joe Falls and his longtime contemporary Tom Gage. And while the O’Neil Award has been given only six times, in being honored in Cooperstown, Erskine joined a long list of his Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers teammates who have been immortalized here.
Hughes, 68, is in his 41st season calling Major League games, the last 28 of those coming on the north side of Chicago. During his speech, he of course thanked many of his influences, but he also made the assembled audience of family and friends laugh with anecdotes about some of his old broadcast partners – including a time when he saw Ron Santo’s hairpiece catch fire at old Shea Stadium.
“We thought it was very fitting,” he quipped, “that the name of the Mets’ starting pitcher that night was Al Leiter.”
He made a special point to thank Cubs fans, well aware of the bond that any fan base shares with the radio voice of its club. That’s especially true for one like Hughes, whose tenure has spanned so many glorious moments in franchise history.
“When I got the call from Cooperstown last December,” Hughes said, “I truly think there were some Cub fans who were just as happy as I was with the news. You make me feel like I am a part of your family.”
Lowe covered baseball from 1979-2014, with the last 29 of those seasons spent as the Tigers beat reporter for the Detroit Free Press. He also covered the Angels, Dodgers and Phillies, and it was during the latter stint that he made the advance for which he is best known. Lowe created the quality start statistic, seeking to quantify how often a pitcher “did his job, which is to give his team a decent chance to win the game.”
Those decades in Detroit meant that, like Hughes, he saw plenty of down times as well as good ones. And for both men, it has been their ability, their enthusiasm, to meet losses and down years with the same zest as wins and championships, that brought them to the same stage on Saturday.
“So much of what makes baseball wonderful to cover is the same, whether your team is up or down,” Lowe said. “If your enjoyment of the beat is pegged to how your team is doing, you’re not going to probably last on the beat very long. I said this in my job interview with the Free Press in 1986. My favorite moment of every day is when that pitcher goes into the windup for the first pitch of the game because you have no idea about what is about to transpire.”
Yet it was Gary Erskine who seemed the most overcome by the moment. Brimming with pride throughout his speech, Carl Erskine’s son recalled his father’s playing accomplishments but especially his achievements off the field. The elder Erskine pitched in five World Series, winning one of them, and threw two no-hitters, but his honor on Saturday hinged more on his status as “a longtime champion of diversity … and inclusivity,” as Bob Costas described him in a video introduction.
Erskine perhaps first became known beyond his playing skills for his friendship with and support of Jackie Robinson, but that was only the beginning. He was an early supporter and has remained an avid proponent of Special Olympics, and the Carl and Betty Erskine Society provides a wide ranger of support for people with developmental and intellectual disabilities. He was also a founding member of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and has been a leader in the Baseball Assistance Team (BAT).
He’s also the author of three books, all of which, according to Gary, echo the man with “an overall theme of kindness, acceptance and inclusion.”
The elder Erskine also gave motivational speeches until recent years, Gary Erskine recalled.
“They always centered around that same message of seeing the best in others and looking for similarities and not differences,” he said. “Everyone who ever heard dad speak aspired to do better and do more for others.”
***Courtesy of the Chicago Cubs website, Pat Hughes, John Lowe and Carl Erskine receive awards from Hall of Fame (mlb.com)***
