Farm to fame: Nine baseball Hall of Famers with Sacramento-area connections
Whenever Dusty Baker finishes his managerial career, he has a reasonable chance of eventually securing a plaque in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
But if it happens, Baker will be far from the first person with a link to the Sacramento region to earn a spot in Cooperstown. In every decade going back to the 1950s, there’s been at least one inductee with a viable connection to the area.
Here are nine such Hall of Famers:
1. Dazzy Vance
Year inducted: 1955, by the Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA)
Sacramento link: One of the National League’s best pitchers prior to 1950, Vance somehow didn’t win his first MLB game until age 31 in 1922. Prior to that, he had occasional cups of coffee in the bigs and pitched for every minor league team that would have him, including the Sacramento Senators of the Pacific Coast League in 1919.
“Vance is one of the best pitchers in the big brush, according to (Sacramento manager) Bill Rodgers,” the Sacramento Star noted about the transaction. “He has been in hard luck, though, and so the Yankees are selling him to Sacramento.”
Vance went 10-18 with a 2.82 ERA for Sacramento, moving on to play for Memphis and New Orleans in the Southern Association the following season.
2. Branch Rickey
Year inducted: 1966, by the Veteran’s Committee
Sacramento link: Before he signed Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers and revolutionized baseball, Rickey served more than 20 years as general manager of the St. Louis Cardinals. In this time, he pioneered the concept of baseball’s farm system and purchased numerous bush teams, including Sacramento prior to the 1936 season.
Rickey would not be an absentee executive for the Solons, speaking in front of more than 1,500 people at Memorial Auditorium on March 3, 1936. “We have won 24 pennants in nine years and I eventually expect the Sacramento club to be added to the list,” Rickey told the crowd, according to The Bee’s coverage of the event.
The Solons won their first and only PCL championship in 1942, while still a Cardinals’ affiliate, with Rickey accepting an offer from Brooklyn months later.
3. Harry Hooper
Year inducted: 1971, by the Veteran’s Committee
Sacramento link: Hooper was a Deadball Era outfielder and team captain for the Boston Red Sox, most famous perhaps for suggesting that teammate, pitcher, and part-time outfielder Babe Ruth belonged in the field every day.
In Lawrence Ritter’s 1966 oral history of baseball’s early days, “The Glory of Their Times,” Hooper spoke of his path to Boston. Having studied engineering at St. Mary’s College, he went to play with the Sacramento Senators in the California State League after graduation because they helped get him get a surveying job with Western Pacific Railroad.
Hooper did his surveying work and hit .344 with Sacramento in 1908. That August, he agreed to join the Red Sox for $2,800 over a beer with owner John T. Taylor at a bar in Eighth and J streets downtown near the current-day site of Central Library.
4. Bob Lemon
Year inducted: 1976, by the BBWAA
Sacramento link: A seven-time 20-game winner with the Cleveland Indians in the 1940s and ‘50s, Lemon was nearing the necessary 75% of the vote he needed for induction to Cooperstown through the BBWAA when he took a job managing the recently reformed Solons in December 1973.
It is doubtful Lemon’s time in Sacramento helped his Hall of Fame case.
Playing at Hughes Stadium, which went just 233 feet down the left field line, the Solons hit an astonishing 305 home runs. But their pitchers gave up 301 homers, with a 6.70 ERA, and the team finished 66-78. Lemon didn’t return the following season, later winning a World Series managing the Yankees in 1978.
5. Ernie Lombardi
Year inducted: 1986, by the Veteran’s Committee
Sacramento link: The Oakland-born Lombardi ranks among the best-hitting catchers in baseball history, winning batting titles with the Cincinnati Reds and the Boston Braves and being named National League Most Valuable Player in 1938. He returned to California just shy of his 40th birthday in 1948, landing back in the PCL with Sacramento.
Lombardi told the San Francisco Examiner that he hoped to catch “two or three games a week in Sacramento.” As John E. Spalding noted in his 1995 team history, “Sacramento Senators and Solons,” Lombardi only briefly played for Sacramento before being released and signing with the Oakland Oaks.
But he managed to hit a 578-foot home run off a hanging curve ball at Sacramento’s Edmonds Field on May 5, with the Oakland Tribune noting it cleared the 60-foot light tower 340 feet from home plate.
6. Ray Dandridge
Year inducted: 1987, by the Veteran’s Committee
Sacramento link: Segregation kept countless Black baseball greats out of the National and American League, including some too old to be considered viable prospects after Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947. One of the toughest cases among this group: Dandridge, 33 when the color barrier fell.
Hitting .362 in 1949 for the Giants’ top farm club, the Minneapolis Millers, Dandridge might have deserved a shot regardless of his age. But star third baseman Sid Gordon, who finished fourth in MVP voting in 1987, played his position in New York.
Instead, Dandridge stuck around Minneapolis for four years, mentoring a young Willie Mays. Dandridge joined the Solons in 1953, arriving late to spring training, injuring his hand during an exhibition, and struggling to play a new position, second base, according to Bee coverage. He hit .263 in 24 games before being traded to Oakland.
7. Orlando Cepeda
Year inducted: 1999, by the Veteran’s Committee
Sacramento link: The Baby Bull and Giants legend moved to a six-bedroom apartment in Roseville around 1987 to instruct at a baseball school Baker and his friend, longtime scout Gene Frechette, conducted at Sacramento State.
“I’d been living in Los Angeles,” Cepeda told longtime Sacramento sportswriter Bill Conlin on April 3, 1988. “But I wanted to move closer to San Francisco where I played so many seasons, and Gene Frechette talked me into coming here to Roseville. My wife and I like it very much. We’re very happy here.”
Cepeda’s teenage son Malcolm, a baseball prospect, relocated to Lake Howell, Fla., by 1990. It’s unclear how long the rest of the family stayed in Roseville, though Conlin wrote in February 1991 that Cepeda and clan were now living in Suisun City.
A Giants spokesman said Cepeda lived in Roseville “not for very long,” lived in Fairfield over 20 years, and now lives in Concord. Longtime Roseville City Councilwoman Pauline Roccucci expressed surprise that Cepeda ever lived in town.
8. Joe Gordon
Year inducted: 2009, by the Veteran’s Committee
Sacramento link: Most of the men on this list were in Sacramento long before or after their best years in baseball. Not Gordon, though.
Gordon struggled for several years after winning the 1942 American League MVP Award with the Yankees. But he had his final great year as a baseball player with the Solons in 1951, hitting .299 with 43 homers and 136 RBIs, then played one more year in town.
He also lived in Sacramento in retirement, building a successful real estate career.
“He was attracted to Sacramento by hunting and fishing opportunities, being avidly inclined as an outdoorsman,” Conlin wrote following Gordon’s death in 1978 at Sutter Memorial Hospital of a heart attack at age 63. “He also was an excellent golfer, recently at the top of his game and shooting in par figures in the face of advancing years.”
9. Pat Gillick
Year inducted: 2011, by the Veteran’s Committee
Sacramento link: Gillick’s father, Larry, had pitched for Sacramento in the PCL between 1929 and 1933 and was managing the semi-pro Sacramento Valley League’s Chico Colts when Pat was born in that city in 1938.
The younger Gillick pitched in the minors for several seasons, including in 1959 with the Stockton Ports where he went 9-5 with a 3.78 ERA. He found greater success as a longtime general manager for the Toronto Blue Jays, Baltimore Orioles, Seattle Mariners, and Philadelphia Phillies, with teams he constructed winning the World Series three times.
Since retiring from MLB in 2008, Gillick also co-founded the Great West League, a summer collegiate wood bat circuit, owning the Chico Heat and Yuba-Sutter Gold Sox of Marysville. The league played three seasons before folding in 2018.
Honorable mention: Nick Peters
Sacramento link: Sportswriters aren’t technically Hall of Famers, instead eligible to win the BBWAA Career Excellence Award and be included in a media exhibit at Cooperstown. Peters, a longtime Giants beat writer for The Bee, won the honor in 2009 when it was known as the J.G. Taylor Spink Award.
“My journalism professors emphasized that a reporter should never be part of the story, so I’m a little uncomfortable standing before you,” Peters said in his award acceptance speech at Cooperstown.
Baseball Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony
Inductees: Derek Jeter, Marvin Miller, Ted Simmons, Larry Walker
Where: Cooperstown, N.Y.
When: Wednesday, Sept. 8, 10:30 a.m. PST
Watch: MLB Network
This story was originally published September 8, 2021 at 5:00 AM.