Why Danny Murtaugh Should Be in the Hall of Fame

It was October 1971, I was starting my fifth grade and had a lot of wonderings about the academic challenges and the friendship chances that scholar year would bring. All of this ran in parallel with my increasing baseball fever. Besides going outdoors to play with my brothers and friends I followed MLB through the Saturday Game of the Week; it was the only chance to watch an MLB game during the regular season down here in Venezuela in those years.

Then I felt really happy in October because we could watch every game of the playoffs. That 1971 season the Pittsburgh Pirates defeated the San Francisco Giants in the NLCS, no matter the presence of Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Juan Marichal and Co. One of the things that called most of my attention was the competitiveness of that man inside the dugout. I always approached the TV set when he went out to talk to Steve Blass, Bruce Kison, Dock Ellis or Bob Moose, because at first I had some trouble pronouncing his surname. But I knew who he was because of the way he treated his players in the dugout.

During that World Series before the mighty Baltimore Orioles, I could see through the broadcast how Danny Murtaugh approached every one of his players and talked to them in a very respectable way, how he talked to his pitchers on the mound.

When the Orioles were winning the Series 3 games to 1, I began to suspect that everything was over. Then Roberto Clemente, Richie Hebner, Willie Stargell, Manny Sanguillén, Blass, Kison, Dave Giusti, Nelson Briles, etc. began to give all of their best baseball. Each time the TV cameras focused on the Pirates’ dugout, Murtaugh had his head up and that fire of competitiveness in his eyes. When the Pirates finally won the World Series all of his players talked about his optimism, his discipline, his humanitarianism, and sense of humor.

Murtaugh’s .540 winning percentage over 15 seasons is better than 10 of the 19 managers in the Hall of Fame. And his two World Series are exceeded by only seven of those 19 managers. Since 1891 Pittsburgh has won 5 World Series, Murtaugh is the only Pirate’s manager to win more than one World Series.

The day the Pirates won the 1971 World Series I knew that they had won another World Series in 1960 against the powerful New York Yankees of Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris. According to the magazine I found on my brother’s desk, Murtaugh always kept faithful that the Pirates could win the Series, even after each one of those frightening scores of the Yankees victories. He didn’t stop believing the team could beat even those Yankees.

On September 1st, 1971 Murtaugh became the first manager to ever field an entire all-black line up. That showed how he thought and felt about the human beings. His explanation to this was, those were the best nine players he had at the moment.

Each afternoon of that World Series I arrived late at school because of the games. Even though I had to leave for school, I was very aware about what could have been happening between the Pirates and the Orioles, most of all after the fourth game. Each day I returned home a little afraid that it had been all for the Pirates, but all I kept watching, reading and seeing was a team winning every game under the advice and sense of humor of a guy who analyzed every piece of action on the diamond and communicated it to his players. That was Danny Murtaugh. By all this he deserves to be in the Hall of Fame.