In 1949, Don Newcombe arrived on the Brooklyn Dodgers and prompty began making up for lost time.
The 23-year-old Newcombe had signed with the Dodgers as an amateur free agent in early 1946 after spending two years in the Negro Leagues. Newcombe became an instant star in the majors, going 56-28 with a 3.39 ERA and helping the Dodgers make runs at the National League pennant each of his first three seasons. He wasn’t bad by sabermetrics in those years, either, posting 13 WAR.
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Then came 1952. Newcombe, who’d been drafted into the military in 1950, went off for a two-year hitch during the Korean War.
“I served my country,” Newcombe told USA Today in 2013. “I was going to fight for my country and my flag if I was asked. I didn't dodge bullets, but I'm proud of my contribution.”
Newcombe’s graciousness and willingness to serve belies deeper injustice.
Newcombe would finish his big-league career in 1960 with a record of 149-90. If he hadn’t lost two prime seasons to Korea or if professional baseball had integrated sooner and allowed Newcombe to season in the minors earlier and make the majors sooner, he might have enough wins to have made the Hall of Fame years ago.
As it stands, Newcombe might be the greatest victim of bad timing in baseball history.
Cooperstown chances: 10 percent
Why: Too often, the Baseball Hall of Fame fails to adequately contextualize in considering players for induction. Newcombe is one of the more egregious examples of this.
Maybe Newcombe seemed like an easy no when he first became eligible for Cooperstown on the Baseball Writers' Association of America’s ballot in 1966, receiving just 2.3 percent of the vote.
Newcombe’s big-league career might have ended when it did in part because of alcoholism, with Newcombe not achieving sobriety until 1967. He would tell newspaper columnist Dick Young in 1980 that he never came to the ballpark drunk and that his drinking only became problematic after he left the bigs, though the fact remains that he last pitched in the majors at 34.
To most writers in 1966, maybe Newcombe just seemed like a pitcher who’d blown a golden opportunity with one of baseball’s iconic teams, the Boys of Summer Dodgers. The 1966 ballot also abounded with players from those teams, with Roy Campanella, Pee Wee Reese, Carl Erskine and Carl Furillo receiving votes. Gil Hodges and Duke Snider would also hit the ballot in the years to come.
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Throughout baseball history, writers have often treated Hall of Fame voting in strict binary terms. With few exceptions, unless a pitcher is Sandy Koufax, Dizzy Dean or Rube Waddell, he will need 200 wins — or likely many more — to get into Cooperstown. Dean and Waddell were far from slam-dunk selections, too.
Something else happened with the Hall of Fame in 1966 that’s worth a mention. Ted Williams took the opportunity during his induction speech that summer to make a brief but historic plug calling for the enshrinement of Negro League greats such as Satchel Paige. Within half a decade, Negro League inductions began in earnest.
Perhaps if Newcombe had debuted on the ballot in the years after Williams’ speech, he might have picked up a few more votes to start, which could have aided his candidacy significantly.
How a holdover Hall of Fame candidate fares and whether they can progress to the necessary 75 percent of the vote from the writers hinges on where they start out. Just this year, Tim Raines capped a rise from 24.3 percent in his first year to 86 percent in his 10th and final year on the ballot.
At 2.3 percent of the vote in his first year, though, Newcombe had little shot. No one’s ever risen from that level to be a selection by the writers. To Newcombe’s credit, he went the full 15 years on the writers’ ballot but never came close to induction with the BBWAA, peaking at 15.3 percent of the vote in his final year in 1980.
Newcombe hasn’t gotten much traction, either, since then through the Hall’s setup for veteran candidates. With the Hall fairly secretive about this voting process, Newcombe’s known to have made Veterans Committee ballots for the 2003, 2005 and 2007 elections, receiving eight of 80 votes in 2005 and 17 of 82 votes in 2007.
Since then, the Hall of Fame’s board of directors has revamped the veterans voting process into a series of committees that consider players based on their eras.
Unfortunately for Newcombe, he falls under the Golden Days Era Committee, which is scheduled to meet once every five years. There’s a decent chance the 91-year-old Newcombe won’t be alive when this committee is scheduled to meet in fall 2020.
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Newcombe’s name has come up in regard to at least one other Hall of Fame vote, a special Negro League induction in 2006 that saw the election of 16 people. One member of that committee, Adrian Burgos, noted for Sporting News in 2015 that Minnie Minoso and Don Newcombe were hurt more than any other Golden Era candidate by a Hall rule that players must either be considered for what they did in the majors or Negro Leagues.
It’s a maddening rule for the Hall of Fame to apply to men such as Minoso and Newcombe, who had zero control on being born 10 years earlier or later than they did.
The best Newcombe’s been able to do as the Hall of Fame’s passed him by is find other pursuits. Living in Southern California with his wife Karen, he works for the Dodgers as a special assistant and attends most home games. Then there’s the work he’s done in sobriety, which was slated to hit 50 years this year.
“I’m glad to be anywhere, when I think about my life back then,” Newcombe told MLB.com in 2007. “What I have done after my baseball career and being able to help people with their lives and getting their lives back on track and they become human beings again means more to me than all the things I did in baseball.”