These Goose bumps a thing of the past

The road to baseball's attic is long, if you can find the road. How to get here? Be the best that ever was.

Or, in the case of Goose Gossage, exceptional enough to endure a nine-year torment while voters waffled and others took bows.

"All I regret," said Gossage, "is my mother did not live to see this."

She was 92 and a year and a half short of seeing her son, Jake's boy, get his moment, his spot in the gallery of baseball's elite.

Gossage's place is here now, his commemorative plaque next to Boojum Wilson, of the Homestead Grays, down the way from Babe Ruth and Bob Gibson, across from Willie Mays and George Brett, a man with whom Gossage will forever be connected.

This is the place where all the tales are tall and all the memories fresh, and there Gossage is in a 20-foot photo, uncorking that feared fastball forever, old No. 54 in the uniform of his childhood team, if two time zones away from his home in Colorado Springs, the Yankees.

Waiting for the pitch, or dreading it, might be Brett, with his pine tar bat, or Carlton Fisk, Cal Ripken, Eddie Murray, Dave Winfield, any of those who made the Hall while Gossage waited.

Down on Main Street, offering autographs on Gossage's weekend, were Mike Schmidt and Ozzie Smith and even Pete Rose. Gossage seemed to pitch everywhere and to them all, brothers now in common glory. Except for Rose, alas.

Winfield and Gossage were teammates on the Yankees, good friends. Winfield was traded to California, eventually moving on to Toronto and Minnesota, and Gossage faced him for the first time.

"I didn't want to know him," said Gossage. "Things had changed. I bent him in half." Winfield went down, and the new rules of engagement were established.

"Players on other teams were not your friends. They were trying to take food off your table. Now you see them huggin' and lovin' around the batting cage."

Every generation thinks his played the game the way it was meant to be played, but intimidation was nearly as much of a weapon as Gossage's fastball, and now "you scare a guy and you get kicked out. You don't even hit him. If I pitched today, all my money would go to the league (in fines)."

Gossage recalled advice from Dick Allen, his teammate on the White Sox at the start of Gossage's career. Allen told Gossage to aim at the batter's lead elbow, because if he could put the ball there, it was impossible for the batter to get the barrel of the bat around.

"I said, 'But what if I plug him?'" Gossage said. "And Dick said, 'So? Everybody in the other dugout is watching. They won't want no part of you.' I was a mean son of a gun. I wouldn't want to face me."

When the time came Sunday to accept his plaque, his official and indelible entry into the Hall of Fame, time to give his thanks, the old intimidator was warm mush.

"My first manager, Chuck Tanner, told me, 'You make them tear that uniform off you,'" Gossage said. "And 22 years later, they did."

Gossage spoke of his family, his teammates and coaches who were there for the journey, of friends who had come to see him on his day. His voice cracked and his eyes leaked when he spoke of friends now gone. Thurman Munson. Catfish Hunter. Bobby Murcer.

The duty of summing up a life still being lived is not easy, recalling a career as vivid in the mind as when it all happened, to make strangers understand how much it all meant.

"I had a dream," said Gossage. "My dad would always say I'd be there one day. Making the big leagues, I thought that was too crazy to be believed."

It all came true finally, at the end of a long if heartfelt day, with 56 living members of the Hall looking on, with tributes and recollections of the year's inductees, if Gossage was the star, it mattered no less to Dick Williams, to the heirs of Walter O'Malley and Bowie Kuhn and Billy Southworth and Barney Dreyfuss, all veteran selections.

"It is just overwhelming," Gossage said. "I can't comprehend it and I never will. I pitched in a lot of big games, but this is over the top. This is the most overwhelming thing that has ever happened to me."

This place does that to the hardest of men. It is destination and reward, hard to find, not easy to get to. That's as it should be.

"I don't think I would enjoy this as much," Gossage said, "if I had gotten in sooner. The longer you have to wait for something, the more special it is."

He can say that now. The Goose's star shines with the best of them.

(Contact Bernie Lincicome of the Rocky Mountain News at linciciomeb(at)rockymountainnews.com.)