Time
to go and add “Stretch” Willie McCovey, who recently passed away on
Halloween day, to the growing “1975 In-Action” sub-set I’ve been
creating over the past couple years:
McCovey was beginning to enter the twilight of his Hall of Fame career which spanned 22 seasons between 1959 and 1980.
Over that time he took home a Rookie of the Year when he burst onto the
Major League scene with a .354 average and 13 homers in 52 games in
1959, an MVP in 1969 when he led the league with 45 homers, 126 runs
batted in, a .453 OBP and a .612 slugging percentage, while getting six
All-Star nods.
By the time he hung them up for good, he finished with 521 homers, 15555
RBIs, 1229 runs scored and 2211 hits playing for the San Francisco
Giants, San Diego Padres, and a brief 11-game stretch with the Oakland
A’s at the end of the 1976 season.
In 1986, in his 1st year of eligibility, he was voted into the Hall with
81.4% of the vote, an easy first-try inductee for the man from Mobile,
Alabama.