About the only thing wrong with the late Nick Cafardo making the national baseball Hall of Fame is that he can’t be in Cooperstown, N.Y., next July to experience his induction.
Last March, while covering the Red Sox at spring training in Florida for the Boston Globe, Cafardo collapsed and died of a cerebral hemorrhage. His death evoked genuine grief across the board — from executives, to players, to broadcasters, to other writers — basically everyone who knew him or read his stories.
That’s because Cafardo, who was a wonderful guy by nature, was as fair as they came. There were no gratuitous cheap shots in Cafardo’s stories. He never went out of his way to attack. He called it as he saw it, but even if you might not have agreed with him, Cafardo’s viewpoints were derived from facts and from honest analysis.
Here’s something perhaps some of you don’t know. When Cafardo started out in this business, he worked for the Patriot Ledger in Quincy, and at the time, The Item subscribed to the paper’s news service. Many of Cafardo’s stories back then ended up on our pages.
He went from the Ledger to the Globe when it was time for the paper to hire a baseball reporter. From his perch in the front row of press boxes all across America, he informed us of all the inner workings of Major League Baseball — particularly what I call “scout-speak,” because those scouts speak their own language. The first time I saw the acronym WAR (wins above replacement), it was in one of Cafardo’s stories. I’m not sure he liked the term any more than I do, but he felt obligated to use it because that was (and still is) the lingo of the moment.
It was Peter Gammons who patented the weekly “notes” column, and it was Cafardo who took that ball and ran with it when it was his turn to be the principal baseball writer — not just for the Globe, but period. In my mind, no story was official unless Nick Cafardo had it.
Not that this is a major qualification for the Hall of Fame, but Cafardo was also a first-class man. At no time was he ever full of himself, or too busy, or too important, to interact with the hoi polloi.
When the Globe used to have its writers host online chats — something I wish they’d still do — Cafardo would resist the urge to toss off a flip or a condescending remark to a less informed questioner, and simply respond straight up.
Those were the qualities that made you appreciate what a good person he was. His knowledge of the game made you realize that he was the real deal in an age there such people are few and far between.
Tuesday, Cafardo received, posthumously, the 71st J.G. Taylor Spink Award for meritorious contributions to baseball writing. Spink was the publisher of the Sporting News from 1914 until his death in 1962, when the award was established. The winner of the award is included, along with the rest of the inductees, in the annual ceremony in July in Cooperstown.
There have been some of the industry’s true heavy hitters standing on that dais in Cooperstown, including fellow Globe columnists Gammons, Harold Kaese, Larry Whiteside and Dan Shaughnessy; Jermome Holtzman, who wrote for just about every Chicago newspaper there ever was; Milton Richman, who was the sports editor of United Press International; essayist Roger Angell of the New Yorker and Clare Smith, who was the first woman ever to be assigned as a Major League beat writer (and as of now, the only woman enshrined via the award).
Nick Cafardo will join the 70 people who are already members of the Hall of Fame in July. There is no doubt that he fits right in with the company he will be keeping.
I only wish he could be there to witness it.
