Gilbert Ray Hodges was born on April 4, 1924 in Princeton, Indiana, United States. He was the son of Charles Hodge, a coal miner, and Irene Horstmeyer. His family moved to Petersburg, Indiana, thirty miles north of Princeton when Hodges was seven.
At Petersburg High School, Hodges lettered in baseball, football, basketball, and track.
After graduating in 1941, he turned down an offer from the Detroit Tigers and accepted an athletic scholarship to nearby Saint Joseph's College, where his elder brother was studying.
Hodges attended Saint Joseph's for two years and enrolled in the Reserve Officer's Training Corps before signing a contract to play professional baseball with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1943.
During the offseason, Hodges attended classes at Indiana's Oakland City College, where he also played varsity basketball.
In 1944 the marines called Hodges for active service, and he spent eighteen months in the South Pacific, where he fought on Iwo Jima and Okinawa. After the war, the Dodgers sent Hodges to its minor league team at Newport News, Virginia, to learn how to be a catcher. During the offseason, Hodges attended classes at Indiana's Oakland City College, where he also played varsity basketball. In 1947, he made the Dodgers major league roster as the team's third-string catcher but appeared in only twenty-eight games. The following year, Hodges became the regular first baseman. Hodges's breakthrough season came in 1949, when he belted twenty-three homers and knocked in 115 runs, the first of seven consecutive seasons in which he surpassed the century mark in runs batted in. For these seven seasons, Hodges averaged twenty-four doubles, thirty-two homers, and 112 runs batted in; his overall batting average was . 284.
Hodges was an integral member of "The Boys of Summer, " the men that made up the Brooklyn Dodgers team from 1947 to 1957. Along with Roy Campanella and Duke Snider, he provided the power that fueled the National League's most dominating offense to six pennants and its only championship in 1955. Hodges's great physical strength notwithstanding, he had difficulty in hitting a right-handed pitcher's curveball and would frequently "step in the bucket, " moving away from the plate to avoid the ball as he swung. This problem was magnified in the 1952 World Series when Hodges went hitless in twenty-one plate appearances. His slump continued into the following season, and he received messages of encouragement from fans around the country. One hot Sunday in May 1953, a Brooklyn priest reportedly advised his congregation, "It's too hot for a sermon today. Go home, keep the commandments, and say a prayer for Gil Hodges. " The slump soon lifted, and Hodges went on to a strong season, batting . 302 with thirty-one homers and 122 runs batted in.
When the Dodgers moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles after the 1957 season, Hodges's career was winding down, but he enjoyed two more fine years. In 1959 he had a team-leading . 391 average in the World Series. He joined the expansion New York Mets in 1962 and hit the team's first home run in its opening game at St. Louis before retiring early in 1963 because of chronic knee problems.
Hodges's decision to manage the Washington Senators in 1963 surprised some of his former Dodgers teammates, who felt that his personality was ill-suited to the demands of managing. However, Hodges's ability to lead and to instill the confidence necessary for success made him an outstanding manager. Taking over a dispirited Senators team in only its third year of existence, Hodges improved the team's standing in each of his four years at the helm.
In 1968, Hodges returned to New York to manage the Mets, another team with a history of incompetence. In his first year as Mets manager, he led the team to a team-record seventy-three victories. The following season the Mets astounded the baseball world by winning one hundred games and the World Series in five games against the heavily favored Baltimore Orioles. To a man, Mets players credited Hodges with molding the team's success. In Hodges's first two years as manager, the team's performance improved by thirty-nine games.
Toward the close of the 1968 season, Hodges suffered a mild heart attack, from which he recovered. After the Mets' success in 1969 and in light of the competitive quality of the team in 1970 and 1971, Hodges approached the 1972 season with optimism. During spring training in West Palm Beach, Florida, in 1972, as a leaguewide players' strike loomed, Hodges died after playing twenty-seven holes of golf with his three coaches. Hodges's funeral service was conducted by Brooklyn's Archbishop Francis J. Mugavero, and more than thirty-five thousand people filed past his bier.
Gil Hodges was one of the most popular players of his generation. Fans appreciated his perseverance, teammates admired his integrity and inner strength, and opposition players respected his leadership qualities. Hodges's defensive performance established him as the outstanding first baseman of his generation and one of the greatest of all time--a remarkable achievement for a right-handed thrower and a man with no previous experience at the position. His defensive prowess stemmed in good part from an enormous pair of hands that enabled him to scoop up low throws and from quick feet that gained him an extra step at first base. In his career, Hodges accumulated 370 homers, 1, 274 runs batted in, and maintained a . 273 average. He played in seven World Series and on six National League all-star teams and hit fourteen grand-slam home runs (a league record since surpassed by Willie McCovey), at least twenty-two homers in each of eleven consecutive seasons, and four home runs in a single game in 1950 (the sixth player to accomplish the feat). He was inducted into the New York Mets Hall of Fame in 1982. The little league team in Brooklyn named in his honor and his local bowling alley.
Hodges was a devout Catholic who often said that his family, not baseball, was his first love.
Hodges was a man who commanded respect. He never showed his emotions on the playing field, nor did he seek the limelight that ordinarily accompanies athletic success. In times of stress, he was calm and reassuring and during brawls on the baseball field, he acted as peacemaker.
Hodges married Joan Lombardi of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, in 1948; they had four children.
