Former Brave Fred McGriff Inducted in Hall

It was 30 years ago this summer – July 20, 1993 – when a fire blazed through the club level of the long-defunct Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium. In one of the strangest days in the history of Atlanta sports, less than two hours before the Braves game against the St. Louis Cardinals was slated to begin, a can of Sterno being used to heat catered food in an unattended suite near the press box sparked a four-alarm blaze that rapidly engulfed the Braves’ radio booth and five other booths along the club level, resulting in more than $1.5 million in damages.

Miraculously, the Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium was considered suitable for a game, the 9:40 p.m. postponement of which allowed the club’s newly acquired slugger, Fred McGriff, time to settle in (he had just driven up that morning from his home in Tampa), get treatment for his bruised ribs, and start that evening.

The multipurpose stadium wasn’t the only thing catching fire on that sultry late July day. Sparked by McGriff’s arrival from the San Diego Padres, the Braves — who at the time were nine games behind the San Francisco Giants in the NL West standings – immediately caught fire themselves … and eventually caught the Giants to capture the division in the last great postseason race before the Wild Card Era. By clubbing 19 homers and driving in 55 runs over the balance of the regular season, McGriff (aka “The Crime Dog”) ignited a Braves lineup that helped the club reel off a 51-17 record down the stretch before falling to the Philadelphia Phillies in the NLCS. Two years later, with McGriff penciled in as the team’s everyday cleanup hitter, Atlanta won its first-ever World Series.

Last month, on Sunday, July 23, the low-key, sweet swinging, always in shape first baseman became the fifth player from that 1995 Braves team to be inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., joining Chipper Jones, Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and John Smoltz in receiving baseball’s highest honor.

“It was just a great time being there in Atlanta with the guys and, of course, winning,” McGriff said during his pre-induction media availability. “We had a really good ballclub for a number of years. It was awesome because I got the chance to play [close to home in Tampa]. At the time, you didn’t have the Tampa Bay Rays. We didn’t have the Miami Marlins or Florida Marlins. So, Atlanta was the closest thing to my home. So being able for my parents to have a better opportunity to see me play a lot more, it was great for me at the time.”

For 19 major league seasons following multiple summers of minor league bus rides through the Carolinas and the Great Smoky Mountains, McGriff paid homage to his hardworking parents – his mother, Eliza, was a schoolteacher, his father, Earl, an electronics repairman – by going about his business quietly, never craving the spotlight. Quite the contrast from many a modern-day star ballplayer.

“I laugh watching games now on TV, because now with social media you got guys, they’re doing stuff just to get on social media. Let me see. Let me see if I can do this and that,” McGriff added. “It’s a whole different game now. But when I was coming up, it’s like, treat people like you want to be treated. Go out there and play the game and play it hard. Play it the right way. And so you try to teach that to the younger guys.”

The Braves’ mid-season acquisition of McGriff, engineered by mastermind executive John Schuerholz, himself a HOF inductee, goes down as one of the best deadline trades in baseball history. In return for the future Hall of Famer, who slammed 30 homers in 10 different seasons and finished with a lifetime .303 postseason average, the Braves’ front office only had to part with Vince Moore, Donnie Elliott, and Melvin Nieves, all of whom were out of professional baseball by 1998. It is quite possible that without McGriff anchoring the Braves’ lineup in 1995, the franchise’s first World Series title would have had to wait until the next century.

Yet despite having an impressive resume (493 home runs — he surely would have eclipsed 500 had it not been for the players’ strike in 1994 — five All-Star Games, 1,550 RBI) while never being suspected of using performance-enhancing drugs, McGriff never got much love from the Baseball Writers’ Association of America (BBWAA), which elects players into the Hall. Once a player has been retired for five years, he needs to receive 75 percent of votes in a given Hall of Fame election.

McGriff spent the maximum 10 years on the writers’ ballot, peaking at 39.8 percent in his final go-round in 2019. But this past December, in his first time eligible for election from baseball’s 16-person Contemporary Eras Committee, McGriff was unanimously selected to become one of the 270 former major leaguers included in the Hall of Fame.

Certainly not an obvious Hall of Famer like Chipper Jones who waltzed into Cooperstown back in 2018, McGriff delivered an induction speech with considerable humility and gratitude.

“My goal was simply to make it to the big leagues, and I exceeded every expectation I could ever imagine and then some,” McGriff remarked during the Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony, which included a video montage of his career highlights narrated by former teammate Marquis Grissom. “I am humbled to be standing on this stage with some of the greatest players to ever play this game. Honestly, I would have been happy just playing one day in the big leagues.”

My goal was simply to make it to the big leagues, and I exceeded every expectation I could ever imagine and then some…I am humbled to be standing on this stage with some of the greatest players to ever play this game. Honestly, I would have been happy just playing one day in the big leagues.

The only player to ever hit 30 homers for five different teams, McGriff also spent chunks of his career in Toronto, San Diego, and his hometown of Tampa. But it was in Atlanta where his prime years, during which he was one of the most feared hitters in the National League, coincided with the dynastic run of the “Team of the 90s.” So naturally, his induction speech had an acute focus on those sweet mid-90s years.

“I was very excited to be joining a team that had been a couple plays away from winning back-to-back championships in 1991 and 1992,” McGriff reflected. “The ’93 team was the best team I believe I ever played on.”

Due in no small part to McGriff, himself, who ended his nearly 20-minute induction speech with a crafty allusion to the bizarre and nearly tragic course of events that preceded his Atlanta Braves debut, in which he socked a game-tying two-run homer that propelled Atlanta to a comeback win and ultimately a division title.

“There be fires along the way, but those fires can ignite the spark to the next season of your life.”