Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, February 8, 1993 TAG: 9302080021
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RAY COX STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
THE SOURCE OF BASEBALL'S BATTLE CRY
TUG MCGRAW, the featured speaker at Sunday night's Roanoke-Salem Baseball Hall of Fame inductions, coined a phrase to rally his teammmates.\ You won't believe this.One of the more famous battle cries in major-league baseball history almost cost the guy who coined it his job.
Tug McGraw, the left-handed relief pitcher who played for parts of 19 seasons with the New York Mets and Philadelphia Phillies, survived his little brush with the boss, of course.
McGraw, looking ruddy-cheeked and fit at age 48, was in Roanoke on Sunday night as the speaker for the Roanoke-Salem Baseball Hall of Fame, which inducted five new members. They were Baltimore Orioles manager John Oates; former Mets catcher and Rocky Mount native and resident Ron Hodges; former major-leaguer and Roanoke native Russ Peters, now living in Bedford; retired Salem businessman Ralph Richardson; and the late Jack Crosswhite of Salem, a successful minor-league manager.
Aside from being a terrific, glove-banging reliever for all those years, McGraw was the guy who came up with the phrase "Ya Gotta Believe" as the Mets were marching to the 1973 National League pennant.
Hodges, who played on the same team, remembers the day the words first were hollered. The team had been going through a difficult stage, no player more so than McGraw.
"Tug was struggling unbelievably," Hodges said. "He was really getting knocked around."
One day, the team chairman, M. Donald Grant, decided to pay a visit to the clubhouse to deliver some inspirational oratory.
Hodges recalled that Grant said something about the players, being the professionals that they were, must pull themselves together and start to believe in their abilities.
"Tug stood up and yelled out, `Ya gotta believe,' " Hodges said.
McGraw, when told of this account later, agreed that all the details were correct.
"But did he tell you what happened next?" McGraw said, the chagrin of the moment still apparent all these years later.
"Mr. Grant totally misunderstood," McGraw said. "He looked at me and if looks could kill, I'd be dead. He thought I was being disrespectful, that I was trying to show him up. He stormed out of the clubhouse.
"I had to go to his office to explain myself. He tells me, "All I can say is, you better pitch great the rest of the way."
He did.
"He was almost unhittable," Hodges said.
And always yapping.
"Every day, this little banty rooster of a left-handed pitcher was going around the clubhouse, getting up in people's faces, saying "Ya gotta believe, brother! I believe, don't you?' " Hodges said.
McGraw, born Frank Edwin in Martinez, Cal., started a long National League career with the New York Mets in 1965.
McGraw went 9-3 with a 2.24 earned run average for the "Miracle Mets" of 1969 that beat the Baltimore Orioles in the World Series, although McGraw pitched only in the NL Championship Series that year.
He did pitch in two other World Series, though, in 1973 with the Mets and in 1980 with the Phillies.
McGraw and Hodges played only two years together, but they did have one memorable encounter in 1975, the year McGraw was traded to the Phillies. Hodges spent most of that year in the International League (he only had 34 big league at-bats). But in one of them, Hodges faced McGraw for the only time and hit a home run, one of two he had that season in the majors.
"Hit it right over the auxiliary scoreboard," Hodges said. "I could feel his eyes burning into my back all the way around the basepaths."
McGraw's last big-league year was 1984, but by then, he had had a chance to earn a World Series champion ring for the Phillies in 1980. McGraw had two saves and two victories in four appearances in the series.
Coincidentally, one of McGraw's teammates that year was Roanoke's Al Holland, a charter member of the Roanoke-Salem Baseball Hall of Fame.
McGraw, a two-time National League All Star, had 179 saves, which puts him in the top-20 all time, and a career ERA of 3.14.
These days, he works as a sports reporter at WPVI-TV in Philadelphia and runs his own marketing and public relations firm, TMR Resources.