DALLAS – Long before Bob Elliott became the first Canadian to receive the Baseball Hall of Fame’s J.G. Taylor Spink Award, he set the standard for baseball writers not only north of the border, but across the continent.
Through his work, he’s given credit to those who deserve it but rarely get it. Through his passion for the game, he’s helped keep fans informed and garnered attention for a sport that too often gets lost amid hockey-mania in Canada.
And as kind as he is connected, the Toronto Sun baseball columnist has made friends in every corner and left many people in his debt (including this appreciative writer).
It’s for those reasons the native of Kingston, Ont., received congratulations and handshakes from all comers Tuesday after being honoured for his "meritorious contribution to baseball writing."
"My hand doesn’t hurt," he said during a brief down moment. "We’re getting there on the throat though."
Elliott received votes on 205 of the 455 ballots cast by BBWAA members with 10 or more consecutive years’ service to become the 63rd winner of the award named after the first recipient, who was a driving force behind The Sporting News.
Philadelphia writer Paul Hagen received 169 votes while Cleveland reporter and author Russell Schneider got 81.
As a measure of the respect he has within the game, Pat Gillick was on hand for the morning presentation and congratulatory calls came from Hall of Famer Ferguson Jenkins and Blue Jays president Paul Beeston, among countless others.
The attention left Elliott humbled, and grateful.
"I’m not a great writer like Jim Murray or Ian O’Connor or Gary Smith, I think I work hard, but I met a lot of people and maintained relationships with a lot of people over the years and that ability allowed me to find some things out," he said. "That would be the No. 1 thing."
Elliott’s endless cache of sources both awes and frustrates his rivals, who can only marvel at his near peerless news-breaking abilities.
Seattle Times writer Geoff Baker, a former Toronto Star reporter, summed up that sentiment with the following tweet: "Nice to see longtime Toronto colleague Bob Elliott win Spink award for writer’s wing of HoF. Always dreaded competing vs him at winter mtgs."
Writing in a unique voice and style all his own, one of Elliott’s strengths is his ability to get to the roots of any story with details not every reporter can ferret out. He is beloved in the scouting community for shining a light on the behind-scenes work they do that so often goes unrecognized.
"Scouts are paid not to say the three words, ‘I don’t know,’" explained Elliott. "So when you ask him something, he’s going to give you a good story. To me the scouts are the best storytellers in the game. I don’t relate to a guy sitting in front of his locker, looking at a catalogue for cars, trying to decide am I going to buy the $38,000 car or the $35,000 car with mag wheels.
"The coaches I relate to, and the scouts I relate to and they work very, very hard, and they’re so proud of one of their guys making it or being right on a guy, they have a good story to tell."
Elliott has also been a strong proponent of Canadian baseball and the country’s national teams, banging the drum for them when no one else would.
To Beeston, that matters as much as his stellar work covering the Montreal Expos for the Ottawa Journal and Ottawa Citizen from 1979-86, and the Blue Jays for the Sun from 1987 to the present.
"There’s nobody that’s chronicled the game in Canada like he has, whether it’s our Canadian national teams, whether it’s Little League, he’s done it all," said Beeston. "He gives people their due, but more importantly gives them the recognition they deserve.
"That carries forward to what he’s done at the major-league baseball level, too, because when Bob talks about any player, he always references the scout. He gets the full picture."
Elliott started his career with the Kingston Whig-Standard and it was there his love for baseball writing took hold, starting him on a path that takes him to a place in Cooperstown next summer.
"When I was working in Kingston we were on the third floor and I’d get done at four in the morning and I’d get the cleaner to open the door and they had the Detroit News," recalled Elliott. "They had a guy named Watson Spoelstra, and I’d read his game story, and I read his notes and I’d read his sidebar – and this was before we even had a team in Canada – and that was the first guy I ever read from a major-league city. He was fantastic. After that, it was just the way Peter Gammons went about his work, his notebooks, how he put things together, and then Tracy Ringolsby. I knew him when he was in Kansas City, and then he went to Dallas, then he went to Denver, and now he’s TV.
"When you look at that list (of Spink winners) and you see guys like Dick Young and Ring Lardner and Damon Runyon and Jim Murray, I’m like Garth Iorg, the one that sticks out like Sesame Street, which one of these things doesn’t belong with the others."
Not a chance.
