To Honor Gil Hodges, the Dodgers Retire His Number Against Mets

LOS ANGELES — The connective tissues stretch all the way across the country and back again, binding Brooklyn, Los Angeles and Queens. Through the years, through all the true bounces and bad hops and yellowed pages, the contents of this baseball triangle remain snugly bound.

Main characters recede and others emerge, and then it repeats all over again. But the strongest and most consistent connection between the Dodgers and the Mets remains Gil Hodges, the late, newly elected Hall of Famer whose No. 14 was retired by the Dodgers in a pregame ceremony here on Saturday night.

The Mets retired the same number for Hodges in 1973.

“He was, indeed — I was going to say the thread, but he wasn’t the thread, he was the iron steel cable,” Vin Scully, the legendary Dodgers broadcaster, said on Thursday during a rare telephone interview.

The Mets franchise and Dodger Stadium both sprang to life in April 1962, and the former is beginning a 10-day western swing this weekend with four games in Chavez Ravine. It is a star-studded matchup of the top two teams in the National League, but the clubs will briefly set the competition aside to honor Hodges, a player who meant so much to both sides.

Scully, 94, was a rookie Brooklyn Dodgers broadcaster in April 1950 when he first met Hodges. Neither man, at that point, could have dreamed that just seven years later, Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley, along with his New York Giants counterpart, Horace Stoneham, would pack up their teams and bring Major League Baseball to California.

With those city-shaking moves, the Brooklyn Dodgers’ lone World Series title in 1955 would become frozen in time. Hearts would break, tears would be shed, but after Ebbets Field met the wrecking ball, the Mets soon emerged. Decades later, the bricks and angles of Citi Field would evoke the spirit of the old ballpark at Sullivan Place. The cross-pollination of the Dodgers and the Mets would become one of baseball’s constants.

When Jane Forbes Clark, chair of the Hall of Fame’s board, and Josh Rawitch, its president, phoned the Hodges family home in Brooklyn in December to deliver the news of Gil’s induction, it was his daughter Irene who picked up and placed the phone next to her mother. Joan Hodges, 96, isn’t always able to assimilate these days, but she perked up immediately at the phone call. “Oh, Gil? My Gil?” Irene recalled her mother saying.

And then that iron steel cable was again pulled taut. From his home in Los Angeles, Scully rang with congratulations. He had been told just before the news became public.

“It gave me a couple of moments before the big huzzahs to just spend an intimate moment with the family,” Scully said. “I was so grateful.”

Fittingly, that call was placed to an old home on Brooklyn’s fabled Bedford Avenue. After the Hodges family lived through the shock of having Gil’s job relocated to Los Angeles, and after he played four seasons, from age 34-37, with eroding skills in Southern California, the Mets brought him back to New York in the expansion draft.

So the Hodges family purchased a home not far from where once Ebbets Field once stood. It is where the family lived when Gil played for the expansion Mets, when he managed the Amazin’s to the 1969 World Series title (with former Brooklyn Dodgers Joe Pignatano and Rube Walker on his coaching staff), and it is where Joan and Irene reside today.

“It really is amazing, isn’t it?” said Bobby Valentine, who managed the Mets in the 2000 Subway World Series against the Yankees. “That Joanie never left, shopped at the same corner stores, walked the same streets, went to the same Mass all those years? Spectacular.”

As Irene put it: “It’s like having part of your youth stay with you.”

That spirit permeates in so many ways long after Gil’s death from a heart attack in 1972 at age 47. Volumes have been written about those beloved Dodgers teams — everything from Roger Kahn’s “The Boys of Summer” to Thomas Oliphant’s “Praying for Gil Hodges.” The latter’s name was inspired by a story capturing Hodges’s popularity. With Hodges caught in the throes of a rare slump, a priest at Brooklyn’s St. Francis Roman Catholic Church, Father…