The author of a new biography of the late pitcher, an ace for the Orioles in the ’60s and ’70s, argues that Dave McNally was accomplished enough on and off the field to warrant a plaque in Cooperstown.
(Note from John Eisenberg: Today I’m handing the Bird Tapes keyboard over to Dennis Gaub, a veteran journalist from Billings, Montana, who has spent the past few years working on a biography of Dave McNally, the Orioles’ star left-hander in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Now that his book is published and available — click here to purchase — Dennis has time to make the case that the subject of his new book deserves baseball immortality. If you want to hear more from Dennis, he will speak about McNally and his book at the Babe Ruth Museum in Baltimore on Saturday, April 11th. The event starts at noon. Below is a link with more information:)
https://www.baberuthmuseum.org/event/sabr-series-dave-mcnally-the-montanan-who-revolutionized-baseball-by-dennis-gaub/
By Dennis Gaub
Why hasn’t baseball’s Hall of Fame inducted Dave McNally?
That question was on my mind a few years ago when I started working on the first-ever biography of McNally, the Baltimore Orioles’ ace left-hander from their glory years. I put the question aside as I worked on the project, but now that my book, Dave McNally: The Montanan Who Revolutionized Baseball, is in print and gathering readers all over the country, I’ve started pondering the question again.
It’s not as if visitors to the Hall of Fame leave Cooperstown, New York, unaware of one of McNally’s most noteworthy feats during his major league career, which stretched from 1962 to 1975. The bat that he borrowed from teammate Curt Motton and used to hit a grand slam in the 1970 World Series is on display at the Hall. So is the ball McNally blasted into the bleachers that day at Memorial Stadium to record the only World Series grand slam ever hit by a pitcher.
But before I dig any deeper into what I think are McNally’s Hall-worthy credentials, let me tell you how my book came to exist.
The cover of Dennis Gaub’s new biography of Dave McNally.
I wrote for newspapers for 25 years, covering sports and other beats, with my longest stint at the Billings (Montana) Gazette, Dave’s hometown paper. Although I left newspapers for the technology industry in the late ‘90s, the creative writing urge never deserted me. About a dozen years ago, while working on a book about a Montana town where the high school basketball team won an epic state championship, I met a man named Tim O’Malley. He was a product of Billings’ Catholic school system, as Dave was, and he was working as an ad salesman for a local TV station. Although Tim and I were both nearly a decade younger than Dave, he had met Dave when he was a kid. While providing useful material for the book I was writing at the time, Tim said to me, “Dennis, you’ve gotta write a book about Dave McNally someday.”
Here it is, buddy.
A decade after that conversation, after I had retired from corporate life, I began working on the McNally biography. And amid the happiness this book is bringing me, two notes of sadness accompany the book’s release. First, Tim passed away last year and thus missed the project he inspired. Second, as steadfast Oriole fans know, cancer claimed Dave’s life in 2002 at the too-young age of 60.
As I worked on the book, I met Dave’s widow, Jean, and his sister, Dee, the only surviving sibling of the four children that Dave’s mother raised as a widow after her husband was killed in the Pacific during World War II. (Dave was the youngest of the four.) I also met another of Dave and Jean’s five children, Anne McNally Anderson. I already knew their oldest child, Jeff, a high school basketball and baseball star whom I covered for the Billings Gazette. Jeff earned an athletic scholarship to Stanford before deciding to concentrate on his pre-medical studies; Jeff is now a physician in Utah.
Researching the book also brought me in contact with a number of people who either played American Legion baseball with Dave in Billings, under the tutelage of legendary coach Ed Bayne, or knew about his stellar performance as an amateur pitcher in the late ‘50s. That’s what led the Orioles to sign him.
Turning back to whether McNally belongs in the Hall of Fame, here are some interesting numbers. As of late 2025, 89 pitchers have been inducted into the Hall. On average, they’ve won 235 games and lost 162, a .591 winning percentage. Well, Dave’s career winning percentage of .607 is higher — he won 184 games and lost 119.
He was consistently dominant. Here’s a snippet from a Society of American Baseball Research article about him: “In the four-year span from 1968 through 1971, McNally might have been the best pitcher in baseball. He won 20 or more games each year for a total of 87 wins, while losing only 31. His club was in the World Series three of those four years and won the Series twice, beating the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1966 and the Cincinnati Reds in 1970.”
As many Oriole fans know, Dave threw a shutout to win Game 4 of the 1966 Series as the Orioles secured a stunning sweep. He won Game 3 in 1970 — the game in which he clobbered his famous grand slam. His other career highlights included a 17-game winning streak from 1968 into 1969 and those four straight 20-win seasons.
Also aiding Dave’s candidacy is the massive contribution he made to the game by taking a lead role in the legal case that brought free agency to baseball in 1975. Dave and another pitcher, Andy Messersmith, had let their contracts expire. Previously, due to the standard “reserve” clause in contracts, players in that situation had no choice but to remain with their clubs as long as that club wanted them; clubs held all the cards. But in 1975 arbitrator Peter Seitz ruled that McNally and Messersmith were free agents. Baseball has never been the same.
Add everything up and, in my mind, McNally belongs in the Hall.
Twenty-eight pitchers with fewer than 200 wins have been inducted. That group contains some players who could offer hope for Dave’s chances. Jack Chesbro is mostly famed for winning 41 games in 1904. (He won 198 in all.) Lefty Gomez is rightly revered, and he won 189, just five more than Dave. Sandy Koufax actually garnered far fewer career wins (165) than Dave, but of course, he’s an all-time legend who played on four World Series-winning teams and tossed a then-major league record four no-hitters, one of them a perfect game in 1965.
McNally’s credentials certainly warrant his receiving more consideration for the Hall than he has received. For some reason, he has never been regarded as a serious candidate.
When he was on the regular BBWAA ballot back in the 1980s, during the decade after he retired, he never received more than 2.8 percent of the vote in a year. Twenty-three years after his death, he is still on the outside looking in.
But I think he deserves serious consideration now from the Hall’s Era Committee, which honors players no longer on the BBWAA ballot. According to the Hall’s website, the committee votes for candidates “based upon the individual’s record, ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character, and contribution to the game.” Dave checks all of those boxes. He may have been a humble product of the Treasure State, as Montana is known, but he was a giant on and off the field.
Dave can’t speak on the issue now, but he discussed it decades ago in an interview that spotlights his humility. Scott Manch, a sportswriter for the Helena (Montana) Independent-Record, asked him in 1984 if he should be enshrined in Cooperstown. Dave responded, “No. Really, I don’t belong in the Hall. And one thing about that place is maybe everybody who belongs there isn’t in there yet. But nobody’s in that son-of-a-gun who doesn’t belong there.”
The time for modesty has passed, Dave. Your family, friends and fans all over the country, not just in Baltimore, join in saying: “You belong in the Hall of Fame!”
About the author:
Dennis Gaub is a journalist based in Billings, Montana, with a bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University and decades of experience as a newspaper reporter and editor. He is the author of Win ‘Em All: Little Laurel Wins Montana’s Biggest Basketball Trophy” (available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBooks and other channels); Midway Bravery: The Story of the U.S. Army Pilot Whose Famed Flight Helped Win a Decisive World War II Battle (available through independent bookstores, and on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and iBooks); Sky Dreamer, historical fiction set in Billings in the early 20th century (available from the author’s website); Lindbergh in Montana (available at independent bookstores, Amazon, Target and Barnes & Noble); and now in print: Dave McNally: The Montanan Who Revolutionized Baseball (published by Sunbury Press).
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