The Baseball Reliquary is pleased to announce the honorees elected to the Shrine of the Eternals, the organization’s alternative to the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. For the first time in the Reliquary’s history, a tie resulted between two of the candidates. Consequently, four individuals will be inducted this year: Dusty Baker, Sean Doolittle, Effa Manley, and Kim Ng. Co-sponsored by the Institute for Baseball Studies at Whittier College, the Shrine of the Eternals induction ceremony be held on August 4, 2024 at 2:00 p.m. in the Villalobos Conference Center on the Whittier College Campus, Whittier, California.
During childhood, Johnnie B. Baker got his nickname “Dusty” from his mother who recognized his tendency to get dirty in the family’s big backyard. In high school he excelled in sports, basketball being his favorite. After being drafted by the Atlanta Braves, he enlisted in the Marine Reserves where he learned the value of discipline, and after joining the Braves four years later, he was mentored by Hank Aaron in how to adjust to the Major Leagues and how to deal with racism. As a player, he won a World Series with the Dodgers and received acclaim as an All Star as well as Silver Slugger and Gold Glove awards. As a manager, he guided five different teams to post-season play, and he twice was recognized as the National League’s Manager of the Year. He is also well known for having reestablished integrity among the Houston Astros, steering them to a World Championship. In his 26 years as a manager, he won 2183 games, the twelfth manager to reach 2000 and the first African American to do so.
Called the “conscience of baseball” by Sports Illustrated, Sean Doolittle has spoken out for the rights of workers, women, immigrants, and Washington, DC statehood, and he has combatted the forces of racism and the plague of gun violence. In other ways he has also been a strong advocate for social justice, hosting a Thanksgiving dinner for 17 Syrian refugee families and supporting the LGBTQ community by raising money, expressing support, and educating teammates. At the Washington Nationals’ Pride Day in 2019, Doolittle wore a trans flag on his right baseball shoe, a rainbow flag on his left shoe, and a Nationals-branded rainbow shirt under his uniform. The son of two military veterans, Doolittle has worked with Swords to Ploughshares and Operation Finally Home to help veterans find jobs and adequate housing. An All-Star closer for Oakland and Washington during his eleven-year career, Doolittle regularly visited independent bookstores during road trips, and he often participated in a reading program for the children of soldiers.
One of the most remarkable women in the history of baseball, Effa Manley ran the daily operations in the 1930s and 1940s of the Newark Eagles, a Negro National League club owned by her husband, Abe Manley. Operating a baseball club in what was essentially an all-male domain, Effa met much resistance but ultimately created a stronger environment for black baseball by improving the business and public relations aspects of the Negro Leagues. In 2006 with her election by the Negro Leagues Committee, she became the first woman to be enshrined in the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Although often referred to as a light-skinned black, Effa was actually white but grew up in a family with a black stepfather and mixed-race siblings, and she identified strongly with black Americans. Among other civil rights activities, she worked with the New Jersey branch of the NAACP and the Citizens’ League for Fair Play, which conducted boycotts of white-owned stores that refused to hire African Americans.
As a youngster in Queens, New York, Kim Ng played street-stickball and years later starred as an infielder on the University of Chicago’s softball team. She began her groundbreaking career in baseball as an intern in 1990 with the Chicago White Sox where her first project was doing research on Rule 5 draftees, an assignment that took advantage of her love of statistics and analysis of scouting reports. Then as the Assistant Director of Baseball Operations for the White Sox, she became the youngest person and the first woman to present—and win—a salary arbitration case. At age 29, she was hired as Assistant General Manager for the Yankees, becoming the youngest person to hold that office, and three years later she moved to the Dodgers as Vice President and Assistant General Manager. After a decade in the Dodgers front office, she accepted the position as Senior Vice President of Baseball Operations for Major League Baseball, the highest-ranking woman in the Commissioner’s Office. And in 2020 she was hired by the Miami Marlins as the team’s General Manager, becoming the first woman to lead a playoff team.
The Baseball Reliquary is a Southern California-based organization dedicated to fostering an appreciation of American culture through the prism of baseball, especially the shapers of its history. The Shrine of the Eternals differs philosophically from enshrinement in Cooperstown in two significant ways: the criteria for election focus on a person’s game-changing contributions that supersede statistical measures; and voting on candidates is open to public membership, not restricted to sportswriters and committees.
At its induction ceremony for the Shrine of the Eternals, the Baseball Reliquary also presents two other awards, the Hilda Chester Award, in recognition of distinguished service to the game by a baseball fan, and the Tony Salin Memorial Award, in recognition of an individual’s commitment to the preservation of baseball history.
The 2024 Hilda Chester Award will be presented to Steve Butts of Lansing, Michigan. At age seven, Steve began his fandom when his grandmother gave him a Detroit Tigers program, and about the same time he started to collect baseball cards. A devoted reader of baseball books since then, he has gleaned their vivid stories and regularly shared their nuggets on the Reliquary’s Facebook page, for which Terry Cannon recruited him as an Administrator in 2015. Since Terry’s death in 2020, Steve has done a remarkable job in binding the Reliquary together with his engaging posts and administrative work.
The 2014 Tony Salin Memorial Award will be presented posthumously to Jean Ardell, author of the wide-ranging book Breaking into Baseball, which chronicles the multiple roles of women in relation to the game: as fans, players (both amateurs and professionals), umpires, owners and executives, and sportswriters. She is also the co-author with Ila Borders of Making My Pitch: A Woman’s Baseball Odyssey. In addition to her published work, Jean also served for years as an organizer of the annual NINE Spring Training Conference, which advances studies in the research of baseball history and sociology.
For additional information about the Baseball Reliquary and its partnership with the Institute for Baseball Studies at Whittier College, please contact the Reliquary’s Director Joe Price at jprice@whittier.edu.
