D.C.'s 'Boojum' Gets His Day in Hall of Fame

(AP)

COOPERSTOWN, N.Y., July 30 -- His name was Ernest Judson Wilson, but everyone called him Jud -- until the day Satchel Paige heard a line drive produced by Wilson's bat whiz by his head and started calling Wilson by the onomatopoetic word "Boojum." And so it was that on Sunday afternoon, when Wilson's newly minted plaque at the Baseball Hall of Fame was read out loud by his grand-niece, that she took extra care to enunciate the nickname, saying it the way Paige used to:

"Ernest Judson Wilson," read Sha'Ron Taylor, who accepted her great uncle's posthumous honor onstage. "Jud Buh-ZHOOM!"

Wilson, a former star third baseman for the Homestead Grays and a longtime D.C. resident who died in 1963, was one of 17 former Negro leagues players and executives who were inducted into the Hall of Fame during the annual induction ceremony Sunday in a grassy field just outside the village.

The day was shared by Bruce Sutter, the relief pitcher of the Chicago Cubs, St. Louis Cardinals and Atlanta Braves, who was elected through balloting by the Baseball Writers Association of America, and whose primary legacy to the game was the split-fingered fastball, which he mastered and became the first to use effectively in the major leagues.

"I would not be standing here today," Sutter acknowledged during his induction speech, "if not for that pitch." Noting that his name would forevermore be followed by the words "Hall of Famer," Sutter said, "It still doesn't sound right, but it's sounding better."

The 17 former Negro leaguers were chosen via a special selection process this spring after a study by a dozen historians, and their induction brings the total number of Hall of Fame inductees to 278.

The Grays, the famed Negro League team that grew to prominence in the 1930s and '40s while splitting its home games between Washington's Griffith Stadium and Pittsburgh's Forbes Field, were represented not only by Jud Wilson, but also by ace pitcher Ray Brown and team manager and owner Cumberland Posey Jr. Since all the Negro leagues inductees are deceased, their plaques were accepted and read aloud by a descendant, if one could be located.

Sha'Ron Taylor, Wilson's great-niece and a resident of Capitol Heights, read about Wilson's election to the Hall of Fame in a magazine. She remembered Wilson as the ballplaying brother of her grandmother, Wilson's sister. Taylor was 2 when Wilson died.

"My grandma told me how he used to take me out to Griffith Stadium," Taylor said in an interview before the ceremony. "He used to take me on the field, after the games."

Curious about the honor that apparently had been bestowed upon her great-uncle, Taylor called the Hall of Fame and was put through to the person in charge of tracking down relatives of the Negro leagues honorees.

"They didn't think [Wilson] had any living relatives," Taylor said, "so they said they were glad to hear from me."

That is how Taylor came to find herself onstage on a sun-splashed Sunday afternoon, under the television lights, surrounded by some of the greatest living ballplayers of all time -- an arm's length away from Joe Morgan and Eddie Murray and Johnny Bench, among others.