Using a Hall pass

Charlie Gehringer

Longtime Detroit Tigers second baseman Charlie Gehringer is elected 76 years ago today to the Hall of Fame after receiving votes on 159 of the 187 ballots cast by the Baseball Writers of Association of America.

The 46-year-old Gehringer, though, does not attend his own induction a month later in June 1949, having gone to California to take care of another, more pressing personal matter.

Like getting married.

Just like that, baseball’s famed “Mechanical Man” becomes its “Matrimonial Man.”

Charlie and Josephine Gehringer in 1978 at Tiger Stadium

Seems the wedding plans are made shortly after Gehringer’s ailing mother – for whom he cares up to that point – passes away earlier in 1949 following a long bout with diabetes and before he learns of his election to the Hall.

“I might’ve married sooner than I did,” Gehringer says, “but I couldn’t see bringing a wife into that kind of situation.”

After the longtime bachelor becomes the first living inductee to skip his own induction, Gehringer and his wife, Josephine, attend nearly every Hall of Fame ceremony until his death in January 1993.