WORCESTER—There has always been something special about the term “first class,” and so it is with baseball.
The first class in the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown had five members in 1935. They were Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson, and Honus Wagner.
The first class in the Worcester Red Sox Hall of Fame has three members including Larry Lucchino, Rich Gedman and Ed Augustus. That number seems about right, seeing as Major League Baseball had been around for about 65 years before inaugurating its Hall of Fame and the WooSox will be four years old when their season opens later this month.
The selections of Lucchino, Gedman and Augustus were announced Monday. They were chosen by a vote of a 17-member committee that considered multiple candidates over the course of two meetings.
More details about the WooSox Hall of Fame including the induction date and the location of the hall, both at Polar Park, will be announced later.
While all three inductees are charter members of the WooSox Hall of Fame, both Gedman and Lucchino have been honored by other halls. Gedman is in the Boston Red Sox Hall of Fame. Lucchino is also a member of the Boston Red Sox Hall of Fame, the Pennsylvania Sports Hall of Fame, the Taylor Allderdice High School Hall of Fame in Pittsburgh, the National Italian-American Sports Hall of Fame and the San Diego Padres Hall of Fame.
Both Gedman and Lucchino were talented athletes who made careers out of sports. Augustus was city manager during the process of bringing the WooSox to town and is now the Secretary of the Massachusetts Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities.
“I was joking with somebody,” Augustus said, “and said that I am the least athletic person ever invited into any Hall of Fame.”
Augustus had been a very casual baseball fan. It was not the balls and strikes that motivated him to work towards attracting the Pawtucket Red Sox to Worcester.
“It was my love of the city,” he said. “I was really convinced that putting the Worcester Red Sox brand here would lead some people to think about Worcester in a way they hadn’t always thought about it, to revisit some of their preconceived notions of what Worcester was.”
The talks with Lucchino were, he said, intense.
“Larry is not an easy-going negotiator,” he added, “but the thing about Larry and I is that we both shared a vision about what the ballpark could be. We never had a harsh word between us and that’s a sign of the respect we had for each other.”
Augustus believes that the results of that long process have been good ones.
“I think things have turned out amazingly well,” he said. “In the role I have now, I’ve been all over the state and everywhere I go I have people tell me — ‘I’ve been to Polar Park and it’s so cool.’ It’s great when exactly what you were hoping for has turned into reality.”
Gedman is a St. Peter-Marian graduate who grew up on Lafayette Street, an easy walk from Polar Park. He is one of the best catchers in Boston Red Sox history and one of the best hitting coaches in Triple-A Baseball.
He is the only hitting coach the WooSox have ever had and was the hitting coach at Pawtucket from 2015 until the move to Worcester.
“It was more surprising than anything,” Gedman said of his selection. “I’m grateful to all the people who took the time to help me learn the game of baseball, more than anything to my mother and father, my wife and family.”
Gedman said he thinks this inaugural WooSox Hall of Fame class is really representative of many different contributors.
“It took more than just a couple of people to put this thing together,” he said. “It was the business community, people in politics — the city and the state — the whole community who stepped up. So I’m honored, appreciative, and thankful. I also know that sometimes, it’s being in the right place at the right time.”
When it first became known that Worcester was interested in having the PawSox move, Gedman was deeply involved in Pawtucket. He was a coach and had also played for the PawSox. He took a wait-and-see attitude.
“I was always guarded,” he said. “At the time, Pawtucket was all we knew. But, me having grown up in Worcester, I was pretty excited that the team could move to Worcester. It has been very successful. It’s really worked out and I’m hoping that continues.”
Lucchino’s name is frequently mentioned as one that will wind up in Cooperstown.
He went from Pittsburgh to Princeton, where he played basketball for the Tigers in the NCAA Final Four in 1965. He was behind the building of Camden Yards in Baltimore, working with Janet Marie Smith, which was the first of the retro big-league ballparks.
The most recent result of that collaboration is Polar Park, voted the best Triple-A ballpark in the minors last season.
Lucchino served as Boston Red Sox President/CEO from 2002 through 2015, during which the club won three World Series, saved Fenway Park, and created the Red Sox Foundation. He was principal owner of the PawSox from 2016-2020 and WooSox Chairman and Principal Owner from the club’s inception in 2021 through 2023.
He stayed on as WooSox Chairman following the sale of the team to Diamond Baseball Holdings in December of 2023.
The WooSox Hall of Fame was established in February to recognize the careers and contributions of former or current WooSox players, managers, coaches, broadcasters, and executives as well as others who have been instrumental in the history of the Worcester Red Sox and Worcester baseball.
This year’s first class of the WooSox Hall of Fame joins members of the Pawtucket Red Sox Hall of Fame that was established in December of 2015. Eleven members were enshrined starting in 2016 through the PawSox final year of 2020.
That list includes Ben Mondor, Wade Boggs, Jim Rice, Manager Joe Morgan, Carlton Fisk, Mo Vaughn, President Mike Tamburro, Fred Lynn, Roger Clemens, Nomar Garciaparra, and Jason Varitek.
Bill Ballou covered the Red Sox for the Worcester Telegram from 1997 through 2018. He has covered pro hockey in Worcester since 1994 and currently does a weekly column for the Worcester Red Sox. Ballou can be reached at vetgoalie@aol.com
