OXON HILL, Md. _ Fifty years after a Baltimore junior-high school teacher named John Schuerholz took a low-level job in the hometown Orioles' front office, the longtime Braves executive is a Hall of Famer.
Schuerholz, who won World Series titles as general manager of the Kansas City Royals and the Braves and was the primary architect of Braves teams that won 14 consecutive division titles, was a unanimously elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame on Sunday by the Today's Game Era Committee, formerly known as the veterans committee.
Former commissioner Bud Selig was also elected, receiving 15 votes from the 16-member committee, which passed on eight other candidates including former Yankees owner George Steinbrenner and former players including Albert Belle, Will Clark, Davey Johnson and Lou Piniella, the latter two nominated for their work as managers.
"I'm speechless, almost," Schuerholz said minutes after the announcement was made Sunday night on MLB Network. "What a remarkable honor, and I'm so very, very proud to have received the call and the invitation to join baseball's Hall of Fame."
Piniella, with seven votes, was the only other candidate to get more than five from the committee, which included Cox and fellow Hall of Famer and Braves broadcaster Don Sutton.
The seventh general manager elected to the Hall of Fame, Schuerholz will be inducted July 30 at Cooperstown, N.Y., where there is sure to be plenty of Braves gear and chopping and chanting at the ceremony for the third time in four years. He was elected in his first time on the ballot, which required at least 12 votes from the 16-man committee.
Schuerholz will be the fifth Braves stalwart inducted from the team's unprecedented run of division titles, joining iconic former manager Bobby Cox, his working partner all those years, and their "Big Three" pitchers _ John Smoltz, Tom Glavine, Greg Maddux _ who piled up Cy Young Awards while serving as the backbone of that Braves run.
"That's great to be affiliated with those guys, those stars, and Chipper's not far, another year and he'll be there," Schuerholz said. "I'm so honored and so pleased, so thrilled by this whole recognition and great honor."
Maddux, Glavine and Cox were inducted in 2014 and Smoltz in 2015, and a fifth Braves from that era, third baseman Chipper Jones, is expected to be first-ballot selection for the Hall of Fame class of 2018.
"What's happened here through John Schuerholz and Bobby Cox is something that will never happen again in baseball," Braves general manager John Coppolella said. "For me, John Schuerholz is the greatest GM of all time. And as good of a GM as he is, he's an even better person. He is somebody that I look up to each day, that I'm honored to have as a mentor, and that is just such a special person. (Hall of Fame election) is well deserved and frankly long overdue."
Schuerholz, 76, was inducted into the Braves Hall of Fame in August. He served as Braves general manager from 1991 through 2007, then served as team president until last spring, when he moved into his current position as vice chairman.
He won World Series titles with the Royals in 1985 and the Braves in 1995, and his Atlanta teams won five NL pennants.
It seemed appropriate Schuerholz's election and the announcement were made in Maryland, as the annual Winter Meetings got underway Sunday at the Gaylord National resort just outside Washington, D.C. Born in Baltimore, he was an undersized soccer player who showed some promise as an aspiring journalist for the school paper at Towson University before focusing on becoming an educator.
But he'd always been a big baseball fan, and at age 26 Schuerholz wrote a letter to the Orioles owner asking if there might be a job for him. He got his chance, and it didn't take long before he began impressing baseball decision-makers.
"I always wanted to be a major league baseball player, and that dream died quickly because of good scouts in our business," Schuerholz cracked, "and so I said, 'Here I am in my dream world, I'm going to work as hard as I can and try to do all I can to be the best executive I can be,' and it turned out like this."
Three years after starting with the Orioles, Schuerholz joined the fledgling Royals in 1969. He spent 22 seasons with Kansas City, moving from farm director to take over as general manager at age 41, then the youngest GM in baseball.
Schuerholz went to the Braves before the 1991 season, replacing Cox, who moved back to the manager's position, a position for which Schuerholz had previously tried to hire him in Kansas City. Schuerholz made moves to bring in veterans including Terry Pendleton, who would become the NL MVP and led the Braves to their worst-to-first season in 1991 that began their run of division titles.
Smoltz was the only player who was with the Braves for their entire run of first-place finishes, but Schuerholz regularly sprinkled in free agents such as Maddux, Fredi McGriff, Andres Galarraga and Gary Sheffield, and the Braves had a rich farm system that Cox and Paul Snyder had helped establish, a system that produced the likes of Chipper Jones and Andruw Jones.
