Former Tide, MLB Star Returns To Alma Mater To Talk Baseball Career

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Hobson finished his time in Chicago with a 303-254 record, including the organization’s first-ever appearance in the Wolff Cup Finals.

“I take a lot of pride in my reputation in the game and this year, when I was negotiating my contract, the very next day, I got a text from my owner telling me they didn’t think I should come back because of my poor reputation and poor leadership and that killed me,” he told the class, sharing a sentiment he had previously expressed to me.

But as the room got still and a few faces drooped, he threw up both hands and jokingly comforted those seated, saying “It’s okay!”

“I’m over it now and it forced me to step back,” Hobson said, “but I know my reputation in this game is good.”

Through the laughs, the bitter sting of such a disappointment is still clear in Hobson’s voice when he discusses this most recent chapter of his baseball odyssey. Still, he was quick to point out his faith in a bigger, more cosmic reason behind his (hopefully temporary) ouster from professional baseball.

Tuscaloosa Patch has reported extensively on the life and legacy of his father, Clell Hobson, who made a name for himself as a Tuscaloosa High hero, Alabama gridiron star, beloved high school football coach and civic leader in Tuscaloosa and the west Alabama area.

ALSO READ: Living Legend |Untold Stories Of A Tuscaloosa Hometown Hero

Bart Starr was his backup at Alabama after the two were high school opponents and the two combined for a record-breaking performance in the 1953 Orange Bowl by passing for over 300 yards in the 61-6 win over Syracuse.

It’s a margin of victory that stood as a bowl record until the 2008 GMAC Bowl.

The elder Hobson is the oldest living University of Alabama quarterback, other than the equally legendary Marie “Tot” Fikes (Carastro) — a woman slightly older than Clell who starred in intramural football in the 1940s at The Capstone.

Clell Hobson insists to this day she was a good enough quarterback to play in pads.

The last living quarterback to have not played for the legendary Bear Bryant, Clell Hobson is 93 and in failing health. He resides at Marengo Nursing Home in Demopolis, where his son has also called home during the off-season.

Several of those in the OLLI class were quite familiar with Clell Hobson and mentioned the reverence his name still carriers across the region and state.

Butch is a fiery man and great for small talk. In his managing days he looked like Paul Newman in a baseball uniform and was a blue-collar scrapper of a ballplayer.

Still, he changes the timbre of his voice almost immediately when he reflects on his father.

In these moments, and if the right set of eyes knows what to look for, he is briefly transformed back into that blue-eyed little boy hitting rocks with a broomstick into a creek in Centreville, pretending to be Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle.

“This is the first year I haven’t been on a baseball field in the spring in 53 years,” Butch remarked. “I think, No.1 for me is: I needed to be with my Dad … he is 93 years 0ld and hasn’t been very active, dementia is starting to set in a little bit. And, No. 2, is for me to heal.”

Butch Hobson Stories You’ve Probably Never Heard

Over the last couple of years, Butch Hobson has become one of this reporter’s favorite people on the planet for his warmth, sincerity and candor. So, I’ve made it a point — since he hasn’t gotten mad enough to run me off, yet — to regularly pester him for updates on his Dad or to just gab about the game we both love so much and how he’s doing.

The man is not just a walking baseball encyclopedia full of trivia tidbits, but someone who actually witnessed firsthand and participated in some of the most iconic moments in sports history.

I’m a zealot for preserving any forgotten story I can and every time Butch reminisces, he provides something old in one sense for him, yet opening up a wellspring to something completely fresh in another for a wide-eyed child of the 1990s like the author of this story.

Those who regularly read Tuscaloosa Patch are familiar with several of the classic Butch Hobson yarns I’ve written about: Coaching future Hall-of-Famer and then-minor league first baseman Jeff Bagwell when he was traded from the Red Sox to the Astros; being in the dugout for Carl Yastrzemski’s 3,000th hit; and being a standout major league third baseman in the late 1970s on some of the most iconic Boston Red Sox teams in baseball history.

ALSO READ: Butch On Baseball: The Story Of A West Alabama Big Leaguer

He lovingly and sincerely throws around names like Bill “Spaceman” Lee, Dennis Eckersley and Carl Yastrzemski like old friends within arms reach and offers fond memories for each of the legends.

For this story, though, I made it a point to focus on the stories from Hobson that even I had not heard or maybe didn’t remember clearly enough to tell in a way they deserved.

For starters, a story few have likely heard has less to do with baseball and concerns Hobson’s roots as a burgeoning gridiron star.

Sitting in a swivel chair speaking to the OLLI class on Tuesday, Hobson recalled how he wasn’t drafted to play Major League Baseball out of Bessemer High School, where his Dad was the head football coach.

This wasn’t an oversight by scouts or because he wasn’t good enough to get picked, but because scouts knew he planned to play football for the University of Alabama and the legendary Paul W. “Bear” Bryant.

“Why waste a draft pick?” he said.

Hobson’s most notable football action came when Tide quarterback Terry Davis went down with an injury during the 1972 Orange Bowl, which saw Hobson thrust into the spotlight full-time running Bryant’s vaunted wishbone offense.

He sported No. 15 in high school, but circumstances saw him wearing No. 17 on his Crimson Jersey in that Orange Bowl — his birthday is Aug. 17, after all — so he’s grown attached to the number.

Twenty years later, Hobson wore that same No. 17 on the back of his Boston Red Sox uniform as a manager.

He played more as a defensive back than anything on the field for Bear Bryant that junior year and was good at it, but two decades after his Dad made national headlines in the Orange Bowl, Butch stood out in Miami running the hobbled offense and despite the national title game ending in a loss to Nebraska.

The performance was good enough, in fact, that assistant coach and eventual UA Director of Athletics Mal Moore told Hobson he had a very real shot at being the Crimson Tide’s starting signal-caller for the 1973 season.

Little did Coach Moore and Coach Bryant know that Hobson garnered serious attention while attending a Cincinnati Reds tryout camp the summer after that Orange Bowl, where scouts told him that he had a future in the game of baseball, but needed a plan — I.E., ditch football and the associated risks to his health. It’s a notion that would prove prophetic in Hobson’s career.

“I made the decision and my Dad said ‘you have to make your own decision and you have to go see The Man,’ and I knew what that meant,” Hobson said, going on to explain that he had to call the athletic office and a meeting was scheduled in Bryant’s office in Coleman Coliseum for 5 a.m. the next morning.

“Next morning, I’m in Coach Bryant’s office that looks out over the baseball field,” he continued. “He had that big desk and he was a big man, so I shrunk down in the chair and he’s got his back to me, looking out at the baseball field and says ‘what can I do for you Butch?'”

Hobson, though nervous, was forward with the iconic football coach and told the man that he believed he had a future in baseball and didn’t want to squander such an opportunity by risking his health playing football during the 1973 season.

He said Bryant took a drag off of his unfiltered cigarette and spat a fleck of tobacco on the floor before looking down at the young man and saying, “Well Butch, from what I’ve seen of your baseball playing, you’ll be back playing for me.”

Hobson was initially furious and poured sweat in the heavy air-conditioning of that office.

But after storming out in a froth, the hot-headed young man quickly realized how Bryant was working to motivate him toward greatness.

Telling the story today, he laughed that it was probably some kind of NCAA violation, but Bryant told him he would keep him on a football scholarship under the condition that he move out of the fairly new, state-of-the-art football dormitory at Bryant Hall and into Mary Burke Hall with all the other “tennis, soccer, and baseball players.”

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Bryant also told him that if he didn’t get drafted to play professional baseball, he wanted Hobson to come back and play his final year of football for the Crimson Tide.

It should come as little surprise this never came to pass as Hobson had a standout 1973 season in Tuscaloosa and was good enough to be selected by the Boston Red Sox in the 8th round of the MLB Draft with the 185th overall pick.

In a bye-gone era when the MLB Draft had 52 rounds, it was a draft year that saw Hall-of-Famers Robin Yount, Eddie Murray and Dave Winfield selected, along with Hobson’s future teammate and one of the most under-appreciated players in baseball history, Fred Lynn.

“The Boston Red Sox, in my opinion, are the greatest organization in baseball,” Hobson said. “They adopted you as a player like you’re one of their own. When I got traded to the Angels and when I would go back to Fenway [Park], I was greeted well. I will not say that about when I got traded to the Yankees, though.”

During his discussion at OLLI, the former big-league third baseman fielded the expected questions about the legends he played with and coached, reflecting on legendary names like Kansas City Royals third baseman George Brett and Hobson’s Angels teammate Rod Carew.

He also talked about the difficulties he had hitting off of Jack Morris. Never mind that Hobson went yard off the legendary Jim Palmer three times— a sentiment I reminded my brother and OLLI Director Ashley Chambers of earlier in the day as Butch, walking with a cane, traversed the concrete steps to the Bryant Conference Center as I said “he don’t need no help.”

While he didn’t mention it during his lecture and Q&A session, Hobson also hit a home run off the namesake of the author of this story — Hall-of-Famer Nolan Ryan.

“I don’t say George Brett because he was a third baseman,” Hobson said, neglecting to mention to the crowd that he told me that Brett once called him his favorite third baseman. “To me, he was a different version of Pete Rose. I patterned myself and the way I played the game after Pete Rose. I played with a football mentality and I didn’t know any other way to play.”

Indeed, this hard-nosed attitude was put on display during one of the most historic games in all of professional baseball history: the 1978 one-game playoff between the Red Sox and Yankees that would become known as the “Bucky Dent Game.”

In stark contrast to the players of today, Hobson had been fighting through loose bone chips floating in fluid in his right elbow the entire season — an old football injury caused by Astroturf that had never truly healed. Keep in mind, reader, this was very much an era of “playing hurt” as opposed to the 21st Century, when a hangnail or thumb blister will see a player go on the disabled list for a week.

After struggling all season through immense pain making throws across the infield from third to first, Hobson approached his manager, and his eventual assistant coach for the Red Sox, Don Zimmer and said he simply couldn’t throw with any kind of certainty.

This decision was about the team and its postseason chances, not about the pain. So, instead, Hobson’s strong bat was penciled in as the designated hitter and, with bone chips floating in his elbow, he still managed to go 1-for-4 on the day on one of the biggest stages in the game’s history.

“It got to the point [the bone chips] were floating and I would take a ground ball and go to throw to first and my elbow would just lock up,” Hobson said. “It was excruciating, but it got to a point I could move them around and they would wrap my elbow with an ace bandage.”

Friends, when was the last time you heard of a pro ballplayer “moving around bone chips” in their elbow just to stay in the game?

Dick Mahoney, the instructor for the class at OLLI on Tuesday and a working sportswriter in the Fenway Park press box at the time, remembered it well.

An up-and-coming sporting scribe in the 70s, Mahoney credits Hobson with starting his decades-long relationship with the Red Sox after Mahoney wrote a 1977 feature story about the third baseman from the Deep South for the Commercial Dispatch in Columbus, Mississippi.

Mahoney recalled Hobson fighting through the injury and Zimmer commenting to the press “He’s my kind of guy. He’s the toughest S-O-B here” — high praise in a rough-and-tumble, blue-collar big city like 1970s Boston.

Fast-forward nearly half a century, though, to what one sports writer you may know well said about his tumultuous three seasons as the manager of the Boston Red Sox.

Baseball Hall of Fame sportswriter Peter Gammons wrote when Hobson was fired from the Red Sox after the 1994 season that it was “because he cared too much about his players” and, while Hobson never took the newspaper at home or cared much for the media, there’s little doubt this gave him a sense of pride when his time with an organization he loves to this day finally came to an end. Indeed, Hobson was at the 2024 Red Sox fantasy camp and is still beloved by the organization.

Still, Hobson reflected on his favorite baseball memory when asked by one of those in attendance for his discussion on Tuesday. He didn’t bat an eyelash in recalling it, either.

The year is 2016 and Hobson was the manager of the Lancaster (Penn.) Barnstormers of the Atlantic League. Going into that season, Hobson signed his son, K.C., to play for the Barnstormers after the power-hitting first baseman was released by the Toronto Blue Jays organization despite being drafted in the 6th Round of the 2009 MLB Draft — roughly two rounds higher than his Dad when he was selected in 1973.

As a side note and fun fact shared by his father, K.C. Hobson was nicknamed “Bamm-Bamm” by Carl Yastrzemski, who was reminded of the character from “The Flintstones” when K.C. was a toddler. This was due to his love of a Mickey Mouse baseball bat given to him by his parents and the child’s instinctual desire to hit everything with it he could.

In fact, well before Kristopher Clell Hobson was a twinkle in his Daddy’s eye, Butch was gifted a Boston Fire Department chief’s hat originally given to the highly decorated Yastrzemski after he hit his 400th home run.

It’s a priceless baseball artifact the Hall-of-Famer signed: “To Bamm-Bamm. Carl Yastrzemski.”

The fire chief’s hat, according to Hobson, now lives in K.C.’s “man cave.”

Still, K.C. Hobson went on to put together a stellar campaign for the Barnstormers in 2016, but by the time the last series of the season rolled around, the Barnstormers were out of the playoff chase and winding down the year with little to find joy in or look forward to.

Then Butch had an idea that would make history and provide a few laughs along the way.

“It’s Friday night and K.C. is getting ready to hit and I came up to him and said ‘I’m gonna ask you something right now and tell me how you feel,'” Hobson recalled. “We’re not in the playoffs and I got a spot open on the roster.’ I was 65 at the time and I said, ‘I think I want to activate myself Sunday and I’ll play third while you play first and I’ll hit second while you hit third for an inning.”

K.C. and, apparently everybody else, embraced the idea. So, fitted with a brand-new pair of red high-top Nike turf shoes, Hobson said he took around a hundred cuts in the batting cage gearing up for his return to the lineup more than three decades after his retirement.

“By the time the game came I had to get the bat boy to help me take the bat to home plate,” he said with a hearty laugh.

Facing a pitcher who threw in the neighborhood of 89-91 mph on his fastball, Hobson had his strategy mapped out for his lone at-bat as he stepped into the box.

“The first pitch was a fastball and comes in shin-high and the umpire goes ‘strike one’ and I turn and say ‘that ball was low,'” he said. “They throw me another fastball and I foul it off and I looked at the catcher, he was some little rookie, and told him to ‘be nice’ and then he threw the slider and — I never could hit a slider — so I struck out.”

Then Hobson had to live up to the other half of his deal and take the field, just for one-half of an inning.

With a right-handed pull-hitter at the plate, Hobson could see that he was likely about to have to make a play the likes of which he hadn’t attempted in decades.

Sure enough, the batter rapped a “bounding chopper” to Hobson’s left and he broke for the ball like it was 1977.

“I had a rookie I signed to play shortstop and that kid comes up to make the play and we collided,” he said. “I was moving when we hit, but we were both on the ground and the shortstop asked ‘who gets that error?’ and I said, “YOU DO!”

Why Butch Doesn’t Like Wade Boggs

Hobson, in true fashion, saved his best story for last and it was one even this reporter had never heard. It’s also one I’ll tell and explain to my grandkids, whether they’re interested in baseball or not.

Hobson is easily one of the greatest third basemen in Red Sox history, but no name occupying the hot corner for the timeless franchise is as well-known to this day as Hall-of-Famer Wade Boggs.

Lampooned on the sitcom”It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia” and dubbed “The Chicken Man” by legendary Red Sox slugger Jim Rice for his superstitious need to eat chicken before every baseball game, Boggs is one of only five players to win four consecutive batting titles and he once hit .400 in 162 straight games between 1985-1986.

But when asked about the “biggest jerk” Hobson ever encountered during his career, he didn’t hesitate to bring up Boggs.

“If you’re a Wade Boggs fan, I’m sorry,” he told the class at OLLI. “He was not a nice person. He was a great player, won Gold Gloves, but was not a nice person and was not liked by his teammates.”

Watch him tell the full story on the link below or click here

As the time began to close on his speaking engagement, Hobson was reminded of a story that few have ever heard and lit up as he told it.

“That’s what you wanna hear, right?” he told his excited audience.

In 1992, Hobson was a rookie manager for the Red Sox and Boggs, normally an unstoppable force at the plate as one of the game’s purest contact hitters, was drinking hard and playing some of the worst baseball of his illustrious career.

At this point in the season, Hobson said Boggs was hitting around .265 and took himself out of the lineup nearly two-dozen times — enough games, in fact, that his backup, Scott Cooper, made the American League All-Star team thanks to filling in for the future Hall-of-Famer.

Cooper wasn’t a slouch by any stretch, though, and would go on to make his second and final All-Star Game the following year in 1994.

The dog days of August 1993 brought little respite for the Red Sox, though, with one of the team’s only bright spots being its intimidating and barrel-chested ace Roger Clemens, who had an earned run average of 2.80 late in the regular season, placing him third in the American League for ERA.

Clemens was on the bump that fateful day, but Hobson thought back on Boggs in what would become his last season in Boston before becoming a free agent and taking his talents to the New York Yankees.

“Boggs is playing third, runners at second and third with two outs,” Hobson said. “He gets a routine ground ball and Wade boots it. I played third base, so it’s clear he just booted the ball. Two runs score and they’re unearned. Clearly two unearned runs.”

It will make more sense in a minute, but, as Hobson has told Patch on several occasions, he didn’t take the newspaper at his home or listen to sports talk radio during his time playing and managing, so what happened next came as a surprise he would remember up until the present.

Enter the pride of Bonham, Texas: Danny Darwin.

Known as the “Bonham Bullet” and “Dr. Death,” Darwin played 20 seasons in the big leagues for 10 different MLB clubs and built a reputation as a gritty and tenacious journeyman pitcher.

Hobson remembers Darwin fondly among the long list of iconic and well-respected ballplayers he has crossed paths with over his career, but was quick to point out that the right-hander had little patience for selfish frivolity from his teammates.

“Danny Darwin and Clemens were both from Texas and [Darwin] was mean,” Hobson remembered with a smile, referring to Darwin as one of his favorite players he ever coached. “If you looked at him the wrong way when you stepped in the box, you might as well get ready to wear one on the elbow.”

Most pitchers are neurotic and superstitious creatures, sure, and Darwin was no exception, with Hobson recalling the sinewy Texan’s pre-game routine as the longtime manager set up a story that circles back to Wade Boggs.

“When he pitched, he would go to the ballpark at noon and, sorry ladies, he would put a towel on and nothing else in the locker room, with his hat on, and he would take his cigarette and a cup of coffee and just walk around the locker room just spending the day,” he said. “I usually got there at 1 p.m. and would do my lineup, so I get there and Danny comes in and sits down with his cigarette and nothing on but a towel.”

Hobson could tell there was something weighing on his pitcher’s mind behind that mustache — a big red flag for a manager — and he immediately sensed trouble.

Darwin then told him what had happened and what was about to happen.

Indeed, Darwin reminded Hobson that the rookie manager didn’t take the newspaper at home, so he must’ve been completely unaware that Boggs had gone to the team’s scorekeeper and had the error from the previous game changed to a hit.

Boggs was one of the most famous players in the game at the time and it’s well within reason to figure that he had the influence to commit such a selfish act.

Hobson was stunned at the news but then that much more concerned after hearing what his starting pitcher for that night said next.

“And Butch, when Wade Boggs gets to the ballpark tonight, I’m going to whip his ass,” Darwin told Hobson. “There’s nothing you can do about it or [Red Sox General Manager] Lou Gorman can do about it.”

Sporting his locker room towel and nothing more other than a smoldering cigarette and his sweat-stained Red Sox cap, Darwin left Hobson’s office to continue with his pre-game ritual, leaving the manager no choice but to immediately call the team’s scorekeeper in advance of the rest of the team arriving to the clubhouse at Fenway Park.

Confirming what Darwin and Roger Clemens already knew to be a fact, the scorekeeper told Hobson that Boggs had, indeed, claimed that the ball took a bad hop and he would have never been able to make the play.

Thus, the E5 was changed to a hit and Clemens saw his ERA rise by 0.07 points as he chased another Cy Young Award on a team that wasn’t bound for the postseason. The scorekeeper told Hobson he had already changed it and there was nothing he could do after the fact.

The rookie manager then began to worry about the crisis unfolding before him and the possibility that the clubhouse would have half a dozen Boston beat writers in attendance for whatever was coming next.

Then Wade Boggs shows up.

“Wade comes in to my office after we’re done with batting practice at about 5:30 p.m. and he looks like crap,” Hobson said. “He drank more Miller Lite than anyone I’ve ever seen and I could tell he had quite a few and I had already taken him out of the lineup. But he said ‘I gotta see Roger [Clemens].'”

Per his own baseball custom at the time, Clemens was out running the city streets of Boston the day after an outing but eventually made his way back to Fenway Park about an hour before the game. By this point, word had already gotten around the clubhouse that Boggs had asked the team’s scorekeeper to change the error.

Once Boggs and Clemens were face to face, and in front of others looking on, Hobson said Boggs pleaded to the imposing, hard-throwing right-hander that he was not responsible for the scorecard change.

“Roger says ‘I don’t care. With the year we’ve had, I don’t care,'” Hobson said.

Hobson felt tensions ease for a moment when the normally fiery Clemens took no exception to what he already knew was a lie from his longtime teammate and shrugged it off.

Then Hobson remembered his starting pitcher for that night — Danny Darwin.

The first pitch for that Sunday night was set for 7:30 p.m. and, at this point in the evening, position players would normally be on the field warming up and pitchers would be long-tossing or throwing in the bullpen, depending on their expected assignments for that day.

“I go sit at the desk and I thought with the timing that [Darwin] had already gone out to the field,” Hobson told the class at OLLI.

But when the manager looked out into the Fenway Park clubhouse locker room around 6:45 p.m., he noticed that not only was the entire team sitting in their lockers, but his starting pitcher hadn’t made the long trek for the bullpen.

“Danny’s got his Red Sox jacket on over his arm and a cigarette in his mouth with his cup of coffee,” Hobson remembered. “Boggs is sitting at his locker and looked like a whipped dog. Nobody liked him.”

This is where Butch Hobson’s storytelling ability really shines. In that moment, he remembers Darwin, with his hat slightly cocked to one side and cigarette in his mouth, turning to hand his cup of coffee of Red Sox pitching coach Rich Gale.

Telling the story to a full classroom, Hobson got to his feet, shifted his weight to his good knee and threw a hard right hand through the air in a single downward thrust.

“BOOM! Right in his ribs, smoked him,” Hobson said of Darwin punching Boggs in the side with his pitching hand, before imitating the groans of pain uttered from the All-Star third baseman as he clutched his side. “Then [Darwin] said, ‘Let me tell you something you S-O-B: Nobody here likes you. Nobody here wants to be your teammate and everyone knows you’re going to be a free agent and you’re gonna go somewhere else next year. We don’t care. But let me tell you something: Wherever you are and whenever I pitch against you, I’m gonna hit you right in the F’ing head.”

Sure enough, Boggs would be off to the Bronx the next year and, as serendipity would have it, Darwin was penciled in to start on the mound for the Red Sox’s first trip into the unfriendly confines of the old Yankee Stadium for the 1993 season.

Before the game, Hobson had an informal chat on the field behind the roll-out batting cage with his longtime friend and Yankee manager Buck Showalter.

The Red Sox manager asked his friendly counterpart if his third baseman was going to be in the lineup that day, to which Showalter shrugged and said Boggs would.

“I said, ‘I bet you a $100 bill that he doesn’t play today’ and I told him the story,” Hobson said.

As his time speaking to the class at OLLI ran over its limit and another class waited outside, Hobson told those hanging on every word that after he finished posting his lineup in the visitor’s dugout in Yankee Stadium, he stepped out and looked to the opposing side for Showalter, who was tacking up his lineup card. Then the two made eye contact.

Without saying another word, Butch Hobson had an embellished look of disgust on his face as he made the universal sign of “thumbs down” and the class erupted with laughter.

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