‘Always Something New To Write’: Paul Hoynes Gets Hall of Fame Call After 42 Years as Cleveland Baseball Writer

Cleveland Guardians Manager Stephen Vogt walked into the press room at Progressive Field, took one look at the front row of chairs, and stopped.

Even with two dozen people in the room ahead of Game 1 of the Wild Card playoff series, Vogt could tell someone was missing. For a brief minute, Vogt appeared to consider the possibility that he was early.

“Where’s Hoynes?” Vogt asked quietly. “I can’t do this without Hoynsie.”

Paul Hoynes, the Cleveland Guardians beat writer for The Plain Dealer, affectionately known as “Hoynsie,” was just upstairs typing away in his usual seat in the press box. But you could forgive Vogt for being thrown off. Cleveland managers have been giving press conferences with Hoynes in the audience since 1983.

Hoynes is a fixture in the Guardians press box and in the next day’s paper. And after 42 years, he says he’s not ready to go anywhere — except Cooperstown.

Hoynes was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame on Tuesday, earning the BBWAA Career Excellence Award for his decades of service to baseball writing. He will be honored July 23-27 in Cooperstown, New York, during Hall of Fame weekend.

Sports writing, Hoynes said in an interview during Wild Card weekend, was “the only thing I did halfway decent.”

“There’s always something new to write,” he said.

Hoynes has garnered a rare level of respect over those four decades on the beat because it comes from every corner of the sport: his sources, those who read him and those who work alongside him.

He was a finalist twice for admission to Cooperstown, missing the Hall of Fame last year by just seven votes.

His peers were convinced this was Hoynes’ year.

“I think he should have been (inducted) years ago,” Guardians radio broadcaster Tom Hamilton says.

Hamilton should know. He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame last summer.

“I don’t think anybody in the business is more respected by his peers than Paul is,” Hamilton says. “And that’s the highest compliment you can get.”

It’s also likely no one makes his peers laugh as much as Hoynes does, whether he’s cracking a joke, unplugging the radio broadcast or showing up to work in two belts. And everyone has a favorite Hoynes story.

Hoynes’ love of baseball, comedy came from his father

Hoynes came to baseball by accident.

Maybe it was always meant to be, as his father was scouted by the Cardinals before joining the Navy ahead of World War II.

Growing up in Cleveland Heights, Hoynes said his father used to take him to a park and hit grounders and fly balls his way. The old rubber balls would sometimes end up inverted in Hoynes’ glove, smashed inward by his father’s power.

That skillset appears to have skipped a generation.

“I was terrible,” Hoynes said.

The skill that didn’t skip a generation: comedy. Hoynes, known for his impeccable timing with a comment or joke, said he gets his humor from his father, a lover of the Three Stooges and W.C. Fields movies.

He played club Rugby at Marquette University, which would come in handy later when a player shoved him into a locker after he didn’t like something Hoynes wrote. That player liked Hoynes much better after Hoynes shoved him back.

Now 74, Hoynes came to Cleveland baseball games as a kid in the days of Rocky Colavito, when going to the ballpark still called for dressing your best.

He began his sports writing career in 1973 for the Painesville Telegraph, covering every Northeast Ohio high school sport possible. Football being his first love, the Cleveland Press hired him to cover the Browns not long before the paper folded. In need of a job, he learned the News Herald was hiring a baseball writer.

“I’d heard terrible things about being a baseball writer,” he said. “Every baseball writer I knew was either an alcoholic or getting divorced. And I was sitting there thinking, this is not a good thing. But I had no other options, so I said yeah. And it turned out to be the best move I ever made.”

By 1984, he was the Cleveland Indians beat writer for the Plain Dealer.  

World Series bet results in a jump in the lake

Hoynes was sure it was a safe bet to make, even for one made over the internet.

He had just written a column declaring the team’s season dead and buried. The fan base exploded with rage and indignation, but he was still confident.

If he was wrong, someone on Twitter said, and the Indians went to the World Series, would Hoynes jump into Lake Erie?

“It’s a deal,” Hoynes replied.

The year was 2016 — the Indians made it to the World Series.

One slightly chilly October morning, Hoynes lay in bed with his wife, Jackie, trying to figure out what he was going to do about this bet.

“She says, ‘You’re jumping in the lake right now,’” Hoynes said.

They drove down to Fairport Harbor Beach, and in black shorts and a black T-shirt, Hoynes carefully waded out into the waves, then dove in. He popped right back up. He swears the water “wasn’t that bad.”

“There’s these geese walking by,” he said. “They didn’t even go in the water, they just kinda looked at me like who is this idiot?”

His wife filmed the event for posterity and proof.

“That got everybody off my back, at least for a while,” he said.

A year later, when the Browns’ head coach promised to jump in the lake if they didn’t win more than one game, Hoynes filmed another video on the beach — this time in considerably warmer clothing — to give the coach some tips from a pro about jumping in the lake on a cold day. Bring some water wings, or your own lifeguard, he advised, and maybe a drill to get through the ice.

Hoynes always ‘trying to get to the bottom of something’

When asked about Vogt waiting for him to start the press conference, Hoynes laughed it off. Vogt is just superstitious, he says.

Hamilton said not so fast.

“That tells you something right there,” he says. “And it’s been that way with every manager that has managed our ballclub in my 36 years. They know who Paul is and they have a great deal of respect for him.”

Those same managers know Hoynes will ask the tough questions, Hamilton says. They may not like it, but they know Hoynes isn’t asking because he wants to get clicks on his story or likes on social media.

Hamilton said other reporters know Hoynes won’t back down, either.

“I’ve seen it time and time again,” Hamilton says. “Other people won’t ask the tough question; they’re waiting for Paul to ask it and do all the dirty work. Paul knows that somebody has to ask it, and if nobody else is going to, he’s going to, because he’s trying to get to the bottom of something.

“He’s trying to get an honest answer to why something may have happened or why a decision may have been made. Those are the true professionals.”

Sheldon Ocker, a former Akron Beacon Journal baseball reporter who overlapped with Hoynes on the beat for over 30 years, says his friend Hoynes was relentless about getting a story.

One year, he says, the manager had been fired with little explanation just before a game on the road. In about the second inning, Ocker says, Hoynes stood up and left.

Hoynes went to the team hotel and banged on that fired manager’s door at least 20 times, Ocker says. He didn’t get the story, but it wasn’t going to be for a lack of trying.

“If Hoynes had a story he had to do, it’s like he had to do it no matter what,” Ocker says.

Sportswriter Marla Ridenour says Hoynes once wrote a full-page story about Albert Belle, without Belle talking to him.

“He doesn’t let it get him down when he gets rebuffed by somebody he really wants to talk to,” Ridenour says. “He’ll find a story one way or another, no matter who he talks to.”

Plain Dealer columnist Terry Pluto described Hoynes as having a “childlike joy” for the job.

“He doesn’t seem bored with this; he’s not really jaded,” Pluto says. “He still wants to get stories.”

In the press box, Ridenour says, Hoynes is “always pounding on his computer.”

“He’s always operating like deadline is in two minutes,” she says.

The gruff-looking exterior doesn’t last long before he’s found a reason to laugh. With his white-gray beard, Hoynes looks like Sean Connery if he had smiled more.

He can be “a hardass,” Ridenour says, asking sources why they did this or that during a game.

“Because it’s him and because of his smiling and friendly demeanor, it doesn’t always seem as accusatory,” Ridenour says. “That way of relating to people, even when he’s asking the tough questions — they don’t seem quite as tough.”

Hoynes works to connect with readers in hard times

Hoynes has had many serious moments on the job. In 1993, two Cleveland players died in a boating accident during spring training.

The wife of one of the players, Steve Olin, came to speak with the media after the accident.

“God, it was heart-wrenching,” Hoynes says. “I was crying listening to it. I was like, I don’t know if I’m made out for this.”

For days and weeks, he says, “we were just writing and writing and writing.”

Did it help anyone process their grief? He doesn’t know.

He tries, he says, with his writing, to make a connection with readers. He hopes that’s part of his legacy.

“I would like to think that people would look back and think I tried as hard as I could, I did the job as well as I could,” Hoynes says, adding he wants to give them more than “Steven Kwan hit a two-run double in the second inning.”

“I hope there’s something that they read my stuff and kind of chuckle, get a laugh out of it,” he said. “See, there’s a little humor in there, too.”

Two belts, crawling out of stadiums, and a radio blackout

Hoynes makes his coworkers laugh regularly, most often without trying.

Hamilton remembered one spring training game when Hoynes tried to set up a workstation in the booth next door. He went to plug in his laptop and unplugged the entire radio broadcast.

“Our engineer was going crazy because he couldn’t figure out why we had suddenly gone off the air,” Hamilton says. “Nobody felt worse about it than Paul. We laughed about it because it was like, ‘Paul, it’s a spring training game. Whatever.’”

Hoynes always seems to have rough luck, his friends say, but always finds his way out of a pickle. He’s been locked inside a baseball stadium and had to crawl his way out. He once accidentally wore two belts to work.

On one West Coast road trip, he lost his plane ticket at the airport, back when a physical ticket was the only way onto the plane. He went up to a counter, and the woman just asked, are you by chance Paul Hoynes? There was his ticket. The other writers thought for sure they were leaving Hoynes behind in Anaheim.

One time during a late-night gathering, Hoynes made a loud, deep, guttural noise, one apparently left over from his rugby days that Ocker described as “the combination of a wild bird — a big one — and somebody who has a stomachache.” 

Ocker pulled strings at the local radio station to have the noise professionally recorded. In the middle of Cleveland’s batting practice one day, a PR guy let it rip over the sound system.

“The players just stopped what they were doing and looked around and couldn’t believe what the hell was that?” Ocker says.

Hoynes undeterred by 162-game grind

The baseball season is a grind, with 162 games over six months. Half of those are on the road, and that’s not including six weeks of spring training or playoffs, should the team make it that far.

Pluto says after six years on the beat himself, he couldn’t do it anymore. Somehow, Hoynes has made it work.

Hoynes credited his wife and now-adult kids for adapting to the schedule early on, finding ways to make it work.

He knows he missed time with them, he says. He once returned home after spring training and a season-opening road trip, and woke up his young son, who promptly asked, “Who are you?”

By September, he says, whether the team has won 100 games or lost 100 games, “it starts to wear you down.”

And yet, he keeps finding more stories to write. Trades. Scoops. Three World Series runs.

“This year we had the two pitchers suspended for gambling, who would think of that?” he says.

Hoynes notes he’s old enough to be a player’s grandfather. Some of the current players are the sons of players he used to cover.

He’s embraced change in the game, especially the pitch clock, which has him able to leave work much earlier these days. It’s lessened the grind, just enough for him to keep going.

“I’m going to fall over dead, right in here, I’ll just keel over on my laptop,” Hoynes says, a laugh barreling out of his chest. “Then maybe I wouldn’t have to make deadline.”

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