Fifty summers ago, Gil Hodges gave this columnist the best year of his boyhood when he skippered the New York Mets to an against-all-the-odds World Series victory. But it’s the way he did it that underscores Major League Baseball’s greatest continuing injustice: this man’s exclusion from its Hall of Fame. 

This weekend at Citi Field the Mets will celebrate that magnificent 1969 team. It was the summer of Woodstock, the first moon landing, Chappaquiddick, the Charles Manson murders and of course Vietnam. But for a 10-year-old Mets fan, it was heaven. 

In his new book about that season, right fielder Art Shamsky writes about conversations he had with his ’69 teammates—Tom Seaver, Jerry Koosman, Bud Harrelson and Ron Swoboda—at Mr. Seaver’s Napa Valley vineyard. In “After the Miracle,” Mr. Shamsky provides an inside-the-clubhouse view of a ball club that began the year thinking it would be lucky to finish above .500 for the first time in its brief history—and then ended on top of the world.

No one was more responsible for the gift the 1969 Mets gave to baseball than Hodges, the former Brooklyn Dodger and World War II Marine who’d earned a Bronze Star in the Pacific. In 1968, he became the fourth man to manage the hapless Mets. Hodges, says Mr. Shamsky, quickly informed his players there was nothing lovable about losing. 

Ever since his death on Easter Sunday 1972 at 47, an argument has raged over whether Gil Hodges deserves a place in the Hall of Fame. Much hinges on his career with the Dodgers, when he was arguably the dominant first baseman of his era, unmatched on defense and with 370 career homers. The counterargument is that his lifetime batting stats don’t quite reach Hall of Fame levels.

Whether he intends it or not, Mr. Shamsky’s book is a powerful argument that Hodges’s 1969 achievement alone qualifies him for the hall. It isn’t only that he dragged a team that had finished second-to-last in the National League the year before to a World Series triumph. It’s also the testaments from the players he led, who credit him for teaching them to be better men as well as better ballplayers. 

No one has made the Cooperstown case for Hodges more faithfully than Mr. Seaver, who was elected to the hall himself in 1992. Perhaps because he had also been a Marine (in the reserves), Mr. Seaver appreciates that the discipline Hodges was famous for wasn’t intended to tear his men down. It was meant to build them up.

“You’re better than you think you are,” Hodges had told them after he’d railed about losing being a “sickness.” They came to believe him. On a glorious September day, the Mets knocked Leo Durocher’s Chicago Cubs from the first-place spot they had held all season. Let’s just say it was the Hodges answer to Durocher’s famous quip that “nice guys finish last.”

Mr. Seaver also told Mr. Shamsky that Hodges belongs in the Hall of Fame “for covering Jackie Robinson’s back.” When Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier, not every player welcomed him. But the Robinson family quickly learned they could count on this stolid Hoosier—as well as his Brooklyn-born wife, Joan.

More than a decade ago, while chatting in the Mets dugout with Mr. Seaver about Hodges, this reporter asked him if the word “hero” was overused in baseball. “Not when you have the right man,” Mr. Seaver shot back.

Perhaps even more compelling are the grace notes from men who might be thought to harbor resentments toward Hodges. These include Cleon Jones, ever the gentleman, whom Hodges once walked back to the bench from left field after he hadn’t seen enough hustle after a fly ball.

Just as classy is Mr. Swoboda, the Met outfielder who was the Age of Aquarius to Hodges’s Greatest Generation and who in ’69 made one of the greatest catches in World Series history. Mr. Swoboda, whose own book about that season (“Here’s the Catch”) has just been released, says Hodges in the Hall of Fame should be a “no brainer.”

Many of these players could have had a further beef with Hodges over the “platoon” system that had Mr. Shamsky (a lefty) sharing right field with Mr. Swoboda (a righty). Players understandably prefer to play every day. 

But it’s hard to argue with results. Under Hodges, it wasn’t just the stars who performed. He seemed to have a knack for pulling the best from his nonstars too. As a team, the ’69 Mets were far more formidable than their individual stats would suggest.