GLENDALE, Ariz. — Joe Goddard, a long-time baseball writer affectionately known as “Young Joe” around baseball press boxes while he covered the White Sox and Cubs for the Chicago Sun-Times, died peacefully surrounded by his family Friday. He was 85.
Goddard, who was twice nominated for induction into the writers’ wing of the National Baseball Hall of Fame, was a Cubs and White Sox beat writer for the Sun-Times for 27 years. He worked at the paper from 1964 to 2006.
“We called him ‘Young Joe’ because he acted young and thought young and always had that little dickens smile. He was a joy to be around, both in and out of the press box,” said Hall of Fame baseball writer Dick Kaegel, who covered the Kansas City Royals and St. Louis Cardinals while Goddard was on the baseball beat for the Sun-Times.
Goddard started his career at the Indianapolis Times in 1961 and spent one year covering the Indianapolis Indians, then a Triple-A affiliate of the White Sox.
He spent nine years working on the Sun-Times copy desk before taking over the Cubs beat at the end of the 1973 season from Hall of Fame writer Edgar Munzel.
“I met Joe in the 1980s. Every baseball writer in the country knew and liked Joe,” Sun-Times sports editor Chris De Luca said. “He was a different breed from a different era. It’s hard to imagine Joe without a smile. He will be missed.”
Goddard was emotional when he received the nomination for the J.G. Taylor Spink Award in 2003.
“Everybody who is in there is an idol of mine,” Goddard said at the time of the writers’ wing. “I worked with many of those guys when I first started. I’m sort of the last of the gentlemen era, where everybody wore ties–and I did, too.”
Goddard grew up in Iverness and attended Palatine High School and DePauw University, and grew up a fan of the Cubs.
“Then the ‘Go-Go’ Sox came along [in the 1950s] and really swept me away,” he once said.
Goddard attended his final Sox game last summer with his wife, Carol and other family members as a guest of Sox chairman Jerry Reinsdorf.
“Joe Goddard was the classic, old-time baseball beat reporter,” Reinsdorf said. “They truly don’t make them like Joe anymore. His coverage of Chicago baseball went back decades. Joe loved the game, the travel, the life, was a reporter who developed relationships across clubhouses and front offices and broke story after story, all while scribbling his notes on tightly folded pieces of paper. He will be missed and his byline always remembered.”
