Nestor Chylak Marquee Hall of Fame 1999

He was hit during the German counter-offensive in the winter of 1944 and lost his sight for ten days. He was awarded the Purple Heart and the Silver Star. None of that is in this archive, which keeps statistics, and the omission is worth stating because the rest of what it holds about him is a number.

The game logs name him behind the plate 985 times, from April 18, 1954 to July 21, 1978, across twenty-five seasons. The count is a floor: it counts only the games he worked at the plate. He never played professionally.

He worked the game at Cleveland in June 1974 that was called off in the tenth inning when the crowd came onto the field, and he called it a forfeit. He appeared on seven Hall of Fame ballots and the Veterans Committee elected him in 1999, seventeen years after he died.