Rise to Fame
A baseball headshot landed him a spot in the Columbia Pictures national talent search. When a 1977 foot injury ended his career as a third baseman in the Yankees farm system, he submitted that photo with an essay and got picked from 75,000 applicants. He made it to prime time before landing at Days of Our Lives in 1986, where he walked in as a mystery man called 'The Pawn' who turned out to be John Black. He stayed in the role for 38 years. The supercouple he formed with Deidre Hall's Marlena Evans gave daytime television one of its most enduring pairings.
In the Spotlight
When pancreatic cancer made finishing his run impossible, the show filmed John Black's funeral while he was still on his deathbed. Production spent three full days on the sequence, and he died the following weekend. The scenes aired in 2025, months after his passing, and the storyline earned a spot in Soap Opera Digest's best of 2025. Nearly four decades and more than 4,200 episodes is a career that outlasts most in any medium, and he spent his last weeks making sure the ending was worth watching.
Side Notes
Third base for the New York Yankees was his first calling, not Stefano DiMera's brainwashing plots. He batted .305 for the Oneonta Yankees in 1976 and made the NY-Penn League All-Star team before a foot injury ended things. His fallback had been medicine: he'd double-majored in microbiology and applied sciences at University of South Florida and was pre-dentistry. His acting career started with a baseball headshot because a teammate spotted a newspaper ad for a Columbia Pictures talent search and convinced him to apply.
Final Chapter
Days of Our Lives dedicated an episode 'in loving memory' on October 29, 2024, the month after his death. Co-star Stephen Nichols organized a team called 'Hogey's Home Runners' for the PanCAN PurpleStride walk in Los Angeles. The John Black character was killed off on screen in 2025, roughly eight months after the actor's real death, in a storyline that Hogestyn helped shape before he died.