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MLB Hall of Fame: That challenging first-year eligibility

By Rick Soisson

COOPERSTOWN, NY - JULY, 1939. The first inductees to the Baseball Hall of Fame pose for a group portrait in Cooperstown in July of 1939. They are: top row left to right Honus Wagner, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Tris Speaker, Nap Lajoie, George Sisler, and Walter Johnson. Front row Eddie Collins, Babe Ruth, Connie Mack, and Cy Young. (Photo by Mark Rucker/Transcendental Graphics, Getty Images)
COOPERSTOWN, NY - JULY, 1939. The first inductees to the Baseball Hall of Fame pose for a group portrait in Cooperstown in July of 1939. They are: top row left to right Honus Wagner, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Tris Speaker, Nap Lajoie, George Sisler, and Walter Johnson. Front row Eddie Collins, Babe Ruth, Connie Mack, and Cy Young. (Photo by Mark Rucker/Transcendental Graphics, Getty Images) /
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How is it that the election to the MLB Hall of Fame is so devilishly difficult in a player’s first year of eligibility? Into the murky past…

Younger baseball fans may wonder why the first question that comes up whenever the annual articles about the MLB Hall of Fame inductees are written is: Who will the first-ballot inductees be? The related questions are always: Will there be any at all, and if so, are those inductees worthy?

Why does the presumption exist that some years there will be no first-ballot players who will be getting plaques in the central tourist attraction in the Hall?

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Very early on, basically, the Baseball Writers of America Association (BBWAA), the Hall voters, seemed to decide as a group that the MLB Hall of Fame was never going to be a place where any old Gino Cimoli could have a plaque.

Cimoli was a perfectly good MLB outfielder, once an All-Star, and a fairly important part of a World Series championship team, but the BBWA seemed very, very determined to make sure that the Cimolis of MLB would never slide into the Cooperstown shrine undeservedly.

After the first MLB Hall of Fame class was voted on in 1936, in fact, no one could foresee there would be a wait of more than a quarter-century for another first-ballot Hall of Famer.

After that year, no other MLB player was voted into the Hall in his first year for 26 years – until Bob Feller was eligible in 1962. This fact was partly obscured by the four, separate annual votes for the Hall before the first induction ceremony in 1939, as well as by the induction of executives and managers at the same time.

Of course, few likely gave any thought to the notion of first-ballot player inductees for quite a few years, but some eyebrows must have raised at the second-year crowd, those who followed Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, Honus Wagner, and Christy Mathewson.

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