Adrian Beltre, Joe Mauer lead iconic Hall class into induction

The only 2024 Baseball Hall of Fame inductee who did not get in on his first try on the ballot is Todd Helton.

Yet Adrian Beltre, Joe Mauer and Jim Leyland also took uniquely long and challenging paths to Cooperstown.

Beltre, Helton, Mauer and Leyland will join one of the most exclusive clubs in sports Sunday afternoon, when they are officially inducted into the Hall of Fame during ceremonies at the Clark Sports Center in the bucolic upstate New York town.

Beltre and Mauer were each elected in their first year of eligibility in voting conducted last December by the Baseball Writers' Association of America, while Helton made it on his sixth year on the ballot.

Leyland, who managed eight playoff teams in a 22-year career and won the World Series with the then-Florida Marlins in 1997, earned 15 of 16 votes cast by the Contemporary Baseball Era ballot in December.

Nobody has a better appreciation of the road to Cooperstown than Leyland, who was elected days before his 79th birthday and 59 years after he hit .204 in his first professional season with the Detroit Tigers.

Leyland, a catcher, hit .222 for his career and didn't get above Double-A before retiring in 1970 and immediately becoming a minor league manager in the Tigers' organization.

He reached the major leagues as a manager in 1986 with the Pittsburgh Pirates and won 1,769 games while filling out lineups for the Pirates (1986-96), Florida Marlins (1997-98), Colorado Rockies (1999) and Tigers (2006-13)

His win total as a manager is 18th-most all-time and he became one of 10 managers to win pennants in both leagues. The Leyland-led Marlins won the 1997 World Series, while the Tigers fell in the World Series in 2006 and 2012.

"I believe that the Hall of Fame is for players and I'm going in as a manager and that's different," Leyland said. "I always put the players first and I kind of feel like I'm kind of a tagalong."

Beltre ranks 18th all-time with 3,166 hits and received 95.1 percent of the BBWAA vote -- tied for the 17th-largest share all-time with original inductees Babe Ruth and Honus Wagner. Yet Beltre didn't hit the Hall of Fame fast track until ending his career by hitting .304 with 199 homers and 699 RBIs for the Rangers from 2011-18, in a span when he made three All-Star teams and finished top 15 in MVP voting six times.

Beltre batted .275 with 278 homers and 1,008 RBIs for the Los Angeles Dodgers, Seattle Mariners and Boston Red Sox from 1998 through 2010, a span in which he made one All-Star team and only earned MVP votes in his walk years with the Dodgers in 2004 and Red Sox in 2010.

Beltre joined the 3,000-hit club in 2017.

"At the time I was -- quote, unquote -- a contract-year guy," Beltre said in January. "I appreciated the fact that the Rangers gave me the chance to come to their ballpark and to this city and be a part of the great team that they already had."

Mauer is a career-long member of the Minnesota Twins who will become the first Hall of Famer born in the 1980s and the first to debut in the 2000s. He built the bulk of his Hall of Fame case as a catcher from 2004-13, when he hit .323 while winning three batting titles and one MVP.

Multiple concussions forced Mauer to move to first base full-time in 2014. He hit .278 with an OPS of .746 -- 5 percent above the league average -- over his final five seasons.

"I think through the process when you retire -- that five-year period of kind of really reflecting on the whole body of work -- I think was beneficial for me," Mauer said.

Helton, who played all 17 seasons with the Colorado Rockies, also got off to a sizzling start by hitting .332 from 1997-2007, while making five All-Star teams and leading the Rockies to the lone pennant in franchise history in 2007.

Helton battled back woes over his final six seasons, when he batted .279 with 66 home runs -- 17 more than he had in 2001 alone.

Like longtime teammate Larry Walker, who needed all 10 years on the ballot before being elected in 2020, Helton's candidacy may have suffered from a perception that his numbers were inflated by Coors Field. But his .865 road OPS is better than the career OPS of all but 82 Hall of Fame position players.

"For me to be good, I had to concentrate and focus 1,000 percent on every pitch of every game," Helton said. "By the end of a season, sure, I was physically tired. But mentally, I was beat just from focusing on every pitch."

--Field Level Media