Jim Thome

Jim Thome hit a baseball as hard and as far as anyone of his generation, 612 home runs in all, and somehow finished his career as the most universally liked man in the sport. He pointed his bat at the pitcher before every swing, a gesture borrowed from a movie, and then drove the ball into the upper decks with a left-handed uppercut built for power. He holds the record for walk-off home runs and never once drew a whiff of the suspicion that clouded his slugging peers. The BBWAA elected him to the Hall of Fame in 2018, on the first ballot.

Peoria

Thome was born on August 27, 1970, in Peoria, Illinois, into a blue-collar family, his father a foreman at the Caterpillar plant and the whole clan steeped in ball. He was no prospect out of the gate, a 13th-round pick of the Cleveland Indians in 1989 who had to hit his way out of every doubt. The hitting coach Charlie Manuel took him on and gave him the trademark that fans would remember, the bat held out toward the pitcher between pitches, a move Manuel had drawn from Roy Hobbs in The Natural. Thome reached the majors in 1991 and turned the gesture and the swing into one of the great power careers in history.

The Cleveland Powerhouse

Thome came up as a third baseman and moved across the diamond to first in 1997, but the position was never the point, the bat was. He anchored the Cleveland teams of the 1990s alongside Manny Ramírez, Albert Belle, and Omar Vizquel, a lineup that pounded its way to two American League pennants. The 1995 club reached the World Series and lost to the Braves, and the 1997 club took the Marlins to a seventh game before falling, and Thome hit in the middle of all of it. He left 337 home runs behind in Cleveland and a city that never stopped claiming him as its own.

The Walk-Off King

No one ended games like Thome did. He hit 13 walk-off home runs in his career, the most in major league history, passing a record that had stood at 12 and been shared by Jimmie Foxx, Mickey Mantle, Babe Ruth, Stan Musial, and Frank Robinson. The biggest of them came on September 16, 2007, when his 500th career home run came as a walk-off against the Angels, making him the only player to reach the milestone with a game-ending swing. He had a flair for the last at-bat, the rare slugger whose drama matched his power, and the number that captures it stands at the top of the list alone.

A Journeyman's Long Climb

After 2002 Thome signed a six-year, $85 million deal with Philadelphia and kept hitting, then became a traveling slugger in his late thirties, suiting up for the White Sox, the Dodgers, the Twins, and a return to Cleveland. He reached 600 home runs with Minnesota on August 15, 2011, hitting numbers 599 and 600 in the same game, the first player ever to do that. He finished with 612, eighth on the all-time list when he walked away, along with a .402 on-base percentage, 1,747 walks, and 1,699 runs batted in. The patience was as real as the power, and the strikeouts that came with it, 2,548 of them, were the price of a swing that never compromised.

The Nicest Man in Baseball

For all the violence in his swing, Thome was known across the game for gentleness, a giant who signed every autograph and thanked every clubhouse attendant by name. He raised more than 200,000 dollars for the children's hospital in his hometown, won the Roberto Clemente Award in 2002 for his community work, and never once surfaced in the steroid investigations that swept up so many sluggers of his era. He played 22 seasons and made enemies of nobody, a reputation as spotless as his power numbers were loud. The respect he earned off the field traveled with him into Cooperstown.

Power Without the Hardware

Thome's career carried a quiet irony, that a man with 612 home runs collected very little individual silver. He made only five All-Star teams and never finished higher than fourth in a Most Valuable Player vote, the byproduct of playing in an era stacked with inflated numbers and of a quiet temperament that drew no spotlight. He won a Comeback Player of the Year award in 2006 and a Silver Slugger a decade earlier, and that was nearly the whole trophy case. The recognition that eluded him season by season arrived all at once at the end.

Cooperstown and the Block C

The writers elected Thome in 2018 on the first ballot with 89.8 percent of the vote, in the class with Chipper Jones, Vladimir Guerrero, and Trevor Hoffman. He chose to enter wearing a Cleveland cap, and he asked that it carry the plain Block C rather than the Chief Wahoo logo, making his the first plaque under the Hall's move away from the old emblem. Cleveland had already built him a statue outside the ballpark, frozen in the bat-pointing stance that fans knew by heart. The 13th-round pick who had to prove himself at every stop finished among the greatest power hitters the game has known.