The Hall of Fame Elects Its First Members

On January 29, 1936, the Baseball Writers' Association of America announced the results of the first Hall of Fame election. Five players received the required 75 percent of the vote: Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, Christy Mathewson, and Walter Johnson.

A total of 226 writers cast ballots. Cobb topped the list with 222 votes, 98.2 percent. Ruth and Wagner tied at 215 votes apiece, 95.1 percent. Mathewson received 205, and Johnson cleared the threshold with 189. No other candidate came close. Nap Lajoie finished sixth with 146 votes, well short of the 170 required.

The vote-counting committee, supervised by BBWAA secretary Henry Edwards, was startled to find that four writers had left Cobb off their ballots. Even more puzzling, eleven writers omitted Ruth, the most famous athlete in American life. Edwards later expressed disbelief that anyone could justify leaving Ruth off a ballot designed to identify the best players in the sport's history.

The election was part of a larger campaign organized by Ford Frick and Alexander Cleland to establish a permanent shrine in Cooperstown, New York. The village had embraced the Abner Doubleday creation myth, which held that baseball was invented there in 1839. Although that story has been thoroughly debunked by historians, Cooperstown's claim stuck, and plans for a museum moved forward.

The five original inductees were not formally enshrined until the museum opened on June 12, 1939. By that time, Mathewson had been dead for 14 years, having succumbed to tuberculosis contracted during a gas exposure in World War I.