COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. – Every member of the National Baseball Hall of Fame gets the same canvas: A plaque measuring 15½ inches by 10¾ inches, with a portrait and a precious few lines of text. The words are timeless tributes in bronze, definitive descriptions of greatness meant to last.
“It is very hard, when you’re talking about what these people have done, to sum up an entire career in 80 to 100 words,” said Josh Rawitch, the president of the Hall of Fame, which will induct five new members on Sunday. “It has definitely become a very important part of what we do, trying to tie that up neatly because we know it will last forever.”
The plaque gallery is hallowed space for visitors, but for those who work there, it is also a passageway from the library atrium to the main offices. Multiple times a week, on his way from here to there, Rawitch will pause on that brisk walk, stop at one plaque and study it.
There are 346 now, plus the bases for this year’s class: Dick Allen, Dave Parker, CC Sabathia, Ichiro Suzuki and Billy Wagner. It’s a lot to know, and Rawitch, a longtime team executive who took the Hall job in 2021, is naturally curious. He’s also a former writer – two years covering teams for MLB.com – who appreciates the challenge of posting for posterity.
“Todd Helton was the first time we put OPS on there,” Rawitch said, referring to the Colorado Rockies first baseman inducted last summer. “And I remember the conversation where we were discussing: has this statistic become significant enough that people don’t need an explanation of it? And it has. So I think as stats become more widely accepted, it becomes easier to put something on a plaque as opposed to having to try to explain to somebody what OPS means.”
Todd Helton’s plaque, one of Cooperstown’s newest, reflected an evolution in how certain statistics are considered. (Tyler Kepner / The Athletic)
On-base plus slugging percentage is essential to Helton’s story; he fell short of traditional benchmarks like 3,000 hits and 500 homers, but ranks among the top 25 in history in OPS. In the Hall’s judgment, that term can stand alone.
This wasn’t the case at the other end of the gallery, where you’ll find Cy Young. Elected in 1937 and inducted in the first ceremony in 1939, Young worked a record 7,356 innings but merits just 33 words on his plaque. One line is spent on a rather elementary definition:
“Pitched Perfect Game May 5, 1904, No Opposing Batsman Reaching First Base.”
Surely by the 1990s, fans wouldn’t need such reminders of baseball basics, right? Well, consider Mike Schmidt’s plaque, from 1995. It ends by noting that he won 10 Gold Gloves “for fielding excellence.”
Mike Schmidt’s plaque went on the wall in Cooperstown in 1995. (Tyler Kepner / The Athletic)
Schmidt’s plaque happens to be positioned directly below that of Steve Carlton, his teammate for many years in Philadelphia. Likewise, Tom Glavine is directly beneath Bobby Cox, his manager in Atlanta, and beside Greg Maddux, his fellow Braves starter.
Tom Glavine’s and Greg Maddux’s side-by-side plaques in Cooperstown. (Tyler Kepner / The Athletic)
The gallery is full of charming quirks like that: “Smiling” Mickey Welch is not smiling; Ernie Lombardi – said to have used an “interlocking golf grip” on his bat – is smartly depicted with his hands up near his chin. And check out Robin Yount’s cap: the Brewers’ clever logo faked out the sculptor, who missed the “m” hidden in the ball-in-glove emblem.
Keen observers will notice that Robin Yount’s cap doesn’t exactly match the Brewers’ M and B glove logo. (Tyler Kepner / The Athletic)
The early plaques offer a solution to the more modern problem of cap selection. Several inductees who starred in more than one spot – Catfish Hunter, Maddux, Roy Halladay, Mike Mussina, Fred McGriff and others – are shown with a blank cap, an unfortunate workaround, since they never actually wore that style. A better idea would be no cap at all, like Mel Ott, a career Giant who shows off his wavy locks, or dapper Hugh Duffy, who mainly played for the “Boston Nationals.”
Duffy is credited with only one specific feat, but it’s something else: a .438 average (now recorded as .440) in 1894 that “was not to be challenged in his lifetime.” Several other plaques highlight a single, herculean achievement: Old Hoss Radbourn pitching the final 27 games of the 1884 season for Providence, Harry Wright hitting “7 home runs in game at Newport, KY. in 1867,” and so on.
Then again, perhaps even more plaques boast of quaint accomplishments:
– Tommy McCarthy is called a “pioneer in trapping fly balls in the outfield.” (Isn’t that illegal?)
– Bobby Wallace is cited for handling 17 chances, an A.L. record for a shortstop, on June 10, 1902.
– Sandy Koufax’s plaque says nothing about his breathtaking World Series performances, but Johnny Evers’ shared record for “making most singles in four game World Series” is immortalized in bronze.
– Connie Mack “received the Bok Award in Philadelphia for 1929.” What’s that? It’s a local community-service prize (I’m a Philly native, but I still had to look it up) and it consumes one of just three sentences describing baseball’s most enduring manager.
It’s alternately fascinating and baffling. Take Pie Traynor, a third baseman whose legacy should need no embellishment. A career .320 hitter who drove in 100 runs seven times, Traynor is hailed as “one of few players ever to make 200 or more hits during a season, collecting 208 in 1923.” But 200-hit seasons were hardly rare – 10 players did it in 1923 alone.
Then there’s Joe DiMaggio. He did a lot of memorable things, didn’t he? Yet two of his six sentences cover rather mundane feats for a player of his stature: “Hit 2 home-runs in one inning, 1936. Hit 3 home-runs in one game (3 times).” Wow.
DiMaggio had memorable nicknames – “Joltin’ Joe” and “The Yankee Clipper” – but you won’t find them on his plaque. Nor will you find “Lefty” for Robert Moses Grove, “Red” for Urban Clarence Faber or “Heinie” for Henry Emmet Manush. James E. Foxx is called “Jimmy,” not “Jimmie,” as he was known, or “Beast,” a truly underrated and fitting monicker.
Nicknames seem to pop up everywhere else, though – and, man, are they weird. Joe “Ducky” Medwick, a Triple Crown winner, is called “Ducky Wucky” in bronze. Dave Bancroft (a four-time league leader in putouts at shortstop!) is “Beauty,” Jake Beckley, who never led the league in walks, is “Old Eagle Eye.”
Ducky Medwick’s and Kiki Cuyler’s full legal names were displayed on their plaques before their more famous nicknames. (Tyler Kepner / The Athletic)
More recently, players’ nickname lines display the shortened version of their formal names. Michael Joseph Piazza was known as “Mike.” James Edward Rice went by “Jim.” And Joseph Paul Torre? They called him “Joe.”
A couple of decades ago, though, “Rodney Cline Carew” stood on its own. So did “George Thomas Seaver,” “Robert Gibson” and so on. Rawitch isn’t sure how the current style came about.
“You want the full name on there,” he guessed, “but you also want people to be able to go back and know what they were actually called when they were playing.”
It’s haphazard, to be sure. But, given the consistent look of the plaques from the very beginning, it’s a sweeping evolution hiding in plain sight. Around the mid-1980s, roughly, the wording became more descriptive, illuminating not only what the players did, but how.
Call it the era of adjectives. And in baseball, there are only so many to go around.
Clutch: All of these players (and possibly more) are described as “clutch” – Richie Ashburn, Harold Baines, Jim Bottomley, George Brett, Bobby Doerr, Paul Molitor, David Ortiz, Tony Perez, Billy Williams and even Tony Lazzeri, even though Grover Cleveland Alexander’s plaque, across the room, devotes half of its space to “striking out Lazzeri with bases full in final crisis at Yankee Stadium” in 1926. (Side note: it was not the “final crisis” for Alexander and the Cardinals in Game 7. The Lazzeri strikeout came in the seventh inning of a game that actually ended with Babe Ruth being caught stealing! Truth is strange.)
Intense: Brett showed “ceaseless intensity,” while Carl Yastrzemski displayed “graceful intensity.” Jack Morris was an “intense competitor,” like Dick Williams, while Earl Weaver managed “with intensity.”
Quiet: If you didn’t say much, that’s definitely worth celebrating. Walter Alston and Billy Williams are both “soft-spoken” (the first words on their plaques), while Doerr was a “quiet leader,” Lazzeri showed “quiet proficiency,” Ryne Sandberg practiced “quiet leadership,” Hilton Smith was “quiet but confident” and Bill Mazeroski had a “quiet work ethic.”
Competitor: By definition, everyone who competes in a game is a competitor. You’re really special, though, if you’re called a competitor on your plaque, like Carlton, Morris, Jim Palmer, Gaylord Perry, Nolan Ryan, Dick Williams and Jud Wilson.
Intimidate: Really great players might scare the opposition. All of these folks are cited for intimidation – Jim Bunning, Don Drysdale, Goose Gossage, Randy Johnson, Ryan, Willie Stargell and Dave Winfield.
Respect: Lots and lots of Hall of Famers are respected. It’s part of the deal. But when you’re an umpire, well, it’s virtually required. You’ll find that all of these arbiters commanded respect: Al Barlick, Nestor Chylak, Jocko Conlan, Cal Hubbard, Bill McGowan and Hank O’Day.
The handful of Hall staffers who draft and edit the wording are aware of all this.
“Really you don’t want to just repeat the same words for every single guy,” Rawitch said. “So part of the challenge for the team here is to figure out: how do you say it without sounding very much like someone else who has similar statistics?”
That effort is reflected in the array of different, lively descriptions of pitch types. In the last 20 years or so, the tired, repetitive language has given way to all of these punchier descriptors:
“Bat-shattering” (Lee Smith), “blistering” (Roy Halladay), “confounding” (Pedro Martinez), “crackling” (Randy Johnson), “exploding” (Gossage), “mystifying” (Trevor Hoffman) – and, perhaps the best, “cruel and knee-buckling” (Bert Blyleven).
Only three plaques, by Rawitch’s count, have ever been changed: Jackie Robinson’s, to reflect his larger impact; Bob Feller’s, to correct an error in his years of service, which were interrupted by World War II; and Roberto Clemente’s, to properly order his name (it’s “Roberto Clemente Walker,” not “Roberto Walker Clemente”).
Mostly, though, the words you see in 2025 will be the same as you’ll see in 2125. There’s always more to the story – in the museum, in the library, on your phone – and some plaques, like Carl Hubbell’s, invite you to do your own research.
Carl Hubbell is remembered as a ‘holder of many records’ on his Hall of Fame plaque. (Tyler Kepner / The Athletic)
But on baseball’s most sacred ground, brevity is forever.
(Top photo of the HOF Class of 2024 (from left) Jim Leyland, Adrián Beltré, Todd Helton and Joe Mauer: Jim McIsaac / Getty Images)
