AMERICA AT LARGE:This year marked the first time in my 20 years voting that the result matched my own ballot, writes George Kimball

THIS PAST Tuesday morning, exactly one week before Barack Obama would be inaugurated as the 44th President of the United States, the Baseball Writers’ Association of America announced the annual tabulation of its Hall of Fame vote.

To the surprise of absolutely no one, Rickey Henderson, widely considered to have been the greatest lead-off hitter in the annals of the sport, was elected in his first year of eligibility, along with Jim Rice, whose name was on the ballot for the final time.

That a pair of African-American ball players would comprise the Class of 2009 in the year of Obama was considered wholly unremarkable. (It has happened before, and it will happen again.)

Unlike Henderson, who played for nine different teams (some of them more than once) over the course of 24 years spent in the big leagues, Rice played his entire 16-year career in Boston, in the employ of a team that had been the last in major league baseball to integrate. For several of those seasons, Jim Rice was the lone African-American on the Red Sox roster.

The election of Henderson was considered such a foregone conclusion that the only surprise was that it wasn’t unanimous. Rickey received 511 votes, or 94.8 per cent. (The 28 voters who left him off their ballots altogether were widely castigated as meatheads and worse yesterday morning.)

A significant corollary development was that for the third consecutive year, Mark McGwire was not elected.

In fact, in what has become an annual referendum on the subject of performance-enhancing drugs, McGwire’s vote total actually dropped to 118 this year, down from the 128 he had received in each of his two previous appearances on the ballot. (Whether 10 guys changed their minds or 10 McGwire supporters died in the past 12 months remains unlearned.)

Rice’s election, on the other hand, bore the trappings of an 11th-hour reprieve. This was his 15th year of eligibility, meaning that if he hadn’t been selected this year his name would have been dropped from the ballot, turning what had become an annual outrage into a permanent one.

Although his credentials have always been persuasive, the electorate was slow to warm to Rice. In 1995, the first year his name was on the ballot, he received just 137 votes, less than 30 per cent of those cast.

And while his showing had improved with each succeeding year, it was beginning to appear that he might run out of time.

The 380 votes he received in 2008, for instance, would have been more than enough for enshrinement three years earlier, but the size of the electorate had expanded to leave him short of the requisite 75 per cent. (Since members of the Baseball Writers’ Association require 10 years’ service before they are entrusted with a Hall of Fame vote, this meant that between 2005 and 2008, 27 new voters had been enfranchised, some of whom had never seen Jim Rice play).

Although for a solid decade he was the most feared slugger in the game, the reason most commonly offered for Rice’s 14-year exclusion was his rocky relationship with the Boston media in his playing days.

Having covered Rice’s entire baseball career, I think I can safely say he didn’t have a difficult relationship with the Boston media, though he might have had a difficult relationship with the Boston Globe.

In 1988, following a celebrated run-in with manager Joe Morgan (who had embarrassed the future Hall of Famer by sending the light-hitting Spike Owen up to bat in his place), the late Globe columnist Will McDonough was moved to write that: “There should be just one thing left in Boston for Jim Rice: the road out . . . The fact is, Jim Rice can’t play baseball anymore, and he knows it . . . Rice can’t run, throw, or field. Never could.”

Two years earlier, Rice had put his personal exclamation point on a heated clubhouse argument with Globe baseball writer Steve Fainaru by ripping the shirt off Fainaru’s back.

It wasn’t the smartest thing he ever did, but at least he didn’t belt him in the chops – and bear in mind that we’re talking about a guy who famously snapped a baseball bat in half just by checking his swing.

As further evidence of Rice’s “difficulty”, his detractors often cited his unseemly confrontation with Bill Crowley, the Red Sox’s long-time public relations director, who had taken umbrage when Rice made the mistake of parking his car in Crowley’s personal space before a spring training game in Florida.

Since his induction into Cooperstown comes in this, the year of Obama, it is probably worth taking note of the atmosphere into which Rice stepped as a rookie 30-odd years ago. The Red Sox didn’t field their first black player until 1959, a dozen years after Jackie Robinson had broken through the colour barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers, and when Rice reported for his first spring training a decade and a half later, it was in Polk County, Florida, a jurisdiction which still happily issued marching permits to the Ku Klux Klan.

Each spring Crowley, the team publicist, distributed “temporary membership” cards to the Winter Haven Elks Club. White players and coaches got them, black players (back then there were no black coaches) did not. The cards were, at Crowley’s discretion, also issued to most members of the media covering the team, but not to Larry Whiteside, an African-American reporter for the Globe. I never once set foot in the Winter Haven Elks Club, and neither, obviously, did Jim Rice.

But another episode involving Rice remains indelibly etched in memory. One evening, with friends in town, I’d phoned a popular local eatery to make a dinner reservation, only to he told that the restaurant didn’t take reservations for parties of less than eight, but would seat us on a first-come basis.

While our group waited at the bar for our table to open up, Jim Rice walked in with his wife and infant son. He was met at the front door by the manager, and the next thing I knew, he was headed back the car-park.

I raced outside to ask what had happened. Rice replied that the manager had told him he couldn’t get a table that night because he didn’t have a reservation.

Rice left with his family. When I went back inside and confronted the manager over what seemed an obvious lie, she attempted to claim that the real reason they had turned Rice away was that the small child would have disturbed the other diners, although one look around the premises revealed several children there with their children.

We walked out and never returned. When I spoke with Rice about the episode the next day, he asked me not to write about it. As a young ball player, he didn’t want to be the guy who rocked the boat. A few years later he might have reacted differently, but of course by then he was being described as “difficult.”

2009, by the way, marked the first time in my 20 years on the voting panel that the Hall of Fame result has precisely matched my ballot. I voted for Henderson, I didn’t vote for McGwire, and for the 15th year in a row, I voted for Rice. This time it counted.