The First Five: Baseball's Original Immortals

On January 29, 1936, a group of baseball writers sat down with a ballot unlike any that had ever existed. Their assignment: choose the greatest baseball players of all time — the first class of a Hall of Fame that existed, so far, only as an idea. Nobody had ever voted on immortality before. The bar was set high: a player needed to appear on 75 percent of the ballots, 170 of the 226 cast, to be enshrined.

When the votes were counted, five names had cleared it. Ty Cobb led with 222 votes — the fiercest competitor of the dead-ball era, a man who played every game as if it were personal. Babe Ruth and Honus Wagner tied at 215 apiece: Ruth, the mighty slugger who had reinvented the home run and made baseball the national pastime's loudest show; Wagner, the peerless shortstop whom even Cobb called the greatest. Christy Mathewson drew 205 and Walter Johnson 189 — the two pitching giants of the age, gentlemen on the mound and terrors to batters.

It was a remarkable consensus. The writers — members of the Baseball Writers' Association of America, the men who covered the game daily — had been asked to judge across eras, comparing players they had seen with legends they knew only from box scores and stories. That five men stood so clearly above the rest, on the very first try, says something about how large those five loomed in the game's imagination.

There was not yet a building to put them in. The Hall of Fame was the project of Stephen Carlton Clark, heir to the Singer sewing-machine fortune, who wanted to draw tourists to Cooperstown, New York, a village battered by the Depression — a site chosen with the help of the now-debunked legend that Abner Doubleday had invented baseball there in the 1830s. Clark's handsome brick museum would not be dedicated until June 12, 1939, when the first five — along with the other early electees — were finally inducted in a ceremony on a small-town ballfield.

But the arguments started immediately, and they have never stopped. Who belongs? Who was overlooked? Every barroom debate about baseball greatness — every argument over statistics, character, and era — descends in a straight line from that first ballot. The Hall of Fame did not just honor five players; it invented a new American pastime: arguing about immortality.

That is the real legacy of January 29, 1936. Every sports hall of fame built since, in every sport, follows the template those writers created: the ballot, the threshold, the announcement, the endless debate. Immortality, it turns out, was something you could vote on — and baseball voted first.

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