Legendary Baseball Players in Awe of Fellow Hall of Famers

COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. — It’s the biggest event of Induction Weekend that no one on the outside ever gets to see. It arrives on that Sunday night, far from the induction stage …

When all the living Hall of Famers come to dinner.

And so often, when that moment arrives, the questions these men ask is not: What’s for dinner? It’s more like: What the heck am I even doing here?

“I’m going to say this,” new Hall of Famer Adrián Beltré admitted the next day, at the annual Hall of Fame roundtable. “I don’t think I belong here, because I idolized so many players here that I could not believe I was in the room that night, having dinner with those guys.

“We walked in, and you can see all those guys,” Beltré went on. “It’s like you’re in heaven, right?”

The awe he felt is still a thing, but not just for him. And that should tell us something, because the two legends who have spent the last four decades inspiring the most awe in that room are no longer with us.

Willie Mays first attended that dinner in 1979, when men like Earl Averill and Cool Papa Bell were sitting at those tables. Hank Aaron first joined him in 1982, at a time when he was still surrounded by a group that included Luke Appling and Bill Dickey.

From then on, at least one of those two icons was in attendance for nearly every one of those gatherings, from the late ’70s until the pandemic. And let’s just say that when Mays and Aaron were present, there was never any question about who in that room was considered true baseball royalty. Nearly everyone else was just a baseball player.

But now that they’re both gone, I found myself wondering about a fascinating question. When all the living Hall of Famers assemble now, who else in the room makes them feel the way Mays and Aaron once made them feel?

So I spent this Induction Weekend asking seven of them that question. Their answers ranged from names you would expect (Sandy Koufax, Johnny Bench, Mike Schmidt) to names I bet you’d never expect (stay tuned for those). Now I’ll let them tell you why some of their fellow Hall of Famers are not like all the others.

Mays and Aaron reign forever

Willie Mays and Henry Aaron will never walk through the doors of the grand Otesaga Hotel again. But memories of them are still so vivid, and they’re still the names that some of these men mentioned first.