Enter smiling

Rice's vote total was embarrassingly low (29.8 percent) in his first year of eligibility, but momentum grew, and he inched agonizingly close to Cooperstown. Yesterday, in his 15th and final year on the writers' ballot, Jim Ed Rice was elected to Baseball's Hall of Fame by a margin of eight votes. He was named on 412 of 539 ballots, pushing him to 76.4 percent, a shade over the required three-quarters.

And so the handoff is complete - Boston's left-field torch of immortality is passed. Ted Williams to Carl Yastrzemski to Jim Rice. Hub Hardball's Tinker to Evers to Chance. Three left fielders. Three Hall of Famers. One half-century.

Rice's reaction in his moment of glory?

"It's a big relief. It is over with, and I feel really good."

Rice's candidacy, in contrast to his career, was highly political in its final years. This player who despised the media became something of a press box lightning rod as his vote total grew.

In the slugger's early years of eligibility, there was a popular notion that scribes were punishing Rice for his lack of cooperation in his playing days. More recently, as he snared more votes, there was a backlash among new-age, basement-dwelling number crunchers who found flaws in Rice's résumé (always borderline by Cooperstown's lofty standards). The stat geeks sniffed at Rice's pedestrian on-base percentage (.352) and charged that his numbers were skewed because half his games were in hitter-friendly Fenway Park.

There was a touch of irony in the emergence of veteran writers as staunch supporters of the Rice candidacy. These were the same people with whom Rice famously clashed in the 1970s and '80s, the ones who supposedly didn't vote for him because he was a nasty interview. But the older writers had the benefit of being eyewitnesses. They watched Rice hit and saw the nightly fear in the visitors dugout at Fenway.

In the end, Rice was able to lurch across the finish line with the help of veteran Sox publicist Dick Bresciani, who carpet-bombed the electorate with data advocating the slugger's election. Rice got additional support from former Yankee closer Goose Gossage, a contemporary who was the only player elected last winter. The recent exposure of modern stars who artificially inflated their stats with steroids also advanced the case for Rice.