The Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York will have its biggest induction class ever this year as a special committee elected 17 players and executives to join baseball's shrine.
The committee was formed to add more players from the Negro Leagues and pre-Negro League era as only 18 players from the Negro Leagues had been inducted prior to this year.
A total of 12 players and five executives were voted into the hall by the 39-person panel selected specifically for this occasion. The vote was secret.
Among those elected to the hall was Effa Manley who will become the first woman individually elected to the Hall of Fame.
Manley was the co-owner of the Newark Eagles for more than 10 years. Under Manley and her husband Abe, the Eagles won the Negro World Series in 1946. Manley also used the Eagles franchise to advance civil rights, holding events like 'Anti-Lynching Day' at the ballpark.
Ironically, Manley was white but married a black man and passed for black. She died in 1981 at the age of 84.
The 12 players selected by the committee include Mule Suttles, Biz Mackey, Ray Brown, Willard Brown, Andy Cooper, Cristobal Torriente, Jud Wilson, Frank Grant, Pete Hill, Jose Mendez, Louis Santop and Ben Taylor. The latter five were pre-Negro League players.
In addition to Manley, the executives chosen include Alex Pompez, Cum Posey, J.L. Wilkinson and Sol White.
Two players who were widely expected to be chosen but were not were Minnie Minoso and Buck O'Neil. They are also the only two living players voted on by the committee.
Minoso, 83, played for 17 big league seasons after his career in the Negro Leagues. He has a .298 career batting average and was a seven-time All-Star.
'I know that baseball fans have me in their own Hall of Fame -- the one in their hearts,' the 83-year-old Minoso told the Associated Press. 'That matters more to me than any official recognition. If it's meant to be, it's meant to be, and I am truly honored to be considered. I've given my life to baseball, and the game has given me so much.'
O'Neil, 94, hit .288 during his Negro League career. He was the star of Ken Burns film 'Baseball' which aired on PBS a decade ago. O'Neil was also the first African-American coach in the majors when he was hired by the Chicago Cubs and was instrumental in the building of the Negro League Museum in Kansas City.
Part of the project was exhaustive research to reclaim Negro League statistics, which were incomplete. Box scores of Negro League games between 1920 and 1954 were researched and compiled by more than 50 baseball historians and researchers.
'What we're proudest of is the broadening of knowledge,' Hall of Fame president Dale Petroskey said. 'When we started five years ago, we had 20 percent of the stats. We've got 90 percent of the stats now.'
The 17 new Hall of Famers will be inducted on July 30 in Cooperstown along with relief pitcher Bruce Sutter.
