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Beltrán Honored by First Ballot Selection to EWB Hall of Fame Tuesday, January 2nd, 2024 How do you get to the Earl Weaver Baseball League Hall of Fame? Just hit 500 homers, get 3000 hits, win 300 games or perhaps just save 300 games. Not an easy task, is it? But occasionally it does happen -- it happened to the gifted first baseman Juan Beltrán, who retired at the age of 41. Juan Beltrán was recently inducted into the coveted shrine of hardball heroes by the Baseball Writers Association. Beltrán was always a favorite of the beat writers -- always quick with a quip and always willing to talk about the game -- but that's not why he got elected to the Hall of Fame. Beltrán played a pretty good brand of baseball, too. He played in 2761 games, had 3444 hits, 632 home runs, 2054 RBIs and scored 1708 runs while batting .307 in his career. Reminiscing about his life in baseball, Beltrán said it all began by hitting grand slam homers in the last of the ninth in his backyard and ended up in the Hall of Fame. "It was quite a trip. I can't believe they pay us money to play a kid's game. Thank goodness, I was good at it. I only got a high school education and I had to cheat to get that. Who knows what I would have done without baseball? I was just a poor old country boy. For the longest time I even thought the last words of the national anthem were 'play ball.'" |
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