Jim Rice embraces Hall of Fame honor with open arms

Red Sox great Jim Rice could not be more ecstatic after making the Hall of Fame in his last year of eligibility. AP

For 15 years Jim Rice had been plagued by the description "borderline Hall of Famer," but a day after he shed the first word of that title, he became something far more unexpected: borderline gregarious.

The longtime Red Sox left fielder showed a new side of himself when he appeared alongside fellow Hall of Fame inductee Rickey Henderson at Tuesday afternoon's press conference at New York's Waldorf Astoria hotel. Rice was content to let the day be what it was supposed to be, a celebration, as he took the high road when asked about waiting until his final year of eligibility on the writers' ballot.

When Henderson answered a question about getting more hits by knocking balls off Fenway Park's Green Monster, Rice rolled his eyes and then interrupted.

"What Rickey's trying to say is that any ball he hit to left field, he was only going to get a single," Rice said with a laugh, leaving unsaid his skill at playing the carom off the wall. (Henderson, of course, took the bait and dutifully replied, "A single is all I really wanted to hit, because I could get to third base.")

At another moment Rice took a jab at the Yankees, referring to owner George Steinbrenner "trying to buy every free agent."

It was a markedly more amiable side to Rice than he usually showed to the baseball writers, a rocky relationship that perhaps led to his long wait for Hall election. But in his opening comments on Tuesday, Rice said he was "happy" and "honored" to have been selected and even showed gratitude to the press, saying, "I appreciate all the writers who voted for me."

Several times, particularly in smaller groups after the main Q&A sessions, the reporters on hand tried to prod Rice into admitting that his frosty relationship with the members of the Baseball Writers Association of America (the main voting body for the Hall of Fame) may have prolonged his period of waiting. But Rice wouldn't take the bait.

"That's over with," he said. "I don't wonder about that."

Pressed further by one microphone-wielding radio interviewer, Rice strongly refuted the theory.

"You don't know anything about me and the press," he said. "You're going by hearsay. Do you actually know?" When the reporter faltered, Rice interrupted him, "Case closed, next question."

Rice also wouldn't let himself get dragged into a steroids debate. Sure, he acknowledged that recent revelations about performance-enhancing drugs made his pre-juiced era power numbers look better, but he otherwise declined to address the issue of whether players who have taken steroids were Hall worthy. At one point he reached his left arm around Henderson and proclaimed, "Here are two guys who have never been on steroids."

Case closed, next question.