COOPERSTOWN, NY -- Jim Thome dreamed of this moment years and years ago. As a wide-eyed, baseball crazed youngster living on South Crest Drive in Peoria, Illinois, he would take rocks from the Thome gravel driveway and whack them across the street with an aluminum bat.
For hours and hours, day after day, he pretended he was a real major leaguer, blasting tape-measured home runs in huge stadiums all over America.
Little Jim hit so many rocks that his dad, Chuck, had to go out and buy more of them to fill his barren driveway. Mr. Thome also had to pay the piper for the damage his son was making to the neighbor’s house across the street.
“I paid for that garage seven times for putting in new windows,” Chuck Thome said laughing.
Thome brought up this early baseball obsession of his at the very beginning of his Hall of Fame induction speech here on Sunday. His childhood fantasy came true. 612 home runs later, Thome made it into Cooperstown.
But he never forgot where the dream began.
“Even though Peoria is 900 miles away from Cooperstown, the history of baseball was never far from my childhood, because it lived in my imagination,” Thome said on the stage in front of 53,000 fans, the second largest crowd in Hall of Fame induction history. “It was very much like the field of dreams where I had a little league uniform on and I got to play alongside Musial, Mays, Ernie Banks, and Ruth, and every game went into extra innings. It’s the same dream every kid has of one day getting to the big leagues.”
After getting the phone call from the Hall of Fame in January, Thome and his wife Andrea visited the museum in Cooperstown in February. It was during that trip that the significance of the moment had finally sunk in. It was the first time Thome entered the building knowing he was a Hall of Famer. He saw the plaques on the wall, and fully grasped what it all meant.
“Reading names like Hornsby, Foxx, Killebrew, Mantle and Jackie Robinson gave me the chills because in that moment, I recognized that the dream I had as a little boy growing up in Peoria did not live in my head, it lived in my heart.”
During his 22-year playing career, Thome touched the lives of countless people. You could tell from all the different Thome jerseys worn by fans walking down Main Street in Cooperstown. There were also many of his former teammates who made the trek to this remote town in upstate New York to honor one of the most respected baseball players of all-time.
“A great teammate, a great person. That’s why I think there’s a lot of people here supporting him. I’m one of them,” said Paul Konerko, who came to Cooperstown with his son. “You don’t just hop on a plane across the country for everybody. Jim is one of those guys who definitely left his mark on me and a lot of people. I wanted to be here and bring my son to see him go in.”
When Konerko was a free agent after the 2005 championship season, what helped him make the decision to return to Chicago was the White Sox trading for Thome that offseason. Konerko got the opportunity to play with and bat behind one of the greatest sluggers of his generation.
Konerko might not have enough hits and home runs to make it into Cooperstown himself, but in a way, he believes that a piece of him made it into the Hall with him.
“That’s the beauty of Jim, knowing Jim and the person he is, you kind of feel like you’re going in too. I’ll take it. That’s enough for me,” Konerko said.
If he wasn’t managing the Class-A Winston-Salem Dash, Thome’s former Indians teammate Omar Vizquel probably would have been here, too. While there might come a day when the All-Star shortstop becomes a Hall of Famer himself, Vizquel looks at Thome as a beacon to the game of baseball, a special player that is tough to duplicate, but needs to be.
“It’s very hard to find guys like Jim Thome in this game, especially now,” Vizquel said. “He’s a guy who’s so humble and down to earth. Every day is the same day. It doesn’t matter if he went 5 for 5 or struck out five times. He’s still going to treat you with respect and give you a smile that everybody loves. You have to have guys like Jim Thome more in this game. I’m so glad and so lucky to have him as a teammate in those good days in Cleveland.”
Towards the end of his Hall of Fame speech, Thome shared some advice to any child who was watching. They are words we adults can follow as well. It helped pave the way for Thome from Peoria to Cooperstown, shaped him as an adult and ultimately made him the player and person he became.
“Take it one moment at a time. Don’t sail too high or sink too low,” Thome said. “Learn to be good at handling failure. Be the first one to the ballpark and the last one to leave. Work hard, don’t complain. Be a great teammate, ask other people about themselves, you never know what you might learn. And above all treat people with respect.”
No one respected the game of baseball more than Jim Thome. His dream became a reality. He’ll be in the Hall of Fame forever.