COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. -- When Vladimir Guerrero and five others are inducted into the Baseball Hall Of Fame on Sunday, they'll find out just how they'll be remembered on their small bronze plaque marking baseball's best.
What they may not know is just how much care went into crafting the handful of words aimed at summarizing a lifetime of on-field accolades.
In keeping with the traditions of the game, putting together what's finally etched on the bronze plaque is very much a team effort, says Jon Shestakofsky, vice-president of communications and education at the National Baseball Hall Of Fame.
"Usually, we're looking at about 85 to 90 words in length (excluding the player's teams) and that's really tough," Shestakofsky says. "Trying to sum up their entire career and what makes them special and worthy of this honour in that number of words is a very difficult task and it's one we take very seriously."
A small group, including Hall library and communications staff, work collaboratively on each blurb, which has to boil down a career that often spans more than 20 years.
"The idea is to create something that's timeless so that 50 or 100 years from now, someone could walk into the plaque gallery, look at someone's plaque, whether it's Tim Raines or Vlad Guerrero, and see their image, read their text and get a great feel for what they did and why they are special to baseball's history," Shestakofsky says.
It begins as soon as the Hall Of Fame ballot results are announced in mid-January. That triggers a process that typically includes multiple drafts and edits as well as gathering images for the sculptor.
It is sent to Matthews International, a Pittsburgh-based firm that creates the final product and returns them to the Hall in April to allow time for quality control.
While there's no set writing style, Shestakofsky said they try to be consistent in their use of language.
"If you look at a number of plaques from the same era, you'll see consistency in terms of sentence structures and the type of information provided," he said.
In rare instances, plaques are changed. A sign in the plaque gallery makes clear they are written using statistics available at the time they are created.
Shestakofsky recalled two occasions where plaques had to be fixed for factual reasons.
In one case, Pittsburgh Pirates great Roberto Clemente's had to be fixed to change his listed name from Roberto Walker Clemente to his actual name of Roberto Clemente Walker.
Another involved Jackie Robinson, who had insisted he be considered for acceptance only on his accomplishments as a player.
"But it started to be understood that you can't really tell the whole story of what Jackie meant to the game without mentioning breaking the colour barrier and the courage he demonstrated on the field," Shestakofsky said.
So, after consulting with the Robinson family, the plaque was slightly changed in 2008 to reflect some of that contribution.
Shestakofsky said looking at the older plaques can reveal the evolution in the game. At a time when statistics weren't as readily available, entries included more descriptive phrases rather than in-depth numbers.
"But you can see differences in how players and Hall of Famers are described over the years and that kind of goes back to tell the story about how the game is consumed now in a much different way than in 1939 when we first opened our doors," he said.
