Former Minnesota Twins catcher Joe Mauer was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame on Wednesday night as he earned 76.1 percent of the vote.
Mauer joins Adrian Beltre in this year's class as guys who are going into the Hall on the first ballot. They will be going into Cooperstown alongside manager Jim Leyland and former Colorado Rockies' first baseman Todd Helton. For Helton, it was his sixth year on the ballot.
In Mauer's case, his election into the Baseball Hall of Fame puts him into a very specific class of sports history.
Per @OptaSTATS on social media:
Joe Mauer of the @Twins is the first player in MLB/NBA/NFL/NHL history to be drafted No. 1 overall by a team from his birth state/province, play 15+ seasons for that team and reach the Hall of Fame.
Mauer, who was born in St. Paul, played for the Twins from 2004-2018. It's been a banner calendar year for Mauer, as was also elected into the Twins' Hall of Fame this past summer.
He was a lifetime .306 hitter with 143 home runs. He was named an All-Star six times, won three Gold Gloves, three batting titles and an MVP award. He paired with Justin Morneau and Johan Santana to make one of the best trios in organizational history.
He also got to the playoffs four times with the Twins, appearing in postseasons in 2006, 2009, 2010 and 2017. The Twins were knocked out by the Yankees in three of those four years, losing to Oakland in the other.
More must-reads: