The First Hall of Fame Class of 1936: Five Men and a Shrine in Cooperstown
Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, Christy Mathewson and Walter Johnson were the first five elected to the Hall of Fame in 1936. This article covers how they were chosen, what their careers looked like, and why they set the standard.
In early 1936 the first ballots in the history of the Baseball Hall of Fame were counted, and five names came out on top: Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, Christy Mathewson and Walter Johnson. There was no building to put them in yet. The museum in Cooperstown, New York, would not open until 1939, and the plaques that now line its gallery were not yet cast. What existed in 1936 was an idea, a method for choosing, and a short list of men whom nearly everyone in the sport agreed belonged at the top.
The five were a deliberate sample of the first generation of modern baseball. Cobb was the hitter who set the standard for batting average. Wagner was the shortstop who made the position a power spot. Mathewson and Johnson were the two best pitchers of the dead-ball years, and Ruth was the one player who made the dead-ball years end. Four were still living in 1936; Mathewson had died in 1925. The class set a pattern that still shapes the museum: it honors a handful of players at a time, and it measures new candidates against the first five.
This article explains how the election worked, who the five were, what the historical record says about each, and what the class shows about how baseball chose to remember itself. To see how the voting process works today, read how Hall of Fame voting works and the long-running debates over who belongs.
Why Cooperstown, and why 1936
The Hall of Fame exists because of a story, a collector and a centennial. The story was that Abner Doubleday had invented baseball at Cooperstown in 1839, a claim that came from a commission of 1907 and has been rejected by historians ever since. The collector was Stephen C. Clark, a Cooperstown resident and heir to a large fortune, who helped build a baseball museum in the village in the late 1930s. The centennial was 1939, one hundred years after the supposed invention, which made 1939 the date the village wanted for opening. The museum opened its doors on June 12, 1939.
Baseball officials saw the value of an election before the building was ready. Ford Frick, then president of the National League, is often credited with pushing the idea of a Hall of Fame that would choose its members by vote. A shrine without members was a building, but a shrine with a roster of the greats gave the sport something to promote. So the election came first. The first inductees were named in 1936, and the group was formally honored when the museum opened three years later.
When the doors opened on June 12, 1939, living members of the early classes gathered in the village for the dedication, and the photographs of Ruth, Cobb, Wagner and Johnson together are some of the best-known images in the sport's history. That sequence is part of why the class matters. The Hall of Fame was never a purely historical project. It was also a promotional effort, started in the middle of the Depression, and it chose first members whose names every fan would recognize.
How the first election worked
In 1936 two groups voted. The Baseball Writers' Association of America, whose members covered the major leagues, voted on players of the twentieth century. A separate committee of veterans was supposed to consider the nineteenth century. In the first year the committee did not name any inductees, and its first selections came later.
The writers' rule was simple: a candidate needed votes on 75 percent of the ballots cast. That threshold has not changed in the ninety years since. About 226 writers returned ballots in 1936, which put the requirement at 170 votes. The five who cleared it did so by wide margins. Cobb received 222 votes, the most, which is about 98 percent. Ruth and Wagner each received 215. Mathewson received 205. Johnson received 189, comfortably above the line.
The vote also left out several famous players, and their absence was part of the story. Napoleon Lajoie, Tris Speaker and Cy Young all received substantial support but finished short of 75 percent. All three were elected the following year. In 1936 the electorate took a deliberately narrow view of whom to honor first.
Today the BBWAA still votes on a ballot of players who retired a number of years ago, the 75 percent rule still applies, and committees review players and executives whom the writers passed over. The details have shifted a good deal over the decades, so check the Hall's own site, baseballhall.org, for the current rules.
Ty Cobb: the hitter
Cobb received the most votes of the five, and the historical record shows why. He played 3,035 games between 1905 and 1928, mostly with Detroit, and collected 4,189 hits, a career batting average of .366 and 896 stolen bases. His best season was 1911, when he hit .420 with 248 hits and 127 RBI. No player had more hits than Cobb when he retired, and his record stood until Pete Rose passed it in 1985.
The context shapes the numbers. Cobb played in the dead-ball era, when a single baseball was used for most of a game, the ball was soft, and home runs were rare. Cobb himself hit only 117 in his career. He won by hitting the ball where fielders were not, running aggressively, and making pitchers uncomfortable. The legend that he sharpened his spikes to injure infielders is the best-known story about him, but historians have disputed how much of his reputation for violence was fact and how much was invented by later writers, so it is better to say his play was aggressive and leave the legends alone. For a modern look at the gear involved, see baseball cleats, helmets and protective gear.
Most readers will remember him as the benchmark for hitting for average. When a modern hitter flirts with .400, the comparison is with Cobb's 1911.
Babe Ruth: the one who changed the game
Ruth is the most famous baseball player in history, and his historical line shows two careers in one. As a pitcher with the Boston Red Sox he went 94-46 with a 2.28 ERA, including 23-12 with a 1.75 ERA in 1916 and 24-13 with a 2.01 ERA in 1917. As a hitter he finished with 714 home runs, a .342 average, a .474 on-base percentage and a .690 slugging average, the last two among the best figures ever recorded. He also walked 2,062 times.
His effect on the sport was in the way it was played. In 1919, his last year in Boston, Ruth hit 29 home runs. After he was sold to the New York Yankees, he hit 54 in 1920, and the historical data shows him with 172 hits and a .376 average that year. In 1927 he hit 60. The numbers were so far above the norm that other players began to swing for the fences. The home run, which had been a curiosity, became the central weapon in the sport. This is the reason his plaque and the others in the first class have the same standing: Cobb showed what the old game could do at its best, and Ruth made a new one.
The Yankees, whom Ruth helped turn into the sport's most famous franchise, began a four-year run of titles in the year the Hall chose him; the story is in the Yankees dynasties article. Ruth had played his last game in 1935 and died in 1948.
Honus Wagner: the shortstop
Wagner played from 1897 to 1917, most of those years for Pittsburgh. He collected 3,420 hits, hit .328, stole 723 bases, and played shortstop at a time when the position was usually a place for a good glove and little hitting. He won eight National League batting championships. The historical data shows his best years early in the century: .381 in 1900, .353 in 1901, .355 in 1903.
He was nicknamed "The Flying Dutchman," and at 62 years of age in 1936 (he was born in 1874) he was the oldest of the living inductees. A tobacco card issued around 1909 with his image has since become one of the most valuable baseball cards in the world; the story of why so few were printed is much argued, and we do not repeat it here. For readers interested in cards and memorabilia, the cards and memorabilia topic page collects current news.
Wagner and Cobb met in the 1909 World Series, when Pittsburgh beat Detroit in seven games. It was the only time the two stars met in a World Series.
Christy Mathewson and Walter Johnson: the two pitchers
Mathewson pitched for the New York Giants from 1900 through 1916, with a final appearance for Cincinnati. He won 373 games and lost 188, with a 2.13 ERA and 79 shutouts. In 1905 he went 31-9 with a 1.28 ERA, and he pitched three shutouts in six days in the World Series against the Philadelphia Athletics. He was admired as a college man and a gentleman in an era when ballplayers were often caricatured as rough, and that added to his appeal as a first inductee. He died in 1925 of illness, at 45.
Johnson pitched for the Washington Senators for 21 seasons, from 1907 to 1927, for teams that were usually poor. He won 417 games, lost 279, struck out 3,509 batters and threw 110 shutouts, a record that has stood ever since. His 1913 season, 36-7 with a 1.14 ERA, is one of the best of all time. His career ERA of 2.17 compares to Mathewson's 2.13, and the two are the standard for the dead-ball pitcher. Johnson's strikeout total stood as the record for more than half a century. The Senators won the pennant in 1924, and Johnson, at 36, pitched in relief in Game 7 to help win the World Series for Washington.
Both men pitched far more innings in a season than any pitcher does now. Johnson threw more than 5,900 innings in his career, and he completed 531 of 666 starts. The workload explains many of the numbers that no modern pitcher can match, and also why comparing a pitcher of 1913 with a pitcher of the 2020s requires care.
The class in numbers
| Player | Position | Years | Key career figures (the historical record) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ty Cobb | Outfield | 1905 to 1928 | 4,189 H, .366, 896 SB |
| Babe Ruth | Outfield, pitcher | 1914 to 1935 | 714 HR, .342, 94-46 as pitcher |
| Honus Wagner | Shortstop | 1897 to 1917 | 3,420 H, .328, 723 SB |
| Christy Mathewson | Pitcher | 1900 to 1916 | 373-188, 2.13 ERA, 79 SHO |
| Walter Johnson | Pitcher | 1907 to 1927 | 417-279, 2.17 ERA, 3,509 SO |
Three things stand out in the table. First, the batting averages of Cobb and Wagner reflect a game in which putting the ball in play was the main skill. Second, the pitching lines, with ERAs near 2.1 over more than 4,700 innings, represent a standard of durability that disappeared once relievers became common. Third, only Ruth's line looks like modern baseball. A fan from 2025 would recognize his on-base and slugging percentages at once, and would have to translate the other four.
What the first class tells us
Several things about the Hall are visible in this first ballot. It was a hall for the stars, not the merely excellent, since only five men cleared the bar from a century of play. It leaned on the statistics that were available to the writers in 1936: batting average, hits, wins, strikeouts and home runs. The newer measures that analysts use today, such as on-base percentage and wins above replacement, did not exist in common form. And it reflected the white major leagues. The Negro Leagues, where players like Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige were playing at the time, were not considered, and players from them were elected only decades later. The historical record now carries Negro Leagues statistics for 1920 to 1948 as major-league data, a reminder of how much of the sport's history the first ballot did not see.
The questions the Hall still argues over, whom to include and where to set the bar, were present from the first ballot. The 75 percent rule has stayed, and with it the argument over who falls short. It is also worth noting that the Hall now has hundreds of members, more than 300 by the 2025 count. The first five remain the template for what a first-ballot choice looks like.
Common questions
Who got the most votes in 1936? Ty Cobb, with 222 votes on about 226 ballots. Ruth and Wagner tied at 215.
Was Christy Mathewson elected after he died? Yes. He died in 1925, eleven years before the first election.
Why was there no player from the 19th century? The 1936 election covered twentieth-century players by writers' vote, and the veterans' committee for earlier players did not select anyone that year. Its first choices came in later years.
When did the museum open? June 12, 1939, in Cooperstown, New York, with the first group of inductees honored at the dedication.
Who was left out that year? Several stars received votes but fell short of 75 percent, including Napoleon Lajoie, Tris Speaker and Cy Young, who were all elected soon after.
Where to go next
For the larger picture, start with the history and the Hall of Fame topic page, then compare the first class with the career leaders on the leaders page. If you are interested in how a later dynasty built its own Hall of Famers, the article on the Oakland Athletics three-peat of 1972 to 1974 is a good next read.