Barry Larkin, Ron Santo inducted into Hall of Fame

By Meggie Zahneis/MLB.com

Every one of the 18,000 people attending the 2012 National Baseball Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony would have understood if Vicki Santo teared up a little when delivering an acceptance speech on behalf of her late husband, new Hall of Fame inductee Ron Santo.

But Vicki Santo didn’t. “This is not a sad day, not at all. This is a very happy day. It's an incredible day for an incredible man, a man who lived an extraordinary life to its fullest,” she said.

Ron Santo’s fellow Class of 2012 inductee Barry Larkin, though, couldn’t quite hold it together. His daughter, Cymber, performed the national anthem, and fellow inductee Johnny Bench encouraged Larkin that if he could contain his tears through that, he’d be fine.

Not so.

Larkin was obviously emotional as he gave his speech, rattling off stories and even speaking a bit of Spanish.

But perhaps the most memorable snippet of Larkin’s speech came in the retelling of an exchange he had with then-teammate Buddy Bell at Dodger Stadium.

“He says, ‘Always remember where you come from and take the time to smell the grass.’ So I'm sitting in Dodger Stadium in the big leagues, 22 years old, I'm like, ‘Yeah, this is nice. This is beautiful.’ He's like, ‘I always want you to take the time to smell the grass.’ And I go, ‘Yeah, smog free day here in LA, beautiful Dodger Stadium.’ He says, ‘I want you to take the time to smell the grass.’ ‘You want me to smell the grass?’ ‘Smell the grass.’ So I literally get down on all fours and smell the grass. As I'm down there, Buddy says, ‘Now turn over.’"

“And as I turn over, I look up in the sky, high blue skies, a few clouds, I see the rim of Dodger Stadium and I just get almost in, like, a trance, and he says to me, ‘Pretty big, isn't it?’ And I go, ‘Yeah, it is. It's enormous. I can see the rim of the stadium, the wavy canopy out in the outfield.’ And he says, ‘How big do you feel?’

And I said, ‘I feel like an ant. I feel so small.’ He says, ‘That's right. That's how small we all are relative to the grand scheme of baseball. Don't ever, ever lose that perspective.’”

Little did Larkin know that one day, he would feel big. Big, in fact, as one of 297 Hall of Famers, one of the 1 percent that take the field to ever enter the hallowed halls of Cooperstown.

Meggie Zahneis, winner of the 2011 Breaking Barriers essay contest, earned the job of youth correspondent for MLB.com in the fall of '11. This story was not subject to the approval of Major League Baseball or its clubs.