It took the maximum 15 tries, but Jim Rice -- finally -- is a member of baseball's Hall of Fame.

In his last year of eligibility on the writers' ballot, Rice earned 76.4 percent of the vote, more than the 75 percent standard, and was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Rickey Henderson was the only other player to earn admission.

"What can you say?" a happy Rice responded when asked how he felt about being elected.

When asked about the long waiting period, Rice said: "You have no control over it . . . You just take it with a grain of salt because there's nothing you can do. You just wait and wait and hope that someone recognizes that you were special."

Rice becomes the 18th Hall of Famer who spent a significant portion of his career with the Red Sox. The others include Babe Ruth, Tris Speaker, Cy Young, Jimmy Collins, Lefty Grove, Herb Pennock, Jimmie Foxx, Joe Cronin, Ted Williams, Red Ruffing, Harry Hooper, Rick Ferrell, Bobby Doerr, Carl Yastrzemski, Carlton Fisk, Dennis Eckersley and Wade Boggs. The only players in that group to spend their entire careers with the Red Sox are Rice, Williams, Doerr and Yastrzemski.

If the Red Sox follow club policy -- in which they retire uniform numbers of players who make the Hall of Fame, spent 10 years with the team and finished their careers with Boston -- Rice's number 14 will be retired sometime this year. No one has worn it since Rice's playing career ended in 1989 (other than Rice himself during his years as the team's hitting coach).

Rice credited several members of the Sox organization for helping him become the player he was.

"When I came up in '75, we had a lot of case with baseball knowledge," he said. "Johnny Pesky, Don Zimmer, Ted Williams was around, Tommy Harper . . . you look at all the guys associated with the Red Sox organization. That's a lot of knowledge."

Pesky and Zimmer were Red Sox coaches in Rice's rookie year of 1975, and Williams was a special instructor for the organization. Harper became a coach a bit later in Rice's career.

Rice, 55, was the 1978 American League Most Valuable Player and finished in the top five of the AL MVP voting five other times, finishing second to teammate Fred Lynn in the 1975 AL Rookie of the Year voting. He led the AL in homers three times, hit .300-or-better seven times and was selected to eight All-Star Games. He is the only player in history to post three straight seasons of 35-plus home runs and 200-plus hits. He finished his career with a .298 batting average, 382 home runs and 1,451 RBI.