Soap opera fans will no doubt remember the sorry plight of Susan Lucci, the Post Meridian siren who kept getting nominated for daytime Emmys, and kept not winning.It became a running joke. Lucci gets nominated; Lucci gets passed over. She went on Saturday Night Live once, and everybody, from the gaffers to the gofers, was parading around with mock Emmys in their hands.She got nominated 18 times before she finally won one.Susan Lucci ? meet Jim Rice. He’s got you beat by three years. It only took him 15 tries to get into baseball’s Hall of Fame – just squeaking by with 76 percent of the votes (one percent more than the minimum required).Rice retired (or, rather, was given his unconditional release) from the Red Sox in 1989 after a career that soared to great heights but came to a sudden, screeching halt. He went from being one of the most feared hitters in baseball to being lifted for pinch-hitter Spike Owen during a game in those heady days of Morgan Magic in 1988. This was no gradual decline.Rice’s supporters have blamed his Lucci-esque quest for baseball immortality on his less-than-cordial relationship with the very news media that elects Hall of Famers on a yearly basis. But it’s probably a safer bet that the writers who weren’t enthralled enough with him to pick him earlier cite his swift, steep fall from excellence as the real reason.For while most people look at the Baseball Writers Association of America as a collection of frustrated hacks who “never played the game,” the truth is that, as a group, it is rather proprietary about who it elects to the Hall of Fame. The writers take seriously their obligation to maintain the integrity of baseball’s shrine to immortality.They know the difference between a first-ballot Hall of Famer (such as Rickey Henderson, who got in yesterday with 94 percent of the votes on his first try) and a more borderline case such as Rice.I don’t have a vote, but if I’d had one 15 years ago, I wouldn’t have voted for Rice on his first try, either. Carl Yastrzemski was a first-ballot Hall of Famer. So was Reggie Jackson. So was Henderson. Rice was not.But I’m not sure he was a 15th-ballot Hall of Famer, either. From the time he was a rookie in 1974 through the mid-1980s, Rice was as feared a hitter as there was in baseball. I don’t know many hitters who drew intentional walks with the bases loaded (better one RBI than a grand slam), but Rice did.He once hit a ball clear over the flagpole at Fenway Park and into the night. And he wasn’t just a power hitter, either. For three straight seasons (1977-79), he hit over 30 homers and got more than 200 hits.His detractors always made note of the fact that he didn’t hit 400 career homers, even though he played at Fenway Park. And that’s true.But Fenway giveth ? and Fenway taketh away. He may have hit a few Fenway blasts into the screen, but he probably lost a lot more homers on line drives that caught the wall while they were still rising.This is one of the less-advantageous features of that Green Monster. I once saw Sal Bando of the Oakland Athletics hit four balls off the wall in the 1975 playoffs ? and end up with four singles.He was also panned because he hit into a lot of double plays, but when you consider that the year he hit into 36 (1984) he also knocked in 122 runs and hit 28 homers, you can see how relative a lot of statistics are.He was a slow runner and he hit a lot of bullets right at infielders. That’s kind of a lethal combination.It’s true Rice could be a churl. He didn’t partake in the give-and-take of media relations with the same relish as, say, Curt Schilling. He wasn’t a quote machine, and all of that worked to his detriment.But then again, when you see how a guy like Schilling can come off as being an absolute blowhard the way he uses the media, maybe Rice was on to something. I do think he had/has no use for self-promoting hucksters who glad-hand their way to popularity among broadcasters and reporters. However, there were times in hi