Barry Larkin and Ron Santo Enter Baseball Hall of Fame Larkin, a Cincinnati native, had played 19 seasons for the team he grew up adoring, had played for Pete Rose, a legend and a mentor, and had won a World Series for the city in 1990. And this was his chance to reflect. "You see us up here nice and polished and looking dapper, calm, cool and collected, but I'm going to tell you what," Larkin said. This is un-stinking believable! His voice became a yell - "Unbelievable!" One could not help wondering: What would Ron Santo have said? Santo's juvenile diabetes brought heart attacks, heart-bypass surgery and the amputation of his legs. He died in December 2010 from complications of bladder cancer, robbing the baseball community of being able to hear Santo's enthusiastic, recognizable voice describe the moment. How would Santo, the former Cubs third baseman and the class's other half, have reacted to being inducted after 31 years of eligibility? What did Santo miss? His widow, Vicki Santo, said afterward that Santo would have missed the camaraderie and the parties, of which she said, "even with his fake legs we would've been out there dancing." Instead of Santo's raw emotion, what was witnessed was Vicki Santo's stoic message: that her husband had viewed his "insidious disease" as a challenge to prove that diabetes was beatable so that he could inspire others and so that his talent, and his will, could endure. Instead of the usual lists of thank-you's and clubhouse memories, Vicki Santo said that the best way to remember Santo was to keep fighting diabetes, keep searching for a cure. "The whole last decade of Ron's life was very emotional for me," Vicki said afterward. I loved him. He was my husband. I wanted the best for him. And baseball was his life, and it also kept him alive the last 10 years of his life. Ron Santo's world was the Chicago Cubs. Fourteen of his 15 seasons, from 1960 to 1974, were with the Cubs. Then he spent 19 seasons as a Cubs announcer who was known for his unabashed, uncensored emotion: joy when the Cubs romped and dejection when they flopped. The Hall of Fame was inducting one of them, said Sue Schwerin, 55, one of 15 Wrigley Field Bleacher Bums who came to see Vicki Santos's speech in person. She displayed an 8-by-4-foot flag, with blue stripes and "Santo, No. 10" written large. It had been flown at Wrigley once, and a similar flag flew in 2003 when Santo's number was retired, when he gave an impassioned speech and said, "This is my hall of fame." Famously, amid the 1998 pennant race, a Cubs outfielder dropped a fly ball in the ninth inning of a late September game. Oh noooo - Noooo! Santo said, the pain apparent in his voice. In the manager's office after the game, "he was almost crying," Pat Hughes, Santo's announcing partner, said in a video shown at Sunday's ceremony. And I see the manager, Jim Riggleman, walk over to Ron Santo, and he put his arm around him. The baseball writers who vote on the Hall of Fame members, though, probably weighted statistics against emotion and instinct. They never gave Santo higher than 43.1 percent approval, when 75 percent is required. It took the Golden Era Committee to induct Santo, at a 15-1 vote. Near the end of his life, Santo seemed to find peace with being shut out of the Hall, and he insisted he did not want to be posthumously inducted. The fight with diabetes, Vicki speculated in her speech, was why he was included now, and there was no shame in that. Santo hid his diabetes from the Cubs, everyone, for most of his career. "On a given day, he played doctor and patient as well as third base," Vicki said in her speech. He tested his sugars by taking batting practice. He checked his glucose levels by fielding grounders. He gauged the amount of insulin he would need by running the bases. Once, with the bases loaded, with his sugar low, with his vision blurry and with his body weak, Santo saw three balls thrown, when there was only one, Vicki said. Santo picked the middle one and hit a grand slam. After baseball, he gave unsolicited pep talks to patients, and he raised more than $65 million for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. Had Santo given the speech, Vicki Santo said, he would not have bragged as she had. On Santo's Hall of Fame plaque, after his baseball accolades are listed, it ends by saying Santo "served as an inspiration to millions through a courageous fight with diabetes."