After a few days of being frustrated, I finally got over it.

Last year at this time, Joe Mauer was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in his first year on the ballot. And I — well, my ego — needed to grieve.

In all my self righteousness garnered through 15 years covering MLB as a reporter, never did I think that a player with only six great seasons would be a first-ballot Hall of Famer.

It’s not that I didn’t love watching Mauer play. Of course I did. For those six years, he was worth the price of admission to any Minnesota Twins game. I saw him play dozens of times, and got particularly excited when he was behind the plate.

But I always felt like he was chasing his own reputation, and struggling to catch it. He had been one of the best players in the game from 2005 to 2010, hitting .328 with an .886 OPS and winning three Gold Gloves as a sensational backstop.And then a significant knee injury and major concussion dampened his career. He stopped catching full time. He stopped hitting like a slugger. And we were all left hoping that Mauer would again be the player we wanted him to be -- the one he showed us that he could be.

It’s that wonderful sense of imagination and idealism that makes so many of us fall in love with baseball. And I think that’s why Mauer landed on 76% of the 385 ballots submitted last year. He wasn’t on my ballot because his career was too short. I wished he was a Hall of Famer, but I really didn’t think he was.

One of the most impressive attributes in a big league player is his ability to play through pain, fight through injuries and stay on the field for the longest, most grueling season in professional sports. It’s a mental grind, too. I’ve seen some of the best players of all time lose confidence completely, and some players with far less talent stumble into long hitting streaks in which they look — and feel — like Joe DiMaggio.

But almost all of them will tell you the same thing: by mid-season, nobody is 100% healthy.

By September, most of them are playing on fumes.

There’s an art to staying healthy. A resilience in the greatest players.

And a lot of luck, too.

Mauer was unlucky. So, too was David Wright (spinal injury), who first appeared on the ballot last year, and Dustin Pedroia (knee injury), on the ballot for the first time this year.

Last year, I chose not to vote for Mauer and Wright. I wished they had played long enough to earn my vote, but I couldn’t convince myself they did.

A year later, my opinion is changing. If 76% of my colleagues decided Mauer should be in the Hall of Fame, shouldn’t Wright and Pedroia be, too?

Wright was among the game’s best all-around players for a decade, serving as a Gold Glove third baseman, a perennial .300 hitter with power and speed, almost single-handedly keeping the lowly New York Mets out of the gutter.

Pedroia was a similar player. I covered him as a Boston Red Sox beat reporter for most of his career, and I’ve never been more impressed with an athlete’s work ethic and desire. But his career came to an end shortly after Manny Machado’s nasty slide into second base tore apart his knee in a 2017 game. Pedroia spent the next four years trying to recover, but played only nine more games.

His numbers on their own (.299 average, .805 OPS, four-time Gold Glover and one American League MVP in about 1,500 games) might not add up to a Hall of Fame player. But he was arguably the best defensive second baseman of his time, an elite baserunner, one of the game’s hardest players to strike out, a postseason performer with two World Series titles and someone who made his team better in every way possible.

In our imaginations, we can choose to remember these guys for their best moments. We can celebrate the heights of their careers and tell stories of what made them so special. And we can look past the fact that their careers ended too soon.

This year, I voted for both Wright and Pedroia. Charismatic Seattle Mariners ace Felix Hernandez got my vote in similar fashion, as a Cy Young winner whose career lacked longevity.

Carlos Beltran, Andruw Jones and Torii Hunter were among the most exciting defensive center fielders of their time, with speed, power and finesse a major part of each of their skillsets.

Jimmy Rollins was an all-around hitting machine, a burner with 10 seasons of at least 30 stolen bases, and a four-time Gold Glove shortstop while leading the Philadelphia Phillies to a long spell of greatness.

Billy Wagner was one of the best relievers of his generation. He’s on the ballot for the last time and came close to induction last year, with 74% of the vote.

The easiest votes were CC Sabathia and Ichiro Suzuki, on the ballot for the first time this year.

Ichiro is, alongside Jackie Robinson and Babe Ruth, one of the most important players to ever slip on a uniform. The weight of the world was on his shoulders when he arrived from Japan as a 27-year-old rookie in 2001. He promptly hit .350, won the Gold Glove, Rookie of the Year and American League MVP, and opened the door for a historic merger of Eastern and Western baseball.

Without Ichiro, there may have never been a Shohei Ohtani.

Overall, I selected 10 players, the most for whom we’re allowed to vote.

Of those I left off my ballot, Manny Ramirez and Alex Rodriguez were too detrimental to the sport to be worthy of celebration. And while some other names were intriguing, two in particular will make me think harder about voting for them in future years: Andy Pettitte, who has more postseason wins (19) and innings (276 2/3) than any other pitcher in baseball history, and Chase Utley, who, alongside Rollins, was an instrumental figure in the Phillies’ dominant run.

With time, my opinion may change. It did this year.

My ballot: Beltrán, Hernandez, Hunter, Andruw Jones, Pedroia, Rollins, Sabathia, Suzuki, Wagner, Wright.

Not selected: Bobby Abreu, Mark Buehrle, Carlos Gonzalez, Curtis Granderson, Adam Jones, Ian Kinsler, Russell Martin, Brian McCann, Pettitte, Hanley Ramirez, Manny Ramirez, Fernando Rodney, Alex Rodriguez, Francisco Rodríguez, Troy Tulowitzki, Utley, Omar Vizquel, Ben Zobrist.