Welcome to Sliders, a weekly in-season MLB column that focuses on both the timely and timeless elements of baseball. 

It was glimmering out there for Ryne Sandberg, the same destination for a very different test of endurance and will. He had made it to Cooperstown as a player. Now, he wanted to make it as a cancer patient on the way to recovery.

And he did. Sandberg was one of the 14 Hall of Famers who gathered last Saturday at Doubleday Field for the East-West Classic, a recreation of the old Negro Leagues All-Star Game. He didn’t play, but he won.

“The timing was good for this trip, so I had this on the calendar, kind of penciled in,” Sandberg said behind the batting cage before the game. “Then I got good news last week, so it freed me up to come up here. And this is a well-needed getaway. This is a special place to come anyway, and my wife also needed a break; she’s had her hands full as well. We always love coming here.”

Sandberg, 64, announced on Jan. 22 that he had been diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer. In the four months since, he has chronicled his ordeal on Instagram, posting messages through six rounds of chemotherapy.

In a post last week, Sandberg revealed that PET and MRI scans on May 20 revealed “NO detection of Cancer!” He said he would…

The Hall of Fame is made for players like Adrián Beltré. As a pure hitter, reliable slugger and slick third baseman, Beltré had few peers: No other infielder in the history of baseball has 3,000 hits, 400 homers and five Gold Glove awards. Beltré, now 44, was a lock for the Hall of Fame.

As a first-time Cooperstown candidate, Beltré did not need to follow the breathless tracking of public ballots this winter. Yet he still could not feel secure, he said, until his wife and son assured him on Tuesday that election day looked promising. He could savor it.

“That made me relax a little bit more, and I kind of forced myself to try to enjoy this moment,” Beltré said from his home in Southern California, moments after achieving his sport’s greatest honor. “It was going to be a nice moment, and probably the last moment in baseball that I was going to accomplish, being at the pinnacle of the game.”

Beltré had company at the summit on Tuesday, with Todd Helton and Joe Mauer joining him in the new class of Hall of Famers. Former manager Jim Leyland, elected by the Contemporary Baseball Era Committee last month, will also be inducted at the ceremony July 21.

Candidates must receive 75 percent of the ballots from 10-year members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of…