-- In 1994, the 49ers signed a plain-talking linebacker from San Diego and the most boisterous, preening, self-promotional athlete of his generation from the Atlanta Falcons. Gary Plummer planned to hold his nose and endure Deion Sanders.

"It was, I guess, a truck guy and a Lamborghini guy, and I just assumed that he was going to be this guy I didn't like," Plummer said by phone. "But he was as far from that as you could get. He was likable from the start."

They immediately won a championship together in their new home, allowing Sanders to become the only athlete ever to play in both the Super Bowl and World Series. A year later, he traded in the 49ers' uniform, plus their relatively paltry salary, for a huge contract with the Cowboys. The Lombardi Trophy shifted back to Dallas, where it had gone for two straight seasons before the Niners acquired Sanders.

It would be an insult to the tremendous talent surrounding him on those two teams to call Sanders the sole difference maker. But his first-ballot induction into the Hall of Fame today, as inevitable as it may seem now, became an absolute certainty when he fit himself into remarkable teams and won rings with them.

"I know that was something we talked about in the Hall of Fame (balloting) room," said Nancy Gay, a Hall voter who covered the 1994 title team for the Mercury News. "The way a player performs in championship situations carries a lot of weight."

The decision to become a 49er started out, in classic Sanders style, as a shrewd business move. He had played five seasons with the Atlanta Falcons, while moonlighting as a Yankee and Brave, but the closest he had gotten to a championship was the 1992 World Series, in which he hit .533 in a losing cause while playing on a fractured foot.

When he flew directly from an NFL stadium to an MLB playoff game, Sanders was seen as a flashy gimmick. Michael Jordan, with little of Sanders' baseball skill, had just been granted a preposterous chance to play in the minors because the Bulls owner knew the public couldn't get enough of the man who had led his team to three straight NBA rings. Jordan was a brand.

Sanders took a one-year deal with the 49ers, worth about $1.2 million, well below what he could have commanded if he had forsaken baseball and chosen a team that had more room under the salary cap. But he knew that he could become a champion in San Francisco, permanently raising his stature and increasing his market value the following year.

Bear in mind, this was not an athlete who ever pretended that he would play the game for free. He drew dollar signs in his autograph, scratched them into the dirt at home plate and even wore them on his underwear.

It was no wonder that Plummer had concerns.

Instead of Prime Time or Neon Deion, though, he encountered a player who furiously studied other teams, carrying a state-of-the-art video player with him everywhere. Gay remembers that Sanders' limitations as a tackler often called his commitment into question. But when covering a practice after a game in which Sanders had allowed a touchdown pass, she noticed him working over and over again on the route that had beaten him.

"I asked him if that was because of the touchdown," said Gay, now the senior NFL editor for the Fox Sports website, "and he told me: 'It will never happen again.' "

Plummer believes that Sanders used his image to mislead opponents about his savvy. In games, Plummer remembered, the cornerback would stand at a distance from the defensive huddle, often dancing in place. The posturing rubbed in the fact that Sanders could lock down one side of the backfield by himself, shifting the safeties and complexities of zone coverage to the other.

"It made him look arrogant, aloof, cocky when he wouldn't come into the huddle," Plummer said. "But he wasn't just over there to dance and jaw with (the opponents') players and their coaches. He was trying to pick up information. And believe me, even if he wasn't in the huddle, we had hand signals and he was communicating. ... He was as smart a corner as I ever saw."

One day the two teammates talked about family, and Plummer mentioned that he had a left-handed 9-year-old son who loved baseball. The next day, Plummer found a lefty Deion Sanders-model mitt in his locker.

The following summer, as the 49ers lobbied for him to return, the cratering Giants acquired Sanders in a late-season trade with Cincinnati. He showed up at Candlestick and found that the Giants had joined their co-tenant's recruiting scheme. His 49ers jersey was hanging in his baseball locker.

Gay had also shifted employers, moving from the 49ers' beat in San Jose to become the Giants writer for The Chronicle.

"A lot of ballplayers wondered if Deion played regularly, if he'd be one of the greatest of all time," she said.

The Giants' visiting clubhouse manager, Harvey Hodgerney, also worked as a 49ers' equipment manager, and he became fond of Sanders and his eccentricities. He remembers the dollar-sign underwear and the time Sanders' Cincinnati teammates secretly coated it with hot muscle reliever. The prank is a baseball cliche, but the results had a uniquely Prime Time flavor.

"He had to get back in the shower, and that made him late for his night out with M.C. Hammer," Hodgerney said. "There was a limo outside waiting for him."

He signed with the Cowboys for $35 million over seven years, and returned to San Francisco only as an opponent. But as he looks back on at his journey from staggeringly talented dilettante to champion to the halls of Canton, this city stands out as the critical turning point.