MyWestworld

Baseball’s Valhalla

Posted on 07. Jan, 2009 by Kerry Banks in Destinations, International

A few years ago my brother and I made a pilgrimage to Cooperstown, New York, to see what is arguably North American’s most famous sports shrine–the National Baseball Hall of Fame. It was early summer and we drove down from Toronto, a seven-hour, sun-baked trip through a rural landscape of green rolling hills, cornfields and cow pastures. Beyond a baseball museum neither of us knew exactly what to expect at the end of the road. Amazingly, despite its celebrated status, we were unable to find a decent description of Cooperstown in any guide book.

It was a surprise therefore to discover that there are really two Cooperstowns, each possessing its own distinct air of unreality. One is a sleepy hamlet of tree-lined streets and beautifully preserved clapboard and red brick Victorian homes on the south shore of Otsego Lake. This Cooperstown appears little changed since the late 1800s, when it served as a resort for wealthy city dwellers. The other Cooperstown, devoted to all things baseball and packed into a three-block stretch of Main Street, is a far newer and more artificial creation, designed for the express purpose of sucking as many dollars as possible out of the pockets of tourists. Here, amid a daunting array of memorabilia shops, everything is a potential souvenir. This point became abundantly clear to us, when, after downing several bottles of Old Slugger Pale Ale in Shoeless Joe’s Café, we were approached by our waitress, who asked, “Do you gentleman want to take those empty bottles with you?” Was this a common practice among her customers? “You’d be surprised,” she said, grinning. “Some of these baseball people are crazy.”

My brother and I qualify as “baseball people.” We both played the game as kids, on dusty diamonds, in organized leagues and out in our backyard with a plastic whiffle ball. We collected and traded baseball cards, we wore baseball caps and we played baseball board games. And in our adult years we continued to keep close ties with the game through our participation in baseball fantasy leagues.

However, we do not consider ourselves crazy, which is why we went to Cooperstown in late June. You would have to be crazy to venture into the place after July 1, when the bulk of the 400,000 annual visitors begin pouring into this village of 2,500 residents. The invasion reaches its peak in late July with the annual Hall of Fame ceremonies, when new members are inducted and an exhibition game between two major league teams is staged at Doubleday Field, a tiny stadium erected upon the very spot where baseball was supposedly invented in the summer of 1839.

This myth was foisted upon the American public by Albert Spalding, owner of the Chicago White Stockings and sporting goods magnate. In 1895, he appointed a council to “research” the claim that baseball had evolved from the English games of cricket and rounders. Spalding wanted baseball to be seen as “all American,” and indeed, his council reported that the sport had been invented by a deceased Civil War hero named Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown. Historians now agree that not only did Doubleday have no connection to baseball, he wasn’t even in Cooperstown in 1839. Instead of springing from pastoral roots, the game actually developed in New York City in the 1840s. On June 19, 1846, the first baseball game with set rules was played in Hoboken, New Jersey, at Elysian Fields, a park named after the paradise of ancient Greek myth, where those who are favoured by the gods go when they die. All in all, a much more prosaic site for baseball’s birth.

However, the Doubleday myth still held sway in the 1930s, when some Cooperstown businessmen decided to build a baseball museum in an effort to boost the area’s Depression-ravaged economy. The Hall of Fame opened with much fanfare on June 12, 1939, as part of a celebration to mark the centennial of Doubleday’s alleged invention of the game. Eleven baseball luminaries, including Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker, Walter Johnson and Connie Mack attended the event. Since then, Cooperstown has never looked back.

And why should it? Baseball has made many of Cooperstown’s resident’s wealthy and continues to provide the town’s prime source of income. The Hall itself has grown from an unimposing two-room structure into a three-storey complex filled with a mind-bending assemblage of baseball artifacts, including such items as fingerless gloves from the 1880s, Ty Cobb’s sliding pads, Lou Gehrig’s locker, the bat that Babe Ruth used to hit his 60th homer of the 1927 season, plus exhibits of uniforms, trading cards, World Series rings and various trophies.

The Hall of Fame gallery, where a couple of hundred baseball’s immortals are commemorated by bronze plaques and brief bios, is probably the major draw for visitors, but it is also surprisingly small. The display’s modest dimensions suggest just how difficult it is to gain entry into the Hall. Only one percent of all the men who have played in the majors have been deemed to possess the necessary credentials and there has never been a unanimous selection.

The museum also houses a library and photo archive containing more than 300,000 images. In addition to retrieving research materials from the vaults, the staff also fields queries on baseball-related topics. The day we visited, there were inquiries about the colour of Babe Ruth’s eyes, Mickey Mantle’s precise height and weight in his rookie year, and which player had hit home runs in the greatest number of major-league ballparks. A Brooklyn couple wanted to discuss the veracity of the depiction of Jimmy Foxx’s character in the movie A League of Their Own, which they claimed to have seen 17 times. A pastor from Seattle was seeking newspaper clippings about the Hall’s opening ceremony in 1939, at which his father had delivered the benediction.

People come to Cooperstown searching for all manner of things. At the end of our two-day stay, I found myself both elated and a tad regretful. My elation was inspired by the discovery that a couple of the baseball trivia books I had written were on sale in the Hall of Fame’s bookstore. My regret was that I had not visited Cooperstown as a child. Seen through a haze of innocence no longer available to me, the trip would, I am quite certain, have become etched into my memory as one of the highlights of my life. But, then again, seeing the place with my brother was a special treat, and the nostalgia I felt for the game and my youth came back in a rush. In the end, it didn’t really matter that the Hall of Fame was built on lies, because going to Cooperstown is all about surrendering to fantasy.

Photo Credits:

#1:baseballhalloffame.org

#2: seecny.com

#3: the700level.com

#4: freewebs.com

Tags: Baseball, Cooperstown, New York, Travel Trends