By Stan Caldwell
stanmansportsfan.com
While undertaking the Great Rock and Roll Adventure with my lovely wife, we had a day to kill when we arrived in New York after three leisurely days of driving.
The premise of the Adventure was to attend the 50th anniversary celebration of the Woodstock Festival, and to see a part of the world neither me nor my wife had visited. I’ll tell that story soon, after I wade through the pictures from two weeks on the road.
But today the subject is the extra day we had built into the schedule. As a baseball fan from an early age, I have always wanted to see the National Baseball Hall of Fame, and we were close enough that we could make the trip to Cooperstown, home of the Hall of Fame.
We took the freeway until we got to the exit for Roscoe, N.Y., and we embarked on one of the prettiest drives I’ve ever made in my life winding through the mountainous countryside from Roscoe to Oneonta. After a brief a detour up I-88, we made it back on the road to Cooperstown.
Before the Hall of Fame was sited there, Cooperstown was already well-known as the hometown of James Fenimore Cooper, whose 19th-century novels such as Last of the Mohicans and the Deerslayer, depicting life in early America, remain popular to this day.
It was also the hometown of Abner Doubleday, who was credited with inventing baseball in 1846. Thus, the decision to build the Hall of Fame there, and the first class – Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, Walter Johnson, Ty Cobb and Christy Mathewson – was inducted in 1939.
The first thing you see when you get to downtown Cooperstown is Doubleday Field. Now, the legend of Doubleday being the Father of Baseball has been proven to be completely fictional, but his name nevertheless graces a nice, functioning ballpark.
While we were there, a Men’s Over-40 tournament was going on, but there were also some kids’ teams there in full regalia, and teams from the Hattiesburg area have competed in tournaments there in the past.
Parking was at a premium when we arrived in the early afternoon, but we saw a family packing a car, apparently to leave, and as I rolled down my window to ask, the wife walked over to us with her parking ticket.
“We way overpaid, and we’re leaving, you can have this,” she said, handing me a little over two hours of paid parking in a prime spot. All I know is their car had Connecticut plates, but wherever they are, their gift was appreciated.
The Baseball Hall of Fame is a smorgasbord of everything you’ve ever wanted to see or hear about Major League Baseball, its history, its numbers, its players, managers and owners.
The first thing you will see on a given tour of the Hall are this year’s class of inductees: Mike Mussina, Edgar Martinez, Roy Halliday, Mariano Rivera, Harold Baines and Lee Smith.
Then you get right down to the heart of the game, the Hall of Fame Gallery, where the plaque of every inductee sits on the wall, grouped by year of induction.
Any fan will get photos of their favorite players, and I was no different. I got shots of displays for the likes of Casey Stengel, George Brett, Roberto Clemente, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron and, of course, Stan “the Man” Musial, along with a few others.
The inaugural class is given a larger display area, along with competing swings of Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams in life-sized statuary. The first floor also has nice displays for the Scribes and Mikemen, who have described the games in one form or another to the fans, and a theater where baseball movies can be seen.
The second floor is where it gets funky. That’s where the minutiae and memorabilia is displayed, and the stories behind them told. But first you walk through a Locker Room for each current big-league team, with more memorabilia relative to each team.
The one that I liked best was a Jerry Garcia bobble head in the San Francisco Giants locker that was given away to fans in 2010 on the 15th anniversary of Garcia’s death.
You come out of the Locker Room and start on the baseball timeline, which walks you through the development of the game, including a display of Babe Ruth stuff, one for Pride and Passion (the African-American Baseball Experience), Diamond Dreams, about the role women have played in the game, and Viva Baseball, celebrating the Latin influence on the game.
The third floor is for the stats geeks. First you walk through a display celebrating some of the legendary ballparks of old, such as Ebbets Field, the Polo Grounds and Forbes Field in Pittsburgh.
There is a display that actually fits the entire dimensions of the Pirates’ PNC Park within the confines of Forbes Field, with plenty of room to spare.
Following that is a very in-depth tribute to Aaron, probably the greatest player the Braves franchise has ever had, honoring, not just the player, but the man. If you are an Atlanta fan, as most folks are around here, you’ll want to spend some time here.
Then comes the place where I could have gotten deeply lost. The stories behind virtually every record ever made in the game’s history.
Baseball is a game obsessed with records, and this part of the Hall of Fame wallows in them. There is a central display that rotates through so many esoteric facts and figures that it assaults you with minutiae.
That’s also the place for oddities, such as the scorecard from the longest professional game ever, a 33-inning contest between the Rochester Red Wings and the Pawtucket Red Sox in 1981. It took eight hours and 25 minutes to play and didn’t finish until two months after the first 32 innings were played, a 3-2 victory for Pawtucket.
The last big exhibit area is the one devoted to the World Series, and there is all manner of stuff to pick through there, including a replica of every Series-winning team’s championship ring. Except one empty space for the 1994 World Series that was never played because of a players’ strike that ended that season in August.
There is, though, a nice little encore on the third floor of the Hall, which is the Special Exhibits Gallery. This the area that honors the photographers who have presented the game with so many memorable images of the game.
And there is a quirky area back on the first floor, off from the Hall of Fame Gallery, that put the coda to our visit in a very nice way, after I initially missed it in my hurry to visit the Gallery.
It’s stuck back in a corner by the Hall’s Learning Center, so I’m not sure a lot of people know about it, and it offers a representation of the Art of Baseball. The Hall of Fame is the permanent home of more than 1,700 works of art devoted to baseball, and a few of the best are on display.
There is some incredible original art here, including Norman Rockwell’s famous 1948 painting Tough Call, also known as Bottom of the Sixth, showing three umpires anticipating imminent rain, a large oil painting of Ruth and a well-known bust of New York Giants great Mathewson.
As is the case with almost every hall of fame or museum, a proper tour of the facility ends in the gift shop, and the Baseball Hall of Fame has a well set-up store selling souvenirs at a reasonable price.
The whole tour took about two and a half hours. We fed the parking meter a little more money to keep our parking spot, but by then it was a moot point. It was late, the men reliving their youth were gone and Doubleday Field sat empty.
After a decent late lunch/early supper at a nearby eatery, we drove back from Cooperstown the same way we came, and it was even prettier than before, with the sun starting to set.
One note of caution to visitors. The roads up there are steep and curvy, so pay attention and keep your speed down.
Our last stop of the day was at the Roscoe Beer Co., a little microbrewery where we bought our sons each a four-pack of their product, including one from a specially-brewed batch commemorating the Woodstock 50 Celebration going on nearby at Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, on the original site of the historic 1969 festival.
That is where the Great Rock and Roll Adventure would begin for us, and the reason we were in New York. But baseball was a nice way to step away for a moment so I could be a kid discovering baseball again.
Even my wife, who is not a baseball fan, enjoyed our visit, and if you are a fan, you owe it to yourself to make a pilgrimage at least once in your life to this shrine to America’s Game.
Stan Caldwell is a 35-year veteran sports writer in the Hattiesburg area, and most recently served as sports information director at Pearl River Community College in Mississippi.
