reputation of his own. He had famous affairs with chorus girls, protected illegal casinos, and was investigated for corruption. Walker was pressured into resigning in 1932 by his fellow New York Democrats and skipped the country to avoid prosecution, taking Betty Compton, one of his girlfriends, with him into exile.
* John Drebinger of the New York Times , for example, ghosted for Giants manager John McGraw. Ford Frick, during his baseball-writing days, worked simultaneously for Babe Ruth and the Hearst newspaper chain. These weren’t isolated incidents by any means, nor were they regarded as flagrant violations of the prevailing journalistic ethics. Drebinger was considered a man of outstanding character by his colleagues. Frick went on to help found the Hall of Fame and wound up as commissioner of baseball.
* A union had been created for the players in 1954 to settle contract disputes, but it was dominated by own ers and didn’t become a true labor union until Marvin Miller came on in 1966.
FIVE . . . The Monks
C ooperstown is a seasonal village. In summer, it is full of visitors to the Hall of Fame, the Fenimore Museum, the Glim-merglass Opera festival, and the other attractions of the scenic Leatherstocking region. In winter, the town empties out; the baseball memorabilia stores along Main Street close down and the bed-and-breakfast owners head to Florida. The town’s lone stoplight continues to signal, but there aren’t enough cars around to bestow it a sense of authority.
Even in good weather there is no such thing as drop-in traffic. “If you get to Cooperstown by mistake, that means you’ve been lost for at least forty-five minutes,” Ted Spencer told me. But in December 2007, the village experienced an epic snowfall, and I got caught in it. For several days I was practically the only guest at the Cooper Inn. The only visitors to the Hall I encountered were a Japanese couple and three boisterous college boys.
The arctic weather and near isolation made the Hall of Fame a cozy place, and when I first arrived the staff welcomed me into its hot stove league. They struck me as an order of baseball monks, a brotherhood of arcane scholars and pure-hearted lovers of the game. They weren’t naïve. They were aware that many of the players enshrined in the great hall of plaques were not embodiments of the Character Clause and that baseball had a checkered past. The Mitchell Report on the use of performance-enhancing drugs was due that week, and they were bracing for that, too.
But they didn’t confuse historical failings or contemporary controversies with the essence of the game. They talked baseball all day long, but the conversation was mostly swapping historical anecdotes, testing one another with obscure trivia questions, or fondly contemplating the sacred relics of the game on display in the museum or secured in its underground vaults.
One of the first monks I met was Gabriel Schechter. On the day we met, he was supposed to have been on his way to Hollywood to appear on Jeopardy, but just as he had been about to leave the house, word came that host Alex Trebek had suffered a heart attack, and his trip was postponed. * Schechter seemed disappointed but sanguine. Born in New Jersey, he taught English at the University of Montana before drifting down to Las Vegas in 1980, where he worked in casinos and wrote freelance stories. Five times he was a dealer in the World Series of Poker. He knows that there are always winners and losers.
In 2002, Schechter came east to Cooperstown to research a book. A few months later he was offered a job, and he’s been there ever since. Among his tasks is fielding questions from fans around the world. The Hall gets an estimated sixty thousand each year, and the monks spend a significant part of their day trying to answer the questions of baseball fans who range from the idly curious to the obsessed. Nothing is too obscure to be researched seriously.
“Once,” Schechter
* John Drebinger of the New York Times , for example, ghosted for Giants manager John McGraw. Ford Frick, during his baseball-writing days, worked simultaneously for Babe Ruth and the Hearst newspaper chain. These weren’t isolated incidents by any means, nor were they regarded as flagrant violations of the prevailing journalistic ethics. Drebinger was considered a man of outstanding character by his colleagues. Frick went on to help found the Hall of Fame and wound up as commissioner of baseball.
* A union had been created for the players in 1954 to settle contract disputes, but it was dominated by own ers and didn’t become a true labor union until Marvin Miller came on in 1966.
FIVE . . . The Monks
C ooperstown is a seasonal village. In summer, it is full of visitors to the Hall of Fame, the Fenimore Museum, the Glim-merglass Opera festival, and the other attractions of the scenic Leatherstocking region. In winter, the town empties out; the baseball memorabilia stores along Main Street close down and the bed-and-breakfast owners head to Florida. The town’s lone stoplight continues to signal, but there aren’t enough cars around to bestow it a sense of authority.
Even in good weather there is no such thing as drop-in traffic. “If you get to Cooperstown by mistake, that means you’ve been lost for at least forty-five minutes,” Ted Spencer told me. But in December 2007, the village experienced an epic snowfall, and I got caught in it. For several days I was practically the only guest at the Cooper Inn. The only visitors to the Hall I encountered were a Japanese couple and three boisterous college boys.
The arctic weather and near isolation made the Hall of Fame a cozy place, and when I first arrived the staff welcomed me into its hot stove league. They struck me as an order of baseball monks, a brotherhood of arcane scholars and pure-hearted lovers of the game. They weren’t naïve. They were aware that many of the players enshrined in the great hall of plaques were not embodiments of the Character Clause and that baseball had a checkered past. The Mitchell Report on the use of performance-enhancing drugs was due that week, and they were bracing for that, too.
But they didn’t confuse historical failings or contemporary controversies with the essence of the game. They talked baseball all day long, but the conversation was mostly swapping historical anecdotes, testing one another with obscure trivia questions, or fondly contemplating the sacred relics of the game on display in the museum or secured in its underground vaults.
One of the first monks I met was Gabriel Schechter. On the day we met, he was supposed to have been on his way to Hollywood to appear on Jeopardy, but just as he had been about to leave the house, word came that host Alex Trebek had suffered a heart attack, and his trip was postponed. * Schechter seemed disappointed but sanguine. Born in New Jersey, he taught English at the University of Montana before drifting down to Las Vegas in 1980, where he worked in casinos and wrote freelance stories. Five times he was a dealer in the World Series of Poker. He knows that there are always winners and losers.
In 2002, Schechter came east to Cooperstown to research a book. A few months later he was offered a job, and he’s been there ever since. Among his tasks is fielding questions from fans around the world. The Hall gets an estimated sixty thousand each year, and the monks spend a significant part of their day trying to answer the questions of baseball fans who range from the idly curious to the obsessed. Nothing is too obscure to be researched seriously.
“Once,” Schechter
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