being themselves. But some of the other guys are great characters. Pumpsie Green, for example. Or Spook Jacobs, who has the world’s biggest collection of baseballs. And I really loved Clete Boyer. He used to come up here and sit on a bench on Main Street and sign autographs at ten dollars a pop, just for the fun of it. I remember meeting Lou Lim-mer, too; he brought his grandkids up here and he was more excited than they were.”
Wiles presides over a vast quantity of information. The Hall has a file on every man who has played major-league baseball since 1871—more than seventeen thousand in all.
The chief librarian of the Hall, Jim Gates, came to the Hall of Fame in 1995 from the University of Florida and began putting order into what had been a huge, unor ganized pile of material. Gates took me on a tour of the museum’s lower level, which contains an estimated twenty thousand books about baseball and a vast number of artifacts. The best are kept in a small, vault-like room designed to preserve and protect fragile treasures. There is a handwritten manuscript of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” composed in 1908 (by two guys who had never been to a ballgame). The original promissory note for the sale of Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees is there, as is Judge Landis’s first contract. The papers of the Mills Commission, which proclaimed baseball’s Cooperstown paternity, are carefully guarded. So are the scorecards of the first perfect game (pitched by J. Lee Richmond in June 1880) and the scoresheet kept by broadcasters Ernie Harwell and Russ Hodges of the final game of the 1951 season, when Bobby Thomson’s “shot heard round the world” home run sent the Giants to the World Series. Among the most treasured books are a first edition of Sol White’s The History of Colored Base Ball , published in 1907; and the Ea gle Base Ball Club Rule Book , circa 1854.
Experts put the value of the Hall’s memorabilia at upward of $100 million. Only a tiny fraction is ever on public display. How it is shown is up to Ted Spencer, whose job as head curator makes him a Cooperstown abbot.
As a boy growing up in Boston, Spencer rooted for the Red Sox and dreamed of becoming an artist. The combination of art and baseball has been helpful in trying to blend Cooperstown’s traditional Norman Rockwell portrait of American baseball with the United Colors of Benetton realities of the modern age.
The monks work intently at the Hall of Fame, even in the off-season. Teams and players send in material that has to be read and cataloged. Hundreds of old boxes of team rosters, scouting reports, financial statements, notes of director’s meetings and fan club proceedings, attendance slips and ticket stubs, contracts and scorecards—the curatorial staff can’t keep up with it all. Thousands of calls come into the research center (every baseball fan has his own personal Lip Pike). Still, there is always time for a cup of coffee and an intense discussion about their favorite topic: baseball. One morning, the talk turned to favorite books.
Tim Wiles was enthusiastic about The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book , by Brendan C. Boyd and Fred Harris. It is a look at life and baseball in the 1970s through the trading card explosion of the time; people of a certain age and sensibility find it magical. Lenny Di Franza, a one-time punk rocker who works in the research department, picked The Boys of Summer , Roger Kahn’s elegiac retrospective of the 1950s Brooklyn Dodgers. Kahn has come to Cooperstown for years to work on his projects and is a house favorite. Gabriel Schechter chose Lawrence Ritter’s The Glory of Their Times , which appealed to his sense of nostalgia. Ted Spencer liked Darryl Brock’s If I Never Get Back , a fable about traveling with the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings. And everyone kept coming back to Harold Seymour’s three-volume history of the game, written between 1971 and 1991. The monks
Wiles presides over a vast quantity of information. The Hall has a file on every man who has played major-league baseball since 1871—more than seventeen thousand in all.
The chief librarian of the Hall, Jim Gates, came to the Hall of Fame in 1995 from the University of Florida and began putting order into what had been a huge, unor ganized pile of material. Gates took me on a tour of the museum’s lower level, which contains an estimated twenty thousand books about baseball and a vast number of artifacts. The best are kept in a small, vault-like room designed to preserve and protect fragile treasures. There is a handwritten manuscript of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” composed in 1908 (by two guys who had never been to a ballgame). The original promissory note for the sale of Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees is there, as is Judge Landis’s first contract. The papers of the Mills Commission, which proclaimed baseball’s Cooperstown paternity, are carefully guarded. So are the scorecards of the first perfect game (pitched by J. Lee Richmond in June 1880) and the scoresheet kept by broadcasters Ernie Harwell and Russ Hodges of the final game of the 1951 season, when Bobby Thomson’s “shot heard round the world” home run sent the Giants to the World Series. Among the most treasured books are a first edition of Sol White’s The History of Colored Base Ball , published in 1907; and the Ea gle Base Ball Club Rule Book , circa 1854.
Experts put the value of the Hall’s memorabilia at upward of $100 million. Only a tiny fraction is ever on public display. How it is shown is up to Ted Spencer, whose job as head curator makes him a Cooperstown abbot.
As a boy growing up in Boston, Spencer rooted for the Red Sox and dreamed of becoming an artist. The combination of art and baseball has been helpful in trying to blend Cooperstown’s traditional Norman Rockwell portrait of American baseball with the United Colors of Benetton realities of the modern age.
The monks work intently at the Hall of Fame, even in the off-season. Teams and players send in material that has to be read and cataloged. Hundreds of old boxes of team rosters, scouting reports, financial statements, notes of director’s meetings and fan club proceedings, attendance slips and ticket stubs, contracts and scorecards—the curatorial staff can’t keep up with it all. Thousands of calls come into the research center (every baseball fan has his own personal Lip Pike). Still, there is always time for a cup of coffee and an intense discussion about their favorite topic: baseball. One morning, the talk turned to favorite books.
Tim Wiles was enthusiastic about The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book , by Brendan C. Boyd and Fred Harris. It is a look at life and baseball in the 1970s through the trading card explosion of the time; people of a certain age and sensibility find it magical. Lenny Di Franza, a one-time punk rocker who works in the research department, picked The Boys of Summer , Roger Kahn’s elegiac retrospective of the 1950s Brooklyn Dodgers. Kahn has come to Cooperstown for years to work on his projects and is a house favorite. Gabriel Schechter chose Lawrence Ritter’s The Glory of Their Times , which appealed to his sense of nostalgia. Ted Spencer liked Darryl Brock’s If I Never Get Back , a fable about traveling with the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings. And everyone kept coming back to Harold Seymour’s three-volume history of the game, written between 1971 and 1991. The monks
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