Part 26 (1/2)

This clotted flow is an inadequate representation of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, but it is perhaps a good tissue sample of one man's brain taken after a couple of hours in the marvelous place. What has been left out so far is the fans themselves-dozens and scores and hundreds of them, arrayed throughout the four floors of the modest Georgian edifice on any summer afternoon, with wives (or husbands) and kids and grandfathers and toddlers in tow, and all of them talking baseball a mile a minute: ”Pop, look at this! Here's Roger Clemens' cap and his gloves and his shoes he wore on the day he struck out all those guys last year-you know, that twenty-strikeout game?” and ”Ralph Kiner led the National League in home runs his first seven years running-how do you like that, honey!” and ”Alison! Alison-n-n! Has anybody seen Alison?” I have done some museum time in my day-if I had to compare the Hall with any other museum in the world it would be the Victoria and Albert, in London-but I can't recollect a more willing and enthusiastic culture-crawl anywhere. It took me a little while to dope this out, and the answer, it became clear, is geographical. The Hall of Fame draws a quarter of a million visitors every year-a total that cannot be fas.h.i.+oned out of drop-in locals from Cooperstown (pop. 2,300), plus a handful of idle music lovers, up for the nearby Glimmergla.s.s Opera summer season, and a few busloads of kids from day camps scattered along adjoining Otsego Lake. (There are other tourist attractions in town as well: the Fanner's Museum and Fenimore House, the latter of which displays some furnis.h.i.+ngs of the eponymous and tireless non-Cleveland Indian publicist James Fenimore Cooper.) Cooperstown is an inviting little village, with flowering window baskets set out in front of its dignified old brickfront stores, but it isn't near anyplace else, unless you count Cobleskill or Cazenovia. From New York City, it's three hours up the New York Thruway and another hour out west of Albany before you hit the winding back-country road that takes you thirty miles to the lake and the town. Folks who come to the Hall are pilgrims, then; they want to be there, and most of the visitors I talked to during a couple of recent stays told me they had planned their trip more than a year before. This place is a shrine.

I had resisted it, all these years, for just that reason. I've been a baseball fan all my life-starting long before the Hall of Fame opened, in 1939-but lately when each summer came along I realized once again that I preferred to stay with the new season, close to the heat and fuss and noise and news of the games, rather than pay my respects to baseball's past. Cooperstown seemed too far away, in any case, and I secretly suspected that I wouldn't like it. I was afraid I'd be bored-a dumb idea for a baseball fan, if you think about it. By mid-June this year, however, up-close baseball had begun to lose its flavor for me. The World Champion Mets-my Mets-had lost most of their das.h.i.+ng pitching staff to injuries and other unhappy circ.u.mstances, and the team fell victim to bad nerves and bickering as it slipped farther behind in the standings. The Red Sox, who also held my fealty, were even worse off: twelve games behind and already out of the race, it seemed-a terrible letdown after their champions.h.i.+p season of 1986. Spoiled and sulky, I suddenly remembered Cooperstown one afternoon in late June, and within an hour had extemporized a northward expedition with Charles, a colleague of mine and a fellow-Soxperson, and his ten-year-old Soxson, Ben-perfect companions, it turned out. We cheated a little by flying up from LaGuardia on a Catskill Airways commuter hop to Oneonta, where we rented a car and instantly resumed our colloquy (it was too noisy in the plane to talk about baseball or anything else), which went on uninterrupted through two soggy days and four meals and three bottom-to-top sojourns in the Hall of Fame; an essential trip, we decided, maybe even for Yankee fans.

Like other shrines, perhaps, the Baseball Hall of Fame is founded on a fantasy-the highly dubious possibility that baseball was ”invented” in Cooperstown by a local youth, Abner Doubleday, while he was fooling around with some friends in a pasture one day in the summer of 1839. In 1905, a committee of baseball panjandrums and politicos, the Mills Commission, forgathered to determine the origins of the national pastime, and after three years of deliberation it bestowed the garland on Doubleday, who had not done damage to his cause by growing up to become a major general and fight in the Mexican and Civil Wars. (He himself never laid claim to the baseball invention.) The commission, we might note, was invented at a time when organized professional baseball was not quite thirty years old and the modern, two-league era (and the first World Series) was only three years old. Teddy Roosevelt was in office, in a time of glowing national self-a.s.surance, and the Mills Commission reacted with alacrity to a letter from one Abner Graves, a mining engineer who had grown up in Cooperstown and swore he had been on hand on the day when nineteen-year-old Abner Doubleday scratched out the first diamond in the dust of a Cooperstown pasture, put bases at three angles, and added a pitcher and a catcher for good measure. Subsequent and more cautious baseball historians have agreed that the American game almost surely evolved out of a British boys' amus.e.m.e.nt called rounders, and that the true father of baseball was Alexander Cartwright, a young engineer and draftsman and volunteer fireman, who first marked off the crucial ninety feet between the bases and formulated the pretty and sensible arrangement of nine innings to a game and nine men to a side; his team, the New York Knickerbockers, came into being in Hoboken in 1845, and their sort of baseball-”The New York Game”-became the sport we know today. The Cooperstown chimera persisted, however, and was wonderfully transfused by the 1934 discovery of a tattered homemade baseball among the effects of the aforementioned Graves, in Fly Creek, New York, three miles west of Cooperstown. The ball-soon enn.o.bled as The Doubleday Baseball-was purchased for five dollars by Stephen C. Clark, a Cooperstown millionaire who had established a fortune with the Singer Sewing Machine Company. The ancient ball became the centerpiece of Clark's small private collection of baseball memorabilia and, very soon thereafter, of the National Baseball Museum-an idea happily seized upon and pushed forward by Ford C. Frick, the president of the National League, and by other gamekeepers of the era, including Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis. The museum opened its doors on June 12, 1939. It is providential, I think, that the Hall has no official connection with organized baseball, although Commissioner Peter Ueberroth and his predecessor, Bowie Kuhn, are both on the Hall's current board of directors, as are the two league presidents and a couple of team owners. The Hall is also financially independent, making do nicely on its gate receipts (admission is five dollars for adults, two for kids), donations, and the revenues derived from an overflowing and popular souvenir shop. The place seems to belong to the fans.

The Doubleday Baseball, the touchstone of the sport, is on view in the Cooperstown Room of the H. of F.: a small dark sphere, stuffed with cloth, which looks a good deal like some artifact-possibly a pair of rolled-up socks-exhumed from a Danish peat bog. Near its niche, on the same wall of the Cooperstown Room, there is an eloquent and unapologetic establis.h.i.+ng text (it was written by Carl Lundquist, a long-term early publicist) that disarms and pleases in equal measure: Abner Doubleday, who started baseball in Farmer Phinney's Cooperstown pasture, is not enshrined in the Hall of Fame. However, it is known that as a youth he played in the pasture and that a homemade ball, found in a trunk, belonged to him. Of such facts are legends made. As a Civil War general, Doubleday performed deeds of valor that earned him a place in history; but in the hearts of those who love baseball he is remembered as the lad in the pasture where the game was invented. Only cynics would need to know more.

The journey that even the most distant fan must endure to arrive at the Hall of Fame is but a few steps compared to the pa.s.sage required of its members-one hundred and ninety-nine retired major-league players, players from the defunct Negro Leagues, old umpires, old managers, baseball pioneers, celebrated bygone executives-whose bronze plaques, each with inscribed name and feats and features, line the wall of the Hall of Fame Gallery and form the centerpiece and raison d'etre of the pantheon. Elections consist of an annual polling of four hundred members of the Baseball Writers' a.s.sociation of America, and to be selected for the Hall a player must be named on seventy-five percent of the ballots; to be eligible for the ballot, the candidate must have put in at least ten years' service in the majors, plus a five-year waiting period following retirement. A backup system permits election by the Committee on Veterans, an august eighteen-man body (baronial old players, executives, and writers, including Stan Musial, Roy Campanella, Monte Irvin, Gabe Paul, and s.h.i.+rley Povich) that selects notables of the distant and not so distant past who have somehow been pa.s.sed over by the BBWA; a subcommittee picks players from the Negro Leagues, which went out of business in the early fifties. (Eleven Negro League players have been elected to date.) In the early days of the Hall, the Veterans Committee was the more active body, since it had to deal with the claims and statistics of many hundreds of old-timers, dating back into the nineteenth century, while the writers were voting on players most of them had actually seen on the field. One hundred and twenty-six plaques in the Hall (ninety of them depicting players) are attributable to the Veterans Committee, but a more accurate view of the workings of the present system emerges when one sorts out the fifty-four living players now in the Hall, sixteen of whom ascended by way of the Veterans Committee and thirty-eight by way of the writers' poll.

Election of the immortals began even before the Hall was completed, and by Dedication Day four years' balloting had produced twenty-five members-senior G.o.ds, if you will. One of the riveting exhibits at the Hall is a formal photograph of the living inductees (there were eleven of them, and ten are in the picture) who came to Cooperstown that sunny June afternoon in 1939. Connie Mack, spare and erect and fatherly in a dark suit and high collar, sits next to Babe Ruth in the front row; the Babe, moon-faced and gone to beef, has an open collar above his double-breasted suit, and his crossed left leg reveals that his socks have been rolled down to shoe-top level. Tris Speaker, playing short center field as usual, stands directly behind Ruth, and Honus Wagner and Walter Johnson, with their famous country sweetness perfectly visible, occupy the corners. As you study the photograph (never a quick process, no matter how many times you have seen it), your gaze stops at the other men's faces, one by one, as recollection of their deeds and their flair for the game comes flooding back: Eddie Collins, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Nap Lajoie, Cy Young (pipe in hand), and George Sisler-old warriors squinting in the sun, comfortable at last. The one man missing is Ty Cobb. He had car trouble on the road and missed the photo opportunity by ten minutes-late for the first time in his life.

The Hall of Fame Gallery-part Parthenon, part bus terminal-is a long hall, windowed at the far end, with dark columns that set off the raised and illuminated galleries, left and right, in which the plaques are arrayed. You want to resist the place, but you can't-or at least I couldn't. I am an old cosmopolitan, and I live in a city where wonders are thrust at you every day, but not many gala openings have produced the skipped heartbeat, the p.r.i.c.kle down the neck, the interior lampglow of pleasure that I felt every time I walked into this room. Others there felt the same way-I heard them, every time-and I noticed, too, that the bronze memorials, which are hung in double rows within alcoves, elicit a neighborly flow of baseball talk and baseball recollection among the strangers standing together before them. The familiar plaques-the immortal's likeness, in framed bas-relief, supra, with accompanying decorative bats and laurel spray, and the enn.o.bling text and stats below-start on the right, as you enter, and proceed by years and order of election down that wall and then, doubling back, up the left side of the room. The early texts tend to be short: Jove needs few encomiums. Ty Cobb's five lines read, ”Led American League in batting twelve times and created or equalled more major-league records than any other player. Retired with 4,191 major-league hits.” Babe Ruth: ”Greatest drawing card in history of baseball. Holder of many home-run and other batting records. Gathered 714 home runs in addition to fifteen in World Series.” That ”gathered” is felicitous, but all the texts-almost fifty years of them now-have a nice ring to them: a touch of Westminster Abbey, a whiff of the press box. Christy Mathewson (he died young, in 1925) was among the first five players voted into the Hall, and the s.h.i.+ning raised lines on his plaque sound the trumpets, all right: ”Greatest of all the great pitchers in the 20th century's first quarter, pitched 3 shut-outs in 1905 World Series. First pitcher of the century ever to win 30 games in 3 successive years. Won 37 games in 1908. 'Matty was master of them all.'”

The early likenesses on the plaques (no one seems to know the name of the first sculptor)* show an a.s.surance and zest that lift them above the heroic genre. Different (and sometimes indifferent) talents have worked the portraits in subsequent years, but no matter: fine art isn't quite the point here. Ted Williams, who waltzed into the Hall in 1966 (his first year of eligibility, of course), so disliked the looks of his plaque that he persuaded the Hall to have another one struck off and hung in its place. This one missed him, too, but you overlook that when you notice that his nose and the brim of his cap have been worn to brightness by the affectionate touches of his fans. (”I'm a saint, you mean?” he said when I told him about this not long ago, and he gave one of his bearlike huffs of pleasure.) In time, my visits to file Gallery became random cruises from alcove to alcove, until I would be brought to a stop by a likeness, a name, a juxtaposition, or a thunderous line or two of stats. I found Casey Stengel, Burleigh Grimes, Larry MacPhail, Hank Aaron, Rube Waddell. Amos Rusie (The Hoosier Thunderbolt) adjoined Addie Joss, my father's favorite pitcher. Here was Freddie Lindstrom. (”As youngest player [he was eighteen] in World Series history, he tied record with four hits in game in 1924.”) And here, all in a cl.u.s.ter, were Yogi Berra, Josh Gibson, Sandy Kou-fax (”Sanford Koufax...Set all-time records with 4 no-hitters in 4 years, capped by 1965 perfect game, and by capturing earned-run t.i.tle five seasons in a row”), Buck Leonard, and Early Wynn. Hack Wilson's plaque showed his determined jaw but stopped just above the place where he became interesting: his mighty shoulders and thick, short body (he was five feet six), which powered fifty-six homers and a record one hundred and ninety RBIs in 1930. I found Roberto Clemente (”...rifle-armed defensive star set N.L. mark by pacing outfielders in a.s.sists five years”) and Eppa Rixey (but why did they delete his nickname: Eppa Jephtha Rixey?). I looked up Johnny Mize and learned something I had forgotten about the Big Cat, if indeed, I'd ever known it (”Keen-eyed slugger...set major-loop records by hitting three homers in a game six times”). The plaques of this year's Hall of Earners-Catfish Hunter, Billy Williams, and Ray Dandridge (another star from the Negro Leagues)-were not yet in place, of course, and after I looked at the bare wall that awaited them I moved along into an empty alcove and thought about the faces that would be hung up there in bronze over the next few summers: Willie Stargell, Johnny Bench, Carl Yastrzemski, g.a.y.l.o.r.d Perry, Rod Carew, Jim Palmer, Pete Rose...I could almost see the plaques already, and I pretty well knew what the lines on them would say, but these longtime favorites of mine would be altered, in quite, thrilling fas.h.i.+on.

Men embronzed have a certified look to them, as if they had always belonged here, but for many of them the selection process has been far from peaceful. Great stars usually jump into the Hall on their very first year of eligibility-in the past decade, these have included Willie Mays, Bob Gibson, Frank Robinson, Brooks Robinson, and Willie McCovey. But Juan Marichal had to wait three years before garnering the requisite seventy-five percent of the writers' ballots, and Don Drysdale waited out ten. Looking back, we detect other excruciations, some of them (but perhaps not all of them) inexplicable. Charlie Gehringer didn't pa.s.s muster until his fifth ballot; Gabby Hartnett waited nine years and Lou Boudreau thirteen. Ralph Kiner made it on his thirteenth try, and Ducky Medwick on his fifteenth, and last, year of eligibility. Candidates who fall shy after fifteen Baseball Writers' ballots must survive three further years in limbo before their names and feats can be taken up by the Veterans Committee-twenty-three years after their retirement from the game. Johnny Mize, whose apotheosis was decreed twenty-eight years after he had hung up his spikes, told me that he was grateful for the honor, but confessed that he had lost interest in the process along the way; he had been particularly unhappy whenever he saw his name slip lower in the writers' estimation because of some arriviste youngster on the ballot. Jack Lang, of the News, who, in his capacity as the near-perennial secretary-treasurer of the BBWA, supervises the voting (he himself was voted into the writers' section of the Hall at this year's induction), told me that many newly eligible stars experience an early ground swell of support and then tail off in ensuing ballots. Columnists and owners and fan clubs have been known to campaign intensively for favorites (Joe Sewell, a stubby little shortstop with the Indians in the nineteen-twenties, and Bob Lemon, the big Cleveland right-hander, inspired an inundation of letters before being admitted), but the process can backfire. Phil Rizzuto, the Yankee shortstop, has become the Harold Sta.s.sen of the Hall in recent years, and Lang believes that the sort of electioneering for the Scooter conducted by George Steinbrenner and by segments of the New York media helped bring about the defiant selection of another diminutive shortstop from the same town and the same era: Pee Wee Reese. The committees have considerable power, when you come to think about it, and one must a.s.sume that the writers are more reliable today than they were at times in the past: twenty-three BBWA voters left Willie Mays' name off their ballots altogether when he first came up for consideration, in 1979. He survived this knockdown pitch and made it home that first year just the same. Lang is uneasy when asked to speculate for long about such matters, and so is another good gray baseball friend of mine, Seymour Siwoff, the chief flamekeeper at the Elias Sports Bureau. He and I had a telephone conversation about the vagueness of the statistics emanating from the old Negro Leagues, and he said, ”The numbers just aren't there, so we have to rely on what the guys who played with him say about a player we're thinking about for the Hall. But I don't worry about it. When a man is in, he's in, and we should be happy for him. We need the Hall, is how I see it. You gotta have that romance.”

Museums wear you down, and Ben and Charles and I took time off from the Hall whenever the bats and stats and babies and souvenir Astro key rings and genuine Cubs Christmas-tree b.a.l.l.s began to swim and blur in our heads. We visited Doubleday Field, the lovely old brick-grandstand ballpark (it's owned by the village) where an annual exhibition game between two big-league teams is played during Induction Weekend; a local high-school team and a semi-pro club play here, too, but the field was sopping on the morning we got there, and the only players on it were some robins busily working the base paths. Ben took a shot at an adjoining baseball range, and his father and I watched him swing like Yaz, like Wade Boggs, and now perhaps like Mickey Mantle and Tris Speaker and Joe D. as well. Mostly, though, we used our time away from the Hall to talk about the Hall. Ben's favorite feature was the I.B.M. Major League Leaders computer stations, where you could punch in the names of players (nine hundred and twenty-two of them) in more than eleven hundred categories, and doodle them around on the screen. ”I didn't know all that much about Ty Cobb before this,” he said at lunch one day. ”I'd read about him in books, but I didn't pay much attention, because he was such a rat. But he was great-I have to admit it.” Charles was fond of a second-floor nook given over to the old Boston Beaneater teams and their near-prehistoric stars, like Jimmy Collins, Kid Nichols, King Kelly, Hughie Duffy, and Billy Hamilton, who had battled Ned Hanlon's Orioles for dominance of the National League at the end of the last century. A splendid photomural of the Beaneater fans shows a thousand derbies. ”I think there was a song way back then called 'Slide, Kelly, Slide,'” Charles said, ”and when I was a kid there was a 'Slide, Kelly, Slide' ride at Whalom Park, in Fitchburg, Ma.s.sachusetts. I'll bet it's still there,”

All three of us loved the bas.e.m.e.nt in the Hall, and we kept going back there. It was a catchall-a bas.e.m.e.nt-full of leftovers and old board games and stuff: Abner Doubleday's campaign trunk; a Hillerich & Bradsby batmaking lathe; an awesome red iron pitching machine (circa 1942) on rubber wheels-a farm implement, you would guess-which fired b.a.l.l.s plateward with a mighty rubber band, after a black paddle had flipped up to alert the batter just before the tw.a.n.gg! In another sector we found an a.s.semblage of slotted All-Time Leaders boards-lists of the individual lifetime standings in hits, doubles, runs batted in, and so forth; it reminded you of the lobby of a high-school gym. The names Aaron and Cobb and Musial ran across the offensive boards like bright threads in a tapestry. The lists were up to the minute, with Reggie Jackson's five hundred and fifty-five home runs, putting him sixth on the Home Runs roster, eighteen back of Harmon Killebrew and nineteen up on Mickey Mantle. Nearby, I lingered over a little exhibit about the handful of perfect games that the sport has produced in its long history, from John Richmond's 10 victory over Cleveland for the Worcester Ruby Legs, on June 12, 1880, down to Mike Witt's perfecto on September 30, 1984, when his Angels beat the Rangers by the same score. (Catfish Hunter had a perfect game to his credit, too: Oakland 4-Twins zip, in 1968.) These had been quick entertainments. Cy Young whipped the Athletics in an hour and twenty-five minutes in 1904, and Sandy Koufax needed only eighteen additional minutes to wrap up his famous outing (Dodgers 1-Cubs 0) in 1965. There have been only eleven perfect, n.o.body-on-base-at-all games in big-league play, if you count Don La.r.s.en's win over the Dodgers in the 1956 World Series, and don't count Harvey Haddix's twelve perfect innings for the Pirates against the Braves in 1959. (He lost the no-hitter, and the game, in the thirteenth.) John Montgomery Ward, pitching for the Providence Grays against the Buffalo Bisons, pulled off the second perfect game in the National League only five days after Richmond's feat, and the next perfect game in that league came along eighty-four years later: Jim Bunning and the Phillies over the Mets, 60, on June 21, 1964. You can't beat baseball.

Now and then, I sensed a fleeting wish that the Hall were less optimistic and decorous. I think I would have enjoyed a visit to Client Corner, in a sector devoted to baseball and the language, and perhaps a downside exhibit-Boot Hall, let's say-of celebrated gaffes of the sport: Merkle's b.o.n.e.r, Snodgra.s.s's m.u.f.f, and so forth, right on down to Bill Buckner's through-the-wickets error in Game Six of the Series last year. Sometimes you wonder if the Hall isn't excessively preoccupied with the past, but the charge doesn't quite hold up. The Great Moments display that catches your eye the moment you walk in has Joe DiMaggio's fifty-six-game hitting streak and Johnny Vander Meer's successive no-hitters in 1938 and Babe Ruth's sixty homers (and Roger Maris's sixty-one), and so on, but Roger Clemens is up there, too, striking out those twenty batters (they were Mariners) on April 29th last year. The sport is ongoing and indivisible, and the Hall's Baseball Today room downstairs has every single Topps Bubble Gum card for 1987 and the bats wielded by Marveil Wynne, Tony Gwynn, and John Kruk when they led off the Padres' first inning against the Giants on April 13th this year with a first-ever three home runs in succession. ”I wouldn't give up my bat if I'd done something like that,” Ben said on inspecting this wonder. ”I'd sell it. No-I'd keep it.”

The Hall, in any case, wouldn't have bought Ben's bat; it doesn't buy stuff. Aside from a few objects on loan, all twenty-three or twenty-four thousand artifacts on view or tucked away in Curator William T. Spencer's workroom have been acquired by gift-often a solicited gift, to be sure. The regularly incoming flood of baseball memorabilia and baseball junk is so heavy that a staff committee, which includes Director Howard C. Talbot, Jr., a.s.sociate Director William J. Guilfoile, and Registrar Peter Clark, who are the worthies most responsible for the imagination and wit and good sense evident in the present Hall, meets every Friday to decide what to accept and (mostly) what to turn down. Dozens of putative Babe Ruth home-run b.a.l.l.s are offered by mail, and so, too, are ”authentic” Babe Ruth bats, including innumerable samples of a Louisville Slugger model, once turned out by the hundreds, with the Babe's imprinted signature on the barrel. The committee is slow to reject, however, for slim leads often yield treasures. A hesitant letter about a box full of clothes belonging to ”somebody named Bender” that turned up in an attic in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., three years ago eventually produced Chief Bender's dazzling white 1914 Athletics uniform, which is now to be seen in the General History sector on the second floor, next to a dandy photo of the Chippewa fireballer. Players are prime sources, of course, and some-Hank Aaron among them-have almost emptied their lockers for the Hall, possibly on the theory that immortality can always be improved a little.

Bill Guilfoile has spent a lifetime in baseball. (He writes the texts for the current plaques, among other things.) Before he came to Cooperstown, in 1979, he was a.s.sistant to the general manager and director of public relations for the Pirates, and I suspect that he may be responsible for the acquisition of the life-size wax statue of Roberto Clemente that now stands just outside his office door. This mysterious-looking effigy used to live in a back room at Three Rivers Stadium, in Pittsburgh, and one day-this was long before Clemente's untimely death in a plane crash-Pirate trainer Tony Bartirome and pitcher Jim Rooker spirited the thing down to the clubhouse and laid it out on the trainer's table, and turned off most of the lights. Then they told team physician Dr. Joe Finegold that Clemente had just fainted on the field, during batting practice. Dr. Finegold-or so the story goes-hurried in, took one appalled look, and felt for a pulse.

If I have slighted Mr. Guilfoile and his colleagues here, the National Baseball Library, which adjoins and is part of the Hall itself, must suffer a similar inadequate dismissal. I did pay a brief visit to the library, where the director, Tom Heitz, shrugged and laughed when I asked him to tell me about the four or five million newspaper doc.u.ments, the hundred and twenty-five thousand photographs, the fifteen thousand-odd baseball books, the old radio-broadcast tapes, and so forth, that are in his care. The library is the custodian of the famous John Tattersall Collection of early-to-recent box scores, and Heitz told me that game information and biographical material about eighty-five percent of all the men who have ever played the game, at any professional level, was readily at hand. He permitted me to leaf through the files of that day's letters and applications to visit the stacks (ten thousand or so scholars consult the library every year), and I found queries from someone who wanted a photograph of the 1934 World Series; from someone who needed the box scores of games he had attended in 1934, 1961, and 1965 (there's a lot of this, Heitz said); from someone who wanted the name of every pitcher who had ever struck out ten or more batters in a single game (not feasible to sort out, Heitz said); an extensive communication from a Belgian scholar, Leon Vanviere, who is the world's No. 1 expert on baseball references in stamps; a letter from Bill Marshall, a scholar at the University of Kentucky, who is preparing a work on the mid-America, lower-minors Kitty, Bluegra.s.s, Ohio State, and Appalachian Leagues; and two or three letters asking for information about a family member or ancestor who claimed or was said to have played professional ball once. Almost a quarter of such heroes, Heitz told me, turn out to be phantoms. But, like Bill Guilfoile, he is cautious. A woman who called up the library a few months ago was found to be a relative to Ted Welch, who pitched in three games for the St. Louis Terries, in the old Federal League, in 1914 (Won 0-Lost 0; ERA 6.00). The library knew nothing else about him-not even his birthplace-but a research questionnaire was mailed off, and Heitz expects that Ted Welch will have an extra agate line or two in the next edition of the Baseball Encyclopedia.

Before I said goodbye, I asked Heitz if his staff could dredge up the box score of a game played in the spring of 1930, in which Lefty Gomez, pitching his first big-league game, beat the White Sox at Yankee Stadium. I was pretty sure about that much, because I was there that day (I was nine years old), and because I had talked with Gomez about the game a few years back. The box score came to me in the mail two days later, and the first thing I noticed when I looked it over was that there were five future Hall of Famers on the field that day, including both pitchers: Red Faber and Lefty Gomez. Lefty fanned the side in the first inning (there was a little game summary attached to the box score), and the Yankees went on to win, 41.

I hadn't planned to go back to Cooperstown at once, but when Induction Weekend came along, late in July, I couldn't stay away. I was a little nervous about too much pomp and oratory, but what I encountered was a jolly family party of baseball. Twenty-five Hall of Fame members came back, to welcome the inductees-Hunter, Williams, and Dandridge-and so did their wives and (in many cases) children and grandchildren, and so did neighbors, brothers and sisters, and old teammates. Mary Rice, the widow of Hall of Fame outfielder Sam Rice, of the old Was.h.i.+ngton Senators, came back, as usual (Sam died in 1974), and so did her daughter Christine and her granddaughter Kimberly; this was Kimberly's nineteenth reunion at Cooperstown. Hall of Famer Happy Chandler-former commissioner, former Kentucky governor, former Kentucky senator-turned up, still hale and handshaking at eighty-nine, and so did Willie Mays, Ralph Kiner, Bill d.i.c.key, Robin Roberts, the Splendid Splinter (more a tree now), Campy, Cool Papa, Country, Pee Wee, the Big Cat, Stan the Man, and more. The n.o.ble, Doric-columned old Otesaga Hotel, whose lawns ran down to the glistening Otsego waters, took us all in (my wife and me included), and, hanging out in and around its lobby, bars, deep verandas, and restaurants, you heard baseball and nothing else for three steaming, cheerful summer days and nights. The fans were there, too, though at a distance-eight to ten thousand of them, heavily familied as well. The Hall had set up a long, airy tent down by the lakefront for three extended autograph sessions-all comers on the first and third days, kids only on the second-and the waiting lines were so long that they had to be mercifully truncated; the foresighted early arrivals had camped out all night to hold their places. I sought no autographs (one small girl in a Mariners T-s.h.i.+rt asked for my signature, somehow under the impression that I was Billy Williams), but I happily stuck around, and there in Cooperstown, encircled by great souls and heroes of the pastime, I bathed in a Ganges of baseball: Johnny Mize (at seventy-four, he is melon-faced and ma.s.sively calm-unchanged): These batters today are so nervous. You look at Winneld and he's duh, duh, dah-duh at the plate. They're doing a dance up there. I'd always walk into the box, drop my bat down, get my feet right, and then I'd be on base or out of there.... My worst day was when I got traded to the Giants and I knew I'd have to hit in the Polo Grounds all year, with that five-hundred-foot center field. It was four hundred and twenty-two feet to right-center, where I liked to hit the ball. Bill Terry hit straightaway and he batted .400 in the Polo Grounds before I got there, and to me that's .500, easy, in any other park.

Ray Dandridge (square and squatty, with bowed legs and broad, large hands; he wore a snowy white cap by day and an engaging smile at all times; seventy-three years old, possibly older): I played shortstop and second base, but third base was my real position. I played with the Detroit Stars in 1933, then in Newark-the Newark Dodgers that turned into the Newark Eagles. I played all year round, mostly for fifteen dollars a week. Went to Puerto Rico, and it was fifteen dollars a week; went to Cuba, fifteen dollars a week; Venezuela and Santo Domingo and Mexico, fifteen dollars a week. I played seven years in Mexico and made some more money there in the end. We won the champions.h.i.+p for Mexico City.... I'm a place-hitter-hit the ball to all fields. I'm a Stan Musial man. I loved to see that man hit. He's my idol, because I hit like him-or he hit like me.

Monte Irvin (played in the Negro Leagues and then for seven years with the Giants and, briefly, the Cubs; he batted .458 in the 1951 World Series; tall and dignified): Ray Dandrige played third base with style and cla.s.s. He had the quickest hands-I never saw anybody come in and sweep up the swinging bunt the way he could do it. He's in a cla.s.s with Brooks Robinson.... If the major leagues had integrated ten years earlier, you'd have seen the great Negro League stars in their prime-Satchel, Buck Leonard, Josh Gibson. We had some sure Hall of Fame pitchers you probably never heard of-Roy Partlow, Raymond Brown, and Leon Day. Leon is here this weekend, you should talk to him... Back then, you had to go easy at the beginning with your team, because there'd likely be an old-timer holding down your spot. He'd say, ”Boy, this position belongs to me-go play somewhere else.” So you learned to play all over the place.

Ted Williams (no description needed; he talked about hitting, of all things): The man who made that statue of me noticed something most people never did: I shortened up on the bat. I knew I was smarter than ninety-nine percent of the other hitters-not mentally but baseballically. I said to myself, ”The quicker I am, the longer I can wait. The longer I can wait, the less I'm likely to get fooled. So how can I be quick? Don't get too heavy a bat. Don't swing from the end of the bat. And with two strikes don't try to pull the ball all the time. And get a good pitch to hit.” That's all there is to it! When I was first in the Pacific Coast League, I went to see Lefty O'Doul, because I was a student of hitting. I talked to him one afternoon-he was with the Seals-when he was sitting on the gra.s.s out in center field, taking some sun. He said, ”Kid, don't let anybody ever change you.” And that's when I thought, Boy, I must be pretty good!

Ernie Banks (still narrow as a slat at fifty-six; still talking, here to led Williams, in the next chair in the autographing tent): You should be a Rhodes Scholar, Ted-baseball's never had one. We need a Rhodes Scholar, because this game takes brains. You even look smart, so you could have done it. You and me, we're the same kind of players. We like people who focus on the task, not the results. It's not the gold, it's the getting.

Billy Williams (eavesdropping from the next chair in line): Oh, no. Not again. I was Ernie's roommate, so I heard this stuff for sixteen years. But I'm all right. I'll survive it.

Joe Sewell (eighty-eight years old, and probably an inch or two under his listed height of five feet back with the Indians in the twenties; struck out only three times in 1930 and again in 1932, and only a hundred and fourteen times lifetime, in more than seven thousand at-bats; wears thick gla.s.ses now and carried nine pens and pencils in his s.h.i.+rt pocket): I have the bat at home that I used for fourteen years. The same bat. It weighs forty ounces. I never cracked it, because I knew how to swing the right way. I took good care of it-worked on it every single day. I rubbed it with a chicken bone and a plug of tobacco, and then I'd roll it up and down with a smooth bottle. The bat was your tool, so you took care of it. They wanted that bat up here at the Hall, but I'm keeping it.

Catfish Hunter (at forty-one, he is the second-youngest player-second to Koufax-ever to attain the Hall; he looks even better than he did when he was out there painting the corners): I don't miss the game, because I'm still in it, coaching my boys. One son, Todd, I coached up from Little League right on through Legion ball. Now he's graduating, so I'm going back to wait for my son Paul, who'll be ready for Little League in a couple of years. I'm a Little League groundskeeper right now. Some parents think Little League pressure is too much for kids, but you got to get used to pressure sometime if you're going to want to play... My wife and my three kids are here. My three sisters will be here tomorrow, and three of my four brothers, and their kids. There's two busloads and ten or twenty carloads of folks coming from North Carolina, so my home town-there's twenty-five hundred inhabitants, same as when I was a kid-will be not at home tomorrow.