The Roger Angell Baseball Collection

by Roger Angell

  Enough. Come sit down and take a load off—let’s sit here on these old green ballpark seats and watch this movie tape. I think it’s—Yes, it is:

  COSTELLO: Now, wait. What’s the name of the first baseman?

  ABBOTT: No, What’s the name of the second baseman.

  COSTELLO: I don’t know.

  ABBOTT: He’s the third baseman.

  COSTELLO: Let’s start over.

  ABBOTT: O.K. Who’s on first.

  COSTELLO: I’m asking you what’s the name of the first baseman.

  ABBOTT: What’s the name of the second baseman.

  COSTELLO: I don’t know.

  ABBOTT: He’s on third…

  What about bats? Pete Rose had a nearly knobless bat, with six separate strips of tape on the handle—or at least that’s what he swung when he rapped out his four-thousandth hit (he was with the Expos then), against the Phillies, in 1984. Probably he wouldn’t have done so well with Babe Ruth’s thick-waisted model, or with Home Run Baker’s mighty mace. Maybe weight isn’t what matters: here’s Jim Bottomley’s modest-looking bat lying on its side in a case—the bat he used in a September 16, 1924, game, when he went six for six against the Dodgers (Sunny Jim played for the Cardinals, of course) and batted in twelve runs. I won’t forget that, I’m sure, but here in the World Series section (there is a cutout silhouette of Joe Rudi making that beautiful catch up against the wall in 1974:1 was there!) some text tells us that the Tigers batted .455 against the Padres’ starting pitchers in the 1984 Series—and how in the world could I have forgotten that, now that I know forever that Cy Young’s 1954 Ohio license plate was “C-511-Y” Cy won five hundred and eleven games, lifetime) and that Mrs. Lou Gehrig’s New York plate for 1942 (Lou had died the year before) was “I-LG”?

  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 fashioned out of drop-in locals from Cooperstown (pop. 2,300), plus a handful of idle music lovers, up for the nearby Glimmerglass 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 furnishings 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 dashing pitching staff to injuries and other unhappy circumstances, 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 championship 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-assurance, 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’ amusement 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 ennobled 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 conne
ction 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 establishing 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 passage 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’ Association 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 Shirley Povich) that selects notables of the distant and not so distant past who have somehow been passed 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 gods, 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 prickle 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 ennobling 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 shining 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 assurance 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 cluster, 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 title 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 rec
ord one hundred and ninety RBIs in 1930. I found Roberto Clemente (“…rifle-armed defensive star set N.L. mark by pacing outfielders in assists 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, Gaylord 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 fashion.