I finally made it to Cooperstown

After a lifetime of waiting, I finally made it to Cooperstown. Not to be inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame — that childhood dream evaporated years ago — but to tour it and savor it.

Tour and savor I did, along with a lifelong friend and our wives, and we thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

Cooperstown, New York, is about a four-hour drive from my New Jersey home, and my friend Ed and I had been plotting for months to rendezvous there this summer. The week before last, my wife and I drove up while Ed and his wife arrived from elsewhere in upstate New York on their way toward their home in Cleveland.

It has taken several days for me to process all that we saw, and I expect I’ll be reliving the day indefinitely. So here are a few of the highlights from the hall, from my perspective.

First off, with a million memories of baseball in my life, I struggled to hold back tears as I entered the building. As we went up to the admission counter, the man checking us in asked if it was my first visit, and — again choking up — I said “Yes, I’ve waited my whole life to get here.”

We headed to the auditorium for a 10:30 showing of a film on the significance of the Hall of Fame that featured a number of inductees, from Tom Seaver and Joe Morgan to Cal Ripken and Derek Jeter. The film was outstanding, putting baseball in context of its importance to America and the Hall’s significance to the players enshrined. It also affirmed Reggie Jackson’s ego.

After the film, the crowd poured into the second floor exhibits on the origins of the game. We decided to head up to the third floor for a clearer shot at exhibits on how the game developed over the last 100 years or so.

The exhibits are extremely well presented, with uniforms, balls, bats, gloves, caps, spikes and all manner of programs, signs and other ephemera combined in glass cases to evoke an era or a theme. Every team and their predecessors were on display, and there was a moving section on the Negro Leagues that shows how shameful Major League Baseball was for the first half of the 20th century (and beyond). There was an excellent exhibit on women’s professional baseball, giving a broader view beyond what the marvelous “League of Their Own Movie” provided. The third floor also had a display of lockers for each of the current franchises.

We moved down to the second floor and toured the great exhibits on the origins of the game and the early club teams that proliferated as “base ball” developed into the national pastime.

Somewhere around 1 o’clock we took a break for lunch, then returned about 2 for another two hours. The highlight was seeing the plaques of all the inductees, which made for rich reading. I made sure to see the plaques of my dad’s heroes, Paul and Lloyd Warner of the Pittsburgh Pirates, and the heroes of my childhood — Koufax, Marichal, Mays, McCovey, Mantle, Maris, Gibson, Kaline, Palmer, Brooks and Frank Robinson, and on and on. A few of them are included in the gallery below.

As this blog started with a focus on baseball caps, the top image is from the hall’s gift shop, with a display of caps on sale. I’m not sure how I walked out of the shop without having bought a new cap or any other souvenir. But better than that, I left with memories that will stay with me forever.