Cooperstown Confidential by Zev Chafets Read Free Book Online

obvious. In 1953, Cooperstown skeptics convinced Congress to officially cite Alexander Cartwright as the founder of baseball. Like most efforts to legislate history, this was not entirely convincing, either. The best assessment is found on the Web site of the Hall of Fame circa 2008: “We may never know exactly where baseball was invented, and it’s possible it was not invented in any one place, but rather evolved in several areas over several years. We do know that some of the earliest forms of organized baseball that we are aware of took place in settings similar to that of Cooperstown. In that sense, the village serves as a fitting repre senta tion of the heritage of the game, and a fitting home to the Baseball Hall of Fame.”
    No such agnosticism was in evidence in Cooperstown on June 12, 1939. Ken Smith, who covered the first induction ceremony for the New York Mirror (and later wound up running the Hall), gave a fair account of the general feeling. “Cooperstown . . . now a bustling little village and a shrine to the pioneering spirit of one Abner Doubleday, whose ingenuity conceived the first game of baseball on a pasture, only a few yards from where the remains of the author, [James Feni-more] Cooper, were to be laid years later . . .
    “For while the pioneering Cooper may have created a greater thing, his literary inventions reached fewer people. The product of Abner Doubleday’s fertile brain was embraced by millions, accelerating through generations, creating national heroes, wealth, industries, careers and unpre cedented recreation.”
    Earlier that year, the New York Yankees and Washington Senators had kicked off baseball’s centennial at Arlington National Cemetery, by attending a memorial service at the graveside of Major General Abner Doubleday. Representative James Shanley, a Connecticut Demo crat, introduced a bill making June 12 National Baseball Day. President Franklin Roo sevelt sent a letter to Stephen Clark in which he declared it “most fitting that the history of our perennially pop u-lar sport should be immortalized . . . where the game originated and where the first diamond was devised a hundred years ago.” Given FDR’s mischievous sense of humor, it is not impossible that he got a smile out of sending this public blessing to the estranged brother of his would-be nemesis. But he had a serious purpose, too. The United States, in 1939, was preparing itself for a world war. The nation would be called upon to rally around the symbols of its own best self. Thirty years earlier, in the age of Theodore Roo sevelt, A. G. Spalding, and the Mills Commission, baseball had been given a forged birth certificate and a war hero for a father, and invited millions of immigrants to learn real American values at the ballpark. Now the sons of the immigrants were preparing to go to war. Nations at war need a sense of shared history, sacred shrines, and heroic symbols. Coopers-town fit the bill perfectly.
    The inductees spoke in turn. Nobody said anything particularly memorable.
    Babe Ruth was given the final slot, and he used it to hit a rhetorical pop-up. “They started something here,” he said, “and the kids are keeping the ball rolling. I hope some of you kids will be in the Hall of Fame. I’m very glad that in my day I was able to earn my place. And I hope that the youngsters of today have the same opportunity to experience such a feeling.”
    “I now declare the National Baseball Museum and the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York—home of baseball—open!” boomed Judge Landis. The crowd cheered and headed for Doubleday Field to see a choose-up all-star game between teams captained by Honus Wagner and Eddie Collins. “Each of the major league teams had sent two representatives,” wrote Ken Smith.
The selection of the two delegates from the New York Yankees had produced a whimsical observation from the loquacious Lefty Gomez. “Leave it to the Yankees to be represented by a couple of