FAME AND FORTUNES : Horse Racing Strives to Catch Its Baseball Neighbor

From its start, the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum was a hit. The operators scheduled an inaugural induction ceremony that included appearances by Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson and Honus Wagner.

The Hall of Fame in tiny (population: 2,300) Cooperstown, N.Y., took that beginning in 1939 and has built on it since. The tendency is to refer to the town as out-of-the-way Cooperstown, but more than 300,000 visited the museum last year, and last month a crowd of more than 20,000 showed up for the inductions of Carl Yastrzemski, Johnny Bench and Red Schoendienst.

The National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame, less than a furlong away from the Saratoga Race Track here, is something else. This museum, to say the least, was slow getting out of the starting gate, and it wasn’t until last year, when a $6-million renovation was completed, that the Hall of Fame joined the 20th Century. Before that, the place could have been mistaken for a mausoleum.

A sports fan whose persuasions run to both baseball and racing has good reason to visit Cooperstown and Saratoga Springs, because one is a two-hour drive from the other. Saratoga Springs (population: 23,000) is a 3 1/2-hour drive from New York. The central airport for Cooperstown and Saratoga Springs is in the state capital of Albany, which is about 60 miles east of Cooperstown and 25 miles southeast of Saratoga Springs.

Operators of the racing museum might have been shamed into upgrading their facility because of the continued popularity of the nearby baseball shrine and because Churchill Downs introduced its $7.5-million Kentucky Derby Museum a few years ago.

The Derby museum is still the best racing has and draws about 120,000 fans a year, more than double the annual attendance at its Saratoga counterpart. In fact, the Travers Stakes, the showcase race of the monthlong Saratoga season, has sometimes attracted more fans than the racing museum has drawn in an entire year.

Whitney Tower, the new president of the racing museum, is related to the Whitney family, which has raced horses for generations. Tower is former turf writer for Sports Illustrated.

Unabashedly, the racing museum has borrowed some of the best elements from both Cooperstown and Churchill Downs. There is a theater, surrounded by walls displaying the plaques of the Hall of Fame inductees, that features “Racing America,” a 15-minute split-screen panorama directed by Keith Cheetham.

Visitors can listen, via telephone, to Angel Cordero explain the art of race riding or hear Wayne Lukas talk about training and how he picks the horses for his clients.

The phones for Lukas and other trainers are on a fence next to a full-scale replica of a section of trainer Charlie Whittingham’s barn at Santa Anita.

There are 10 galleries in the museum. The one that covers the most ground is in the theater, where six computer terminals can provide a glimpse of the career of any horse, jockey or trainer who has been enshrined. Yes, Bill Shoemaker still gets Forego to the wire in that memorable New York race in which it always seems that the late-running gelding won’t reach the finish line first.

Speaking of Shoemaker, there seems to be little in evidence here of the legendary jockey, who was inducted into the hall in 1958--three years after the first group. Perhaps the museum will do better by Shoemaker after his retirement early next year.

While Cooperstown can offer Lou Brock’s shoes, worn the day he stole his record 893rd base, Saratoga has Eddie Arcaro’s boots. Stan Musial’s locker can be found in Cooperstown, Angel Cordero’s at Saratoga. Cy Young, who won 511 games, had an Ohio license plate in 1954 that read “C-511-Y”; the late trainer, Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons, timed his horses with a diamond-studded stopwatch.

While racing’s museum was being improved, baseball was spending $6 million on the Fetzer-Yawkey Building (named after the owners of the Detroit Tigers and Boston Red Sox), which includes a 15-minute multimedia show in a three-dimensional, make-believe ballpark.

Baseball’s museum will probably always be better because it has so much money to spend. The annual budget is $3 million, more than half coming from gift-shop and catalogue sales. After that rebuilding expense of $6 million, racing is cantering along on an estimated $650,000 per year.

Racing has a gift shop, too. A three-foot-high concrete jockey sells for $950; a laminated front page from the Daily Racing Form on the day Affirmed beat Alydar in the Kentucky Derby sells for $95.

The other day, Paul Mellon, philanthropist and breeder and owner of horses, was browsing in the gift shop. Mellon may have been the largest single contributor to the renovation fund, providing $369,000 and loaning the museum many paintings from his extensive collection.

Mellon left, however, without making a purchase. Two of his horses were about to win back-to-back races at the track across the street.