Hall of Fame Can’t Answer Baseball’s Big Question

The first thing you learn at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum is that real fans don’t take lunch breaks.

About half-past noon, the main exhibit hall on the museum’s first floor is teeming with activity. For one day, visitors are taking their nourishment from bats, balls and the other 6,000 items that tell a remarkable story.

A young couple and their two children are watching a TV monitor, and being thoroughly entertained by Abbott and Costello’s hilarious “Who’s On First?” comedy routine. A few steps away, visitors are clustered around “The Three Umpires,” Norman Rockwell’s classic painting of the stone-faced arbiters braced against some industrial-strength rain drops. Hanging in a place of prominence are 6- to 7-foot-long banners emblazoned with the photographs of Jim Palmer and Joe Morgan, the 205th and 206th inductees into baseball hallowed Hall.

It’s baseball as you’ve probably never experienced it. Baseball in Sensurround.

In 1990, the Hall of Fame and Museum is an impressive repository of baseball history, not to mention a mighty tourist attraction. When it opened for business in 1939, the museum welcomed more than 25,000 visitors, and, as recently as 1984, yearly attendance hovered just above 200,000. But several years ago, the explosion in baseball’s popularity finally reached this remote country outpost in upstate New York. In 1989, visitors to the Hall topped 410,000, with the majority coming during the peak months of June, July and August.

They might have come to see the jersey worn by Orel Hershiser in the fifth game of the 1988 World Series, Bo Jackson’s cap from the 1989 All-Star Game or Mickey Mantle’s Yankee Stadium locker. They’re all here.

Or maybe they made the pilgrimage hoping to pick up a handy fact or two about the game. Like the young boy in a Red Sox cap who stood in front of a display case that held items belonging to the dynastic Yankees of the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s. Among the treasures was a fielder’s glove and a pair of spikes used by Phil Rizzuto, the famous shortstop turned TV pitchman.

As he stood beside the window, the boy made a startling discovery. Then, in a tone of utter astonishment, he asked his dad, “You mean the guy from The Money Store ... was a baseball player?”

Yes, the museum is full of surprises.

It’s also an excellent place to go in search of baseball’s origins and secrets, the trouble being that most of the deepest secrets have to do with who gave us baseball in the first place and, most important, where. There is no shortage of theories on this point. Ask the citizens of Hoboken, N.J., who recently proclaimed their town “The real birthplace of baseball,” and hired a public-relations firm to convince the rest of us. But if you’re interested in making friends during your visit to Cooperstown, only one answer will do.

The historians pretty much agree now that there isn’t a baseball birthplace and that there almost certainly wasn’t a first baseball game. Instead, baseball probably evolved slowly during the 1830s and ‘40s from a game known as “Townball” that was played in any number of cow pastures where men gathered with their bare hands and handlebar mustaches.

No matter. Cooperstown has been recognized as the cradle of baseball since the early 1900s, when A.G. Spalding, the sporting-goods manufacturer, suggested a commission be appointed to resolve the question of baseball’s birth once and for all. In 1907, the seven-member panel announced its decision, which was that the first game was played here and that it had been created in largest part by one Abner Doubleday, a Civil War hero and a career military officer.

The commission considered lengthy testimony from a number of sources, but its conclusion was based largely on the recollections of a man named Abner Graves, an elderly mining engineer, who reported that baseball had been “invented” by Doubleday between 1839 and 1841. Doubleday wasn’t in a position to either confirm or deny this; he’d died in 1893 in Mendham, N.J.

In reporting its findings, the commission outlined its reasons for finding that Cooperstown was the birthplace of baseball, and praised its star witness, referring to Graves as a “reputable gentleman.” But years later, there’s more reason than ever to challenge both conclusions. Among them: About 20 of Doubleday’s journals survive, but none mentions baseball; Graves was 5 and Doubleday 20 when the former claimed the two were classmates; in his final years, Graves was judged criminally insane after he shot and killed his wife.

The Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum doesn’t answer the question of baseball origins any more convincingly than Graves did. But there are fascinating exhibits that speak to the game’s earliest chapters. In the Cooperstown Room, on the museum’s ground floor, is a glass case containing the museum’s first acquisition -- a brown, bruised, crudely shaped baseball literally bursting out of its seams. Steven C. Clark Sr., one of Cooperstown’s richest and most civic-minded citizens, bought the ball for $5 from another local who claimed it was one of those used by Doubleday and the boys. Ball in hand, Clark began pitching the idea of a baseball museum to a skeptical baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who began to see the genius of the idea only when Clark offered to pay for it.

Under the heading of relics, there’s a gem in the display that traces the evolution of baseball equipment. It’s the original catcher’s mask, invented in 1876 by the captain of the Harvard College baseball team. While it won’t win any beauty contests, the mask is a first, and firsts are a rare thing even in this building.

Peter Clark, the Hall of Fame’s registrar, considers this one of the museum’s most precious possessions because “it’s one of the few things in the collection that you actually can point to as the first, the start of all catcher’s masks.” He pauses to consider the enormity of it. “It’s almost like seeing the first baseball,” Clark said. “If such a thing existed, can you imagine how overwhelming that would be?”

Clark is one of the museum executives who shoulder the heavy responsibility of deciding what new items should be added to the collection. The group, which also includes the museum’s librarian and curator, meets each Friday to discuss letters and calls that have come in with offers of everything from Babe Ruth autographed baseballs to a 1925 Hudson automobile whose owner claimed it belonged to Ty Cobb. Most offers (the museum does not purchase items) are politely turned down on the grounds that the museum already is well-stocked in that area. Balls signed by Ruth are particularly plentiful -- Clark estimated the museums owns 50 to 60 balls with his signature -- and more are offered almost every week. “There’s so many out there, it kind of makes you wonder how he had time to play baseball,” Clark said.

The museum accepted 373 items last year, including 15 autographed baseballs, four uniforms and five items that fall under the heading of “books and publications.” Among those gifts was a letter to Jackie Robinson from Sen. John F. Kennedy dated July 1, 1960.

Items high on the museum’s wish list are old uniforms, especially if they date back to the 19th century. “If we could come up with something going back to the Cincinnati Red Stockings period, that would be a real coup,” Clark said. That’s not as much of a long shot as it may sound. Three years ago, a man from Ohio phoned the museum with an offer of six Chicago Cubs uniforms from 1909, including one that had belonged to Hall of Famer Frank Chance. The man’s grandfather had been a florist in Chicago, and the players, many of whom were customers, presented them as gifts.

The museum’s executives use a rigorous system of checks and double checks to satisfy themselves that all the items they accept are the real thing. First, they examine the items closely. After you’ve seen Ruth’s signature a couple hundred times, it’s not too difficult to spot a phony. When it becomes necessary, they also quiz the donors to determine things like where they obtained the item and from whom. If they don’t get the right answers, the gift isn’t accepted. That’s what happened with the Cobb car.

Sometimes the matter of authenticity is trickier than others. On the first floor, in the east wing, most of one wall is given over to a display of baseballs from no-hit games dating back to Bob Feller’s no-no (Cleveland 1, Chicago 0) on April 16, 1940. Most of the balls are autographed, and on some the winning pitcher also has scrawled the final score and date.

The problems come in determining just what balls you are looking at. Clark says the museum tries to get the last ball used in the game because “there’s something about the last pitched ball that people will ooh and aah about.” But it isn’t always successful in doing that, according to a random poll of two no-hit pitchers who live in the Baltimore area. The museum has the ball used to record the last out of Rex Barney’s no-hitter. The Baltimore Orioles public-address announcer, who pitched for the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1940s, vividly recalls being asked to autograph the ball for display at Cooperstown.

Jim Palmer, on the other hand, says the only place his no-hit ball is on display is in his garage -- it’s in a plastic bag, along with a baseball from his 1966 World Series victory over Sandy Koufax. The most likely explanation is that the museum received a ball -- but not THE ball -- from his big game.

There are no doubts about what you are seeing in a special room on the first floor, the one with the cathedral ceiling and the bronze faces on the walls. The Hall of Fame gallery is quieter than most places in the museum. It’s the kind of place that makes people think about removing their hats, or maybe taking off their shoes. Something about being in the company of Ruth’s plaque -- or the plaques of Walter “Big Train” Johnson or, yes, Brooks Calbert Robinson Jr. -- has that effect on a baseball fan.

This weekend, they’ll add two more faces to the collection.