Cooperstown Confidential
Read Cooperstown Confidential Online
Authors: Zev Chafets
Cooperstown Confidential
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Non-fiction
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A Match Made in Heaven: American Jews,
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(as William Wolf)
Zev Chafets
COOPERSTOWN
CONFIDENTIAL
Heroes, Rogues, and the Inside Story of
the Baseball Hall of Fame
Copyright © 2009 by Zev Chafets
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York
All papers used by Bloomsbury USA are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in well-managed forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
HAS BEEN APPLIED FOR.
Chafets, Ze’ev.
Cooperstown confidential : heroes, rogues, and the inside story of the Baseball Hall of Fame / Zev Chafets.—1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN 978-1-60819-109-3
1. National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. 2. Baseball—United States—History. 3. Baseball players—United States—Biography. I. Title.
GV865.A1.C37 2009
796.357'092'273—dc22
[B]
2009006601
First U.S. Edition 2009
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Book design by Simon M. Sullivan
Typeset by Westchester Book Group
Printed in the United States of America by Quebecor World Fairfield
Dedicated to
Charley Ronen, son-in-law extraordinaire,
Abigail Ronen, latest but not least,
and
Malcolm Cook MacPherson (1943–2009),
beloved friend
Contents
EIGHT. The Marvin Miller Affair
ELEVEN. A Few Closing Thoughts
Appendix 1: Rules for Election
Appendix 2: Hall of Fame Members
Appendix 3: The Honor Rolls of Baseball
Cooperstown Confidential
Soon after I started work on this book, I got in touch with Bob Lip-syte, a former
New York Times
sportswriter. We didn’t know one another personally, but he had once written some good things about a novel of mine. Naturally, this disposed me to think of him as both wise and virtuous.
In an e-mail, I told Lipsyte what I was writing and asked if he would share his thoughts on the Baseball Hall of Fame. He responded with a question of his own: Why the hell was
I
writing a book on the subject?
Good question. I am not now, and never have been, a sportswriter or a baseball historian. As a kid in Pontiac, Michigan, I played ball, collected baseball cards, and rooted with all my heart for the Detroit Tigers to regain their past glory—or at least make it out of fifth place in the division. The Hall of Fame was a distant place back then, but it loomed large. Our baseball catechism began with the fact that Ty Cobb was the first man inducted into the shrine. Harry Heilmann, Mickey Cochrane, and Charlie Gehringer represented us in Coopers-town. So, after 1956, did Hank Greenberg and, the following year, “Wahoo” Sam Crawford. My friends and I were too young to have seen any of them play, but it didn’t matter: we had a connection to greatness.
In 1967, I moved to Israel. Baseball wasn’t played there (the national sport is freestyle po litical argument, no statistics allowed), and American games weren’t broadcast on tele vision because, at the time, Israel had no televi sion. All I had were the box scores on the sports page of the
International Herald Tribune
and a subscription to
Sports Illustrated,
which arrived sporadically or—when
SI
ran a cover that interested Israeli postal clerks, on subjects like soccer or women in bathing suits—not at all.
Sometimes we American expat journalists played sandlot baseball in the park, much to the amusement of the Israelis, who preferred soccer. But that changed in the late seventies, when a group of American socialist hippies arrived at Kibbutz Gezer, a collective farm about a half hour’s drive from Jerusalem. One of their first acts was to lay out a softball diamond. They also went about planting crops, some of which had more in common with Humboldt County than the Land of Milk and Honey. The kibbutzniks were good socialists; they believed in sharing. And so, within a few years, Gezer became the Coopers-town of Israel. Teams formed. Kibbutz Gezer fielded a squad of men and women, an act of gender-mixing that seemed revolutionary at the time, and also humiliating to the teams that lost to them. The Venezuelan embassy, one of the best squads, often showed up with drinks from the diplomatic duty-free store. So did the marine guards from the American embassy. All of them beat us, the foreign correspondents. My memories of those games are hazy, but I did take away one lasting lesson: not all substances are performance-enhancing.
Baseball never caught on in Israel, a fact that didn’t deter a group of American entrepreneurs from attempting to set up a professional league there in 2007. A former U.S. ambassador to Israel, Dan Kurtzer, was appointed commissioner. Six teams were designated and began recruiting. Open tryouts were held in the U.S. for Jewish players who might want to combine a baseball career with a Zionist decision. This effort quickly yielded to the more realistic plan of importing players from Latin America. Two former major-leaguers, Kenny Holtzman of the Cubs and Ron Blomberg of the Yankees, were among the first managers. But even former big-leaguers didn’t put fans in the grandstands. To be fair, there were no grandstands. The Baptist Village near the airport had a baseball field but it prohibited beer drinking, and its team quickly folded. There were only two other “stadiums”—an improvised ball field in a Tel Aviv park and the diamond at Kibbutz Gezer. In deference to the Sabbath, league games were not played on Saturday; and they weren’t played at night, either, because there were no lights. The games weren’t broadcast or telecast, and the Israeli press, after a half-hearted attempt to explain the rules of the sport, more or less ignored the whole thing. Unsurprisingly, the Israel Baseball League folded at the end of its first season. Evidently Commissioner Kurtzer had failed to inform the investors that the average Israeli would rather undergo a colonoscopy than watch nine innings of baseball in the hot sun. Chalk it up to yet another failure of American intelligence in the Middle East.
I missed the demise of the Israeli League. At that time, I was living in Westchester, New York, not fifteen minutes from Yankee Stadium—enemy territory. But despite my boyhood hatred of the Yankees, I found myself gradually drawn into the saga. It was, I discovered, great to be a Yankees fan. Unlike the Tigers, the Yankees were in the pennant race every year. The team had a roster full of future Hall of Famers, and bought new ones every season. The New York media turned these players into familiar A-list characters, complete with soap-opera back stories. Did Jeter hate Rodriguez, or were they best friends? What was Giambi on, and could he get off in time to save his career? Andy Pettitte kept following Roger Clemens around like Robin trailing Batman—what was that all about? What did Joe Torre really think of Steinbrenner? And what the hell was A-Rod doing at Madonna’s apartment in the middle of the night? Unwillingly, irresistibly, I found myself being drawn to my new home team. (Rooting for the Mets was never an option. They are in the National League, an orga niza tion I grew up regarding as more foreign than the Warsaw Pact.)
My son, Coby, was eight when I first took him to Yankee Stadium. I was a columnist for the
New York Daily News
at the time, and I scored two tickets in the newspaper’s box, just in back of the Yankees dugout. (I had always wondered who sits in such great seats. The answer, it turned out, was mostly drunk sales reps from out of town.) As the Yankees were coming off the field from infield practice, pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre walked past, saw us sitting there and rolled a baseball across the roof of the dugout to Coby. With that gesture, I overcame a lifetime of Yankee-phobia and plunged myself back into the endless cycle of baseball fandom.
That season I also took Coby to Cooperstown, the first visit for both of us. One of the Hall’s key selling points is that it connects generations, and I kept that in mind as we walked through the exhibits and the plaque room and stood in front of Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth and my boyhood hero, Al Kaline. Coby listened to my generation-connecting nostalgia with interest, but he was even more charmed by the memorabilia stores along Main Street. He bought a bat with his name inscribed on it, a little piece of baseball immortality of his own. He took a few practice cuts with the newly minted relic, and his expression reminded me of the look I had seen on the faces of pilgrims ascending the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem, sporting “authentic” crowns of thorns from the Seventh Station of the Cross Boutique.
Religious language comes easily in Cooperstown. “Since its founding by Stephen C. Clark and its opening a museum in 1939,” writes Jeff Idelson, the president of the Hall, “the Baseball Hall of Fame has always been the definitive repository for baseball’s important relics and the museum has always drawn national attention as a showcase for the game’s sacred past.”
Every year, about 350,000 visitors come to the Hall of Fame.
*
Many regard themselves as “pilgrims” visiting a shrine, where they can gaze on hallowed relics and bow before the bronzed images of immortals.
It is hard to overestimate the power this confers. For fifty years, America has devoured its own iconic institutions: Vietnam killed John Wayne. Watergate did in the imperial presidency. Bill and Monica transformed the Oval Office from a chamber of awe to a room with a rug. The once-grand mainline Protestant churches stand empty. Catholic priests are openly despised by their former altar boys. The Declaration of Indepen dence, it turns out, was written by a sexist slave master. After the 2000 election, half the country even believed the Supreme Court was in the tank. But Cooperstown has survived this carnival of iconoclasm and flourished. Not even Major League Baseball’s image busters—strikes and lockouts, drug and sex scandals, multimillionaire .260 hitters and carpetbagging owners—have dimmed its aura.
Cultural historian Jacques Barzun once remarked that “whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game.” The sacred nature of Cooperstown is one of baseball’s realities.
Certainly the media, critical and cynical about so much else, tend to speak of the Hall of Fame in reverential terms. There are debates every year about which players do and do not deserve to be elected, but rarely does anyone question the way the Hall actually works and who is in charge; what players do behind the scenes to get themselves elected; how “Cooperstown values” are sometimes used to enforce baseball’s unwritten codes on its nonconformists and renegades; or the ways in which the Hall writes and promotes an official narrative of baseball’s past and of the history of America.
America has few honors greater than enshrinement in the Hall of Fame of its National Game. The title HoF that the approximately sixty living members are entitled to add to their signatures confers upon them the closest American equivalent of knighthood. Election is an achievement of almost mystical significance. “If you don’t feel an aura that’s almost spiritual when you walk through the Hall of Fame, then check tomorrow’s obituary. You’re in it,” pitcher Don Sutton said in 1998. Of course, Sutton was being enshrined at the time.
And shrines, as everyone knows, are full of mysteries and secrets.
* The term “Hall of Fame” is a convenience; the full name is the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. This takes in the National Baseball Hall of Fame (that is, the gallery of plaques) and the National Baseball Library and Archives.