Cooperstown Confidential (3 page)

Al Kaline was a member of this Baltimore tribe, a working-class German-Irish kid who married his sweetheart right out of Southern High School, moved to Detroit, and stayed there for fifty years as a player and broadcaster. Team loyalty and traditional conformity are highly prized virtues in the baseball culture, which prefers its heroes plain and modest. Individuality and charisma are often discouraged as “hot-dogging.” Players don’t usually get into Cooperstown with the baseball equivalent of end-zone spikes or 360-degree dunks. This was especially true in the American League of my youth, where the dashing, athletic style of the Negro leagues was actively discouraged by the simple expedient of hiring very few black players. The Tigers were less hospitable to African-Americans than most; their first player of color, Ozzie Virgil—who didn’t arrive until 1958—was from the Dominican Republic. Since integration, the fans of Detroit, and other American League cities, had grown increasingly nervous about the growing gap between us and the National League. Kaline was a great white hope, proof that you didn’t need to be a Mays or an Aaron or a Clemente to be great. There’s no record that Kaline shared or encouraged this view—and none that he didn’t. He was always the strong, silent type.

Standing in line waiting to meet Kaline, I could see his acne scars. As a kid, another thing I had loved about Kaline was his courage. He knew how to play through zits (although he had them erased on his baseball card). I used to imagine him keeping a tube of Clearasil in his locker. For a moment my cynical adult self wondered what other substances he might have had stashed in there, but I dismissed the thought as unworthy. I can no more picture Al Kaline using steroids than I can Davy Crockett hunting bear with an Uzi. Besides, I owed Kaline. Although he didn’t know it, he gave me a gift that had lasted me a lifetime: a magic number.

When my turn came, I introduced myself as a writer working on a book. Kaline took this in with an expression of polite wariness. Like other great players, he has spent many years deflecting hero worshippers, groupies, cranks, reminiscers, irate critics, hustlers, guys down on their luck: an entire universe of needy strangers. He glanced over my shoulder where the line of paying customers—at sixty dollars a signature—was stalled. “Sounds interesting,” he said. “Why don’t you get in touch with me and we can discuss it? The Tigers PR department will know how to reach me.”

“The Tigers,” I said, as if I were hearing the name for the first time. “Right, the PR department.”

“Great,” said Kaline with a smile of well-mannered dismissal.

“PR department,” I repeated. “Right?”

“Right.”

And that was that. I wanted to say: Al, I know you don’t remember me, but we broke in together. I’m the kid in right field with the weird grandfather who wanted me to run out on the field that night. And .340? That’s my number.

As a ten-year-old I had taken my first and last ride on a monster roller coaster. Back on solid ground, I wondered how I would know if I was ever truly frightened out of my wits—so scared that I was actually mentally incapacitated. I needed a secret watchword, a wit-detector, something so fundamental that forgetting it would be a sign of total breakdown. I chose the one thing I knew better than my own name: Kaline’s championship batting average.

I focused on .340 through teenage traumas, took it with me to the army, and invoked it in the midst of a near-drowning in the Sea of Galilee. In Tel Aviv, during the first Gulf War, every time I had to fit a gas mask onto my nine-year-old son’s face, I thought of Kaline. In my drinking days, .340 was a self-administered sobriety test (warning: this is not admissible in court). It will probably be my last volitional thought before sinking into Alzheimer’s.

There was no way to explain this to Kaline, especially not at the front of a line of strangers under a blistering August sun. Besides, I didn’t want to take the chance that he wouldn’t be in the least interested.

The Freeman’s Journal
is Cooperstown’s weekly newspaper. It was founded in 1808 by the father of James Fenimore Cooper. On Induction Weekend, with the national press assembled in the village, the
Journal
has an opportunity to express its thoughts on the state of baseball. The paper is inde pendently owned, but it often publishes Hall of Fame press releases verbatim, has an unfailingly admiring view of Hall chairwoman Jane Forbes Clark, and is generally regarded as a reliable reflection of the Cooperstown establishment’s point of view.* The subject of 2007’s editorial was steroids—and what to do about Barry Bonds.

While 60,000 fans honor Ripken and Gwynn
—
both men symbolize
hard work and fair play
—
in baseball’s mecca, on the West Coast a tainted
Barry Bonds is passing Hank Aaron’s career home-run record of 755.
It’s widely believed that Bonds would not be where he is without long-term
use of ste roids . . .

This isn’t academic. Cooperstown depends on a healthy Hall of Fame,
which depends on a healthy sport, which depends on the public’s affection
for the National Game.

* The material on the Clark family is based largely on
The Clarks of Cooperstown
, by Nicholas Fox Weber. Jane Forbes Clark made it clear that she does not hold the book in high regard. As an antidote, she sent me
Cooperstown
, by Louis C. Jones, originally published by the Otsego County Historical Society. Unsurprisingly, the book contains a highly sanitized view of the Clarks and their beneficence.

Five years from now when he becomes eligible
—
and every year
thereafter
—
the Baseball Writers’ Association of America should categorically
reject Barry Bonds for Hall of Fame enshrinement. MLB
should crack down on ste roid use definitively and with finality. The
players’ union should be just as adamant.

The Cooperstown establishment was tacking up a message on its clubhouse door for the rest of baseball—including the BBWAA, whose members serve as an electoral college at the discretion of the Hall’s board of directors—to see and absorb: No Cheaters Allowed.

On Sunday afternoon, a vast crowd gathered on the shadeless lawn of the Clark Sports Center to witness the enshrinement of Tony Gwynn and Cal Ripken, two “good guys” who had never been suspected (or at least publicly accused) of using any perfor mance enhancer stronger than Wheaties.

Fifty-three of the sixty-one living Hall of Fame players were on stage, under a canopy that protected them from the blistering sun. The most notable absentee was Hank Aaron, who was maintaining radio silence during Bonds’s run at his record. He had been a friend and competitor of Bonds’s father, Bobby, and of Willie Mays, Barry Bonds’s godfather, and Aaron didn’t want to get stampeded by the establishment into saying something derogatory.

The Hall of Famers were introduced. Naturally, the Baltimore crowd gave loud, hometown ovations to Brooks Robinson, Frank Robinson, Eddie Murray, Earl Weaver, and Jim Palmer. Willie Mays, Yogi Berra, and Reggie Jackson drew huge cheers, too. The biggest applause of the day went to the elusive Sandy Koufax, one of the only Hall of Famers who hadn’t spent the weekend signing autographs. Koufax is the Greta Garbo of baseball—short career, great charisma.

Sam Abbott, the rector of Christ Church in town, rose to render an Episcopalian baseball prayer. He assured the crowd that there were no losers there that day, only winners. He thanked the Lord for the inductees (“Have you ever created a man more effective with the bat than Tony Gwynn? Have you ever created a man more persevering in suiting up and playing hard despite nagging injuries, losing seasons, and mathematical elimination than Cal Ripken?”). He ended by thanking God for Stephen C. Clark, whose “vision and generosity” had enabled the founding of the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Jane Forbes Clark, Stephen’s granddaughter, rose to greet the crowd. A handsome woman in her early fifties, she wore a simple white dress and a strand of pearls. “The men behind me,” she said with aristocratic serenity, “define Hall of Fame character, integrity, sportsmanship, and incredible baseball careers.” The crowd cheered, of course, but I couldn’t help but wonder how much Ms. Clark actually knew about the men she had introduced with such sincerity. Many of them were, indeed, men of high character and unblemished reputation. But among them I counted a convicted drug dealer, a reformed cokehead who narrowly beat a lifetime suspension from baseball, a celebrated sex addict, an Elders of Zion conspiracy nut, a pitcher who wrote a book about how he cheated his way into the Hall, a well-known and highly arrested drunk driver, and a couple of nasty beanball artists. They had been washed clean by the magical powers of Cooperstown, HoF certified.

Tony Gwynn was the first inductee to speak. The Hall of Fame helps its new members prepare by sending them speeches from years past, but it doesn’t do much good. In the old days, the players were mercifully brief. At the first ceremony, in 1939, Walter Johnson stood up, said “I’m very proud to have my name enrolled in the Hall of Fame. And I’m very happy to have my name enrolled with these men,” and sat back down again. Gywnn said approximately the same thing in fifteen minutes. He thanked his parents, his brothers, his wife, his children (his son is a ballplayer; his daughter, a singer, had just performed the national anthem), his managers, coaches, teammates, opponents, friends, and fans. Then—totally oblivious to the tens of thousands of people baking on the lawn before him—he delivered a quotidian account of his long career. Presumably, San Diego fans found it interesting.

Cal Ripken came up next and gave an iron-man oratorical perfor-mance that made Gwynn’s ramble seem like the Gettysburg Address. On a few memorable occasions in Cooperstown history, inductees have used their speeches to say something important. In 1995, Mike Schmidt called on baseball to reinstate Pete Rose. A year later, Jim Bunning, a congressman at the time, issued a stern warning to a baseball establishment that was stumbling through a series of strikes and scandals. “Get your house in order. Stop going to the players and asking them to foot the bill. And get a commissioner—a real commissioner [an allusion to the fact that Milwaukee owner Bud Selig was “acting commissioner” at the time]. Come up with a way to share the revenues . . . Find a rudder before Congress gives up on you and intervenes.”

Bunning’s warning was scoffed at by the press, but he proved prescient. In the years since his induction, Congress has become increasingly involved in baseball issues. A lot of lawmakers looked at Barry Bonds’s expanding hatband and saw themselves on C-SPAN.

The most important induction speech in the Hall’s history was delivered by Ted Williams in 1966. It came, appropriately, out of left field. “Inside the building are plaques to baseball men of all generations. I’m proud to join them. Baseball gives every American boy a chance to excel. Not just to be as good as someone else, but to be better than someone else. That is the nature of man and the nature of the game. And I’ve been a very lucky guy to have worn a baseball uniform, and I hope some day the names of Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson in some way can be added as a symbol of the great Negro players who are not here only because they weren’t given a chance.”

Ripken was not planning to do a Bunning or a Williams. He began with the customary life list of thank-yous and then turned philosophical. “Did you ever stop to think about how your life would unfold or imagine how you would like your life to turn out? One of those reflective pauses happened in my life when I was around eigh teen years old. I thought I had it all figured out: I would play big-league baseball until about forty-five and then worry about the rest of my life after that. It took me a little while, but I did come to realize that baseball was just one part of my life—with the possible exception of this weekend, of course. This was never more clear to me than when we had children. I realized that the secret of life is life.”

The crowd cheered and cheered. They loved Ripken, a regular guy who said what they would have said. They loved Cooperstown, too; a place that looked like America was meant to look. They loved the Hall of Fame, a magical shrine with the power to freeze time and let heroes live forever. Eventually they stopped cheering and clapping and began to file out in the direction of the closest cold beer and the chartered buses that would take them back to Baltimore and the America that really is.

TWO . . .
Paternity Suit

T
he Baseball Hall of Fame—like many great American institutions—was founded by a fortune and a fiction. Its story begins before the Civil War and, at first, it had nothing to do with baseball.

In 1851, a mad machinist named Isaac Merritt Singer patented a sewing machine. Singer was a man of huge physical size and appetites, husband and consort to multiple women, the father of at least twenty children.

To help patent his various inventions, Singer turned to a New York attorney named Ambrose Jordan. But Jordan found him so unbearably vulgar that he palmed him off on his son-in-law and ju nior law partner, a buttoned-down gentleman by the name of Edward Clark.

Together, Clark, the son of a well-to-do Hudson Valley family, and the scandalous Singer fought a prolonged legal battle with other sewing machine inventors and patent attorneys over the rights to the new machine. Finally, they reached an agreement that made everyone happy. Singer and Clark wound up as partners in the IM Singer Sewing Machine Company, and soon the two of them were among the richest men in America.

Singer used his money to acquire a mansion on Fifth Avenue and proceeded to scandalize polite New York society with orgies and excesses. Eventually he was arrested for bigamy. (Since he had three wives at the time, the charge probably should have been trigamy, or mass marriage—a fourth wife was discovered after he fled.) He escaped to Europe, where he remained in exile, with a new, French wife. Eventually he landed in En gland, where he built a 115-room mansion and populated it with many of the children from his five baby mamas. When he died, in 1875, chaos over the inheritance ensued.

Edward Clark spent his money in more genteel fashion. A staid Episcopalian and family man, he moved his newly wealthy family to Cooperstown in 1854 and embarked on the life of an American aristocrat. Clark picked Cooperstown because the beauty of the area charmed him and, mostly, because his wife had been raised there.

The village itself had been founded about 1800 by William Cooper, a hot-tempered New York Federalist who sided with Aaron Burr against Alexander Hamilton. Like Hamilton, Cooper got himself killed over politics, purportedly sustaining a fatal knock in the head during a heated politi cal argument in Albany in 1809. Cooper left behind a passel of children, including his twenty-year-old son, James Fenimore Cooper.

The younger Cooper, of course, became a famous writer and a civic booster. In 1838, he predicted a fine future for his village. “We shall have no mushroom city but there is little doubt that in the course of time, as the population of the country fills up this spot will contain a provincial town of importance,” he wrote.

Like his father before him, Cooper was the leading citizen of Cooperstown. And, like his father, he was a contentious fellow. His neighbors mostly hated him, especially after he refused to let them use the village picnic grounds, which he legally owned. He died in 1851, and two years later his grand house, Otsego Hall, burned down. When Edward Clark moved to Cooperstown the following year, the villagers were more than ready for a new squire.

The Clarks have now dominated Cooperstown and the region around it for five generations. They own just about everything, starting with the grand Otesaga Hotel, where Hall of Famers are put up during Induction Week. The family holdings include about ten thousand acres in and around the village. The family founded and controls the local hospital, donated the land for the public schools, and built the Clark Sports Center. The Clark Foundation supplies villagers with scholarships and grants, decorates the town for the holidays, and more or less takes care of what ever civic emergencies arise. And, of course, the Clarks control the Hall of Fame.

For Cooperstown, the regency of the Clarks has been, by and large, pleasant and prosperous. The family’s excesses and eccentricities have been largely enacted away from home. Edward Clark built the Dakota, one of Manhattan’s first luxury apartment buildings and now a cherished landmark, though at the time it was derided as “Clark’s Folly.” His son Alfred was the very model of a Victorian husband and father at home—and led a secret homosexual life in Europe. Alfred had four children, all boys, of which the two most interesting were Sterling and Stephen. They were fellow art collectors but bitter rivals. Sterling scandalized his (ostensibly) staid family by marrying a French actress. After the death of their mother, in 1909, Sterling, Stephen, and their two brothers were among the richest people in the world.

Sterling Clark was a nasty piece of work. He turned a fight over the inheritance into a long-running tabloid sensation. At one point he denounced his youngest brother, Stephen, as “that swine and treacherous sneak.”

Sterling had nothing to do with the Baseball Hall of Fame, but he does merit an asterisk in the annals of American political scandal. Sterling despised Franklin Roose velt, to whom he always referred as “Rosenfart,” as a traitor to his class. In November 1934, the
New York
Times
reported that a retired Marine Corps major general, Smedley Darlington Butler, had informed a committee of the House of Representatives that Sterling Clark had approached him with a plan to overthrow the government and replace Roosevelt with a military dictator, General Hugh S. Johnson. Both Johnson and Clark denied it, and a House investigation was inconclusive. But a member of that inquiry, John McCormack of Massachusetts, described the attempted putsch as “a threat to our very way of government by a bunch of rich men who wanted Fascism.”

In 1936, Sterling decided to pack up and leave Cooperstown to his brothers. In a departing gesture of animosity, he refused to sell them his property, donating it instead to a children’s home. It was only three years later that Sterling’s brother Stephen would create the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. This is where forgery and fiction enter the story.

To understand how this happened, you have to dial back to a clash of baseball titans in 1903. Henry Chadwick was the first great baseball journalist and statistician—the Bill James of the nineteenth cen Born in England, he came to America as a young man and for forty years was baseball’s foremost historian and reporter. He edited the
Beadle’s Dime Base Ball Player
, the sport’s first publication, and created the game’s essential statistical mea sures, such as batting average and earned run average. He also expanded the box score and was the first to compile running totals of home runs, games played, and other foundational numbers. Without Chadwick and his stats, generations of American kids would have been left with nothing to memorize.tury.

In 1903, at the age of eighty, Chadwick published an article on the origins of baseball, in which he took a Darwinian view. The game, he argued, had its roots in the two-century-old English game of rounders, which in the new world had gradually morphed into town ball; the first or ganized team was the Olympic Town Ball Club of Philadelphia, circa 1833. Town ball had, he concluded, evolved into baseball as it was at the turn of the twentieth century.

This was not exactly news. Chadwick had been asserting this evolutionary doctrine of baseball’s origins for twenty-five years. But the spirit of the times had changed. America was in the midst of the biggest and, to many, the most disconcerting wave of immigration in its history. In 1892, Ellis Island opened America’s front door, and in the next two decades almost thirteen million people—almost a quarter of the entire pre-1890 population—came in. These new immigrants were not Protestant immigrants from northern Europe but Jews, Italian Catholics, and other exotic breeds. A lot of Americans worried that they would change the national character. President Theodore Roo sevelt was among the concerned. He welcomed newcomers on condition that they learn English and blend into the American culture; the U.S., he warned, had no place for hyphenated citizens.
*

Chadwick, the man who labeled baseball a foreign import, was himself hyphenated.

Someone had to challenge Chadwick’s account. That man was A. G. Spalding.

If Henry Chadwick was known as the Father of Baseball, Spalding was its first superstar. He broke in as a pitcher with the Boston Red Stockings in 1871 and led the National Association in wins for five straight years. Twice he won 50 games in a season. In 1875, his record was 55–5. The following year, he moved to the newly formed National League, where the Chicago team paid him a salary and 25 percent of the gate in return for his services. He led the NL with 47 wins that year. Spalding retired after the next season with a lifetime 253–65 won–lost record and a 2.14 ERA. He was twenty-six years old.

The same keen business instinct that prompted Spalding to cut himself in on the Chicago gate receipts led him to found A. G. Spalding and Brothers, which turned into the first great American sporting goods empire. In 1878, he founded
Spalding’s Official Base Ball
Guide and Official League Book,
the most important baseball journal of its time. To edit it, he hired Henry Chadwick himself. A decade later, figuring that his fortunes were neatly tied up with the American game, he or ganized a baseball exhibition tour of Australia, New Zealand, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Italy, France, and England. The entire United States followed his exploits; in Egypt, according to legend, he used the pyramids as a backstop.

Spalding returned to great acclaim from his round-the-world tour, and by the turn of the twentieth century, A. G. Spalding was a very rich and prominent man. In 1900, President McKinley appointed him commissioner of the American Olympic Committee. The
Boston
Herald
, with only slight exaggeration, called Spalding the most famous American after Lincoln and Washington. His name, the
Herald
reported, “has been blazing forth on the cover of guides to all sorts of sports, upon bats and gloves for many years. Young America gets its knowledge of the past in the world of athletics from something that has ‘Al Spalding’ on it in big black letters, and for that reason, as much as any other, he is one of the national figures of our time.”

Spalding, a proud nationalist in the Teddy Roo sevelt mold, was offended by Chadwick’s notion that baseball had evolved from an Old World game. But Chadwick was his friend as well as his employee, and he loved the old guy. Besides, not even A. G. Spalding had the stature to challenge Chadwick’s authority as a historian. What Spalding needed was an alternative creation myth, one backed up by evidence. To get it, he devised the Mills Commission.

Despite its official-sounding name, the commission was not a publicly appointed body. Its members were handpicked by Spalding. For a chairman, he selected Abraham G. Mills of New York, a businessman and former president of the National League who shared Spalding’s nativist views of baseball. Other members included U.S. senators Morgan G. Bulkeley of Connecticut (another former president of the National League) and Arthur Pue Gorman of Maryland, along with the secretary of the Amateur Athletic Union and two former ballplayers turned businessmen.

For evidence, Spalding furnished chairman Mills with a sort of baseball Book of Mormon: an eyewitness account of the origins of the game, written by one Abner Graves, a retired mining engineer living in Colorado. In the letter, Graves, who grew up in Coopers-town, described how one day in 1839 a local chap named Abner Doubleday had laid out four bases in the shape of a diamond, divided the boys of Cooperstown into two teams, and brought order out of a chaotic town scrum. In Spalding’s interpretation, this made Doubleday the architect and creator of baseball.

Doubleday was an excellent choice. He was a Civil War hero, an officer who fired the first shot at Fort Sumter, was wounded at the Second Battle of Bull Run, rose to the rank of major general, and commanded a division at the battles of Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, where a statue stands in his honor. After leaving the army, Doubleday moved to San Francisco, where he founded the first cable car company. He was also a prolific writer of memoirs and essays, none of which, oddly, ever mentioned playing baseball, let alone inventing it. And, when he died in 1893, none of his obituaries said anything about baseball, either.

But this didn’t bother Spalding, and it certainly didn’t matter to Mills, who like Doubleday was a Union veteran and a New Yorker. On December 30, 1907, he reported that after due consideration, the committee had concluded that Abner Doubleday had, indeed, invented baseball on the green in Cooperstown in 1839. Only one member demurred.

Mills was no fool. He knew his report was not a model of investigative rectitude. Asked directly in 1926 if he had any actual proof, he admitted that he had “none at all as far as the actual origin of the game of baseball is concerned.” The commission, he said, had merely reported that the first actual baseball diamond was laid out in Cooperstown. “They were honorable men . . . if our search had been for a typical American village, a village that could stand as a counterpart of all villages where baseball might have been originated and developed—Cooperstown would best fit the bill.”

But by the time Mills made this admission, Spalding and Chadwick were both long gone and their controversy over the game’s origins considered a settled matter. Cooperstown was officially recognized by baseball as the site of its nativity and Abner Doubleday was its recognized father. According to myth, Abraham Lincoln himself had summoned General Doubleday to his deathbed and pleaded with him to keep the game alive. Lincoln was, in fact, a baseball fan. He even built a diamond on the grounds of the White House. But it seems extremely unlikely that, lying mortally wounded, the Great Emancipator would have had the future of baseball on his mind.