The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (155 page)

Like other shrines, perhaps, the Baseball Hall of Fame is founded on a fantasy—the highly dubious possibility that baseball was “invented” in Cooperstown by a local youth, Abner Doubleday, while he was fooling around with some friends in a pasture one day in the summer of 1839. In 1905, a committee of baseball panjandrums and politicos, the Mills Commission, forgathered to determine the origins of the national pastime, and after three years of deliberation it bestowed the garland on Doubleday, who had not done damage to his cause by growing up to become a major general and fight in the Mexican and Civil Wars. (He himself never laid claim to the baseball invention.) The commission, we might note, was invented at a time when organized professional baseball was not quite thirty years old and the modern, two-league era (and the first World Series) was only three years old. Teddy Roosevelt was in office, in a time of glowing national self-assurance, and the Mills Commission reacted with alacrity to a letter from one Abner Graves, a mining engineer who had grown up in Cooperstown and swore he had been on hand on the day when nineteen-year-old Abner Doubleday scratched out the first diamond in the dust of a Cooperstown pasture, put bases at three angles, and added a pitcher and a catcher for good measure. Subsequent and more cautious baseball historians have agreed that the American game almost surely evolved out of a British boys’ amusement called rounders, and that the true father of baseball was Alexander Cartwright, a young engineer and draftsman and volunteer fireman, who first marked off the crucial ninety feet between the bases and formulated the pretty and sensible arrangement of nine innings to a game and nine men to a side; his team, the New York Knickerbockers, came into being in Hoboken in 1845, and their sort of baseball—“The New York Game”—became the sport we know today. The Cooperstown chimera persisted, however, and was wonderfully transfused by the 1934 discovery of a tattered homemade baseball among the effects of the aforementioned Graves, in Fly Creek, New York, three miles west of Cooperstown. The ball—soon ennobled as The Doubleday Baseball—was purchased for five dollars by Stephen C. Clark, a Cooperstown millionaire who had established a fortune with the Singer Sewing Machine Company. The ancient ball became the centerpiece of Clark’s small private collection of baseball memorabilia and, very soon thereafter, of the National Baseball Museum—an idea happily seized upon and pushed forward by Ford C. Frick, the president of the National League, and by other gamekeepers of the era, including Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis. The museum opened its doors on June 12, 1939. It is providential, I think, that the Hall has no official connection with organized baseball, although Commissioner Peter Ueberroth and his predecessor, Bowie Kuhn, are both on the Hall’s current board of directors, as are the two league presidents and a couple of team owners. The Hall is also financially independent, making do nicely on its gate receipts (admission is five dollars for adults, two for kids), donations, and the revenues derived from an overflowing and popular souvenir shop. The place seems to belong to the fans.

The Doubleday Baseball, the touchstone of the sport, is on view in the Cooperstown Room of the H. of F.: a small dark sphere, stuffed with cloth, which looks a good deal like some artifact—possibly a pair of rolled-up socks—exhumed from a Danish peat bog. Near its niche, on the same wall of the Cooperstown Room, there is an eloquent and unapologetic establishing text (it was written by Carl Lundquist, a long-term early publicist) that disarms and pleases in equal measure:

Abner Doubleday, who started baseball in Farmer Phinney’s Cooperstown pasture, is not enshrined in the Hall of Fame. However, it is known that as a youth he played in the pasture and that a homemade ball, found in a trunk, belonged to him. Of such facts are legends made. As a Civil War general, Doubleday performed deeds of valor that earned him a place in history; but in the hearts of those who love baseball he is remembered as the lad in the pasture where the game was invented. Only cynics would need to know more.

The journey that even the most distant fan must endure to arrive at the Hall of Fame is but a few steps compared to the passage required of its members—one hundred and ninety-nine retired major-league players, players from the defunct Negro Leagues, old umpires, old managers, baseball pioneers, celebrated bygone executives—whose bronze plaques, each with inscribed name and feats and features, line the wall of the Hall of Fame Gallery and form the centerpiece and raison d’etre of the pantheon. Elections consist of an annual polling of four hundred members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, and to be selected for the Hall a player must be named on seventy-five percent of the ballots; to be eligible for the ballot, the candidate must have put in at least ten years’ service in the majors, plus a five-year waiting period following retirement. A backup system permits election by the Committee on Veterans, an august eighteen-man body (baronial old players, executives, and writers, including Stan Musial, Roy Campanella, Monte Irvin, Gabe Paul, and Shirley Povich) that selects notables of the distant and not so distant past who have somehow been passed over by the BBWA; a subcommittee picks players from the Negro Leagues, which went out of business in the early fifties. (Eleven Negro League players have been elected to date.) In the early days of the Hall, the Veterans Committee was the more active body, since it had to deal with the claims and statistics of many hundreds of old-timers, dating back into the nineteenth century, while the writers were voting on players most of them had actually seen on the field. One hundred and twenty-six plaques in the Hall (ninety of them depicting players) are attributable to the Veterans Committee, but a more accurate view of the workings of the present system emerges when one sorts out the fifty-four living players now in the Hall, sixteen of whom ascended by way of the Veterans Committee and thirty-eight by way of the writers’ poll.

Election of the immortals began even before the Hall was completed, and by Dedication Day four years’ balloting had produced twenty-five members—senior gods, if you will. One of the riveting exhibits at the Hall is a formal photograph of the living inductees (there were eleven of them, and ten are in the picture) who came to Cooperstown that sunny June afternoon in 1939. Connie Mack, spare and erect and fatherly in a dark suit and high collar, sits next to Babe Ruth in the front row; the Babe, moon-faced and gone to beef, has an open collar above his double-breasted suit, and his crossed left leg reveals that his socks have been rolled down to shoe-top level. Tris Speaker, playing short center field as usual, stands directly behind Ruth, and Honus Wagner and Walter Johnson, with their famous country sweetness perfectly visible, occupy the corners. As you study the photograph (never a quick process, no matter how many times you have seen it), your gaze stops at the other men’s faces, one by one, as recollection of their deeds and their flair for the game comes flooding back: Eddie Collins, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Nap Lajoie, Cy Young (pipe in hand), and George Sisler—old warriors squinting in the sun, comfortable at last. The one man missing is Ty Cobb. He had car trouble on the road and missed the photo opportunity by ten minutes—late for the first time in his life.

The Hall of Fame Gallery—part Parthenon, part bus terminal—is a long hall, windowed at the far end, with dark columns that set off the raised and illuminated galleries, left and right, in which the plaques are arrayed. You want to resist the place, but you can’t—or at least
I
couldn’t. I am an old cosmopolitan, and I live in a city where wonders are thrust at you every day, but not many gala openings have produced the skipped heartbeat, the prickle down the neck, the interior lampglow of pleasure that I felt every time I walked into this room. Others there felt the same way—I heard them, every time—and I noticed, too, that the bronze memorials, which are hung in double rows within alcoves, elicit a neighborly flow of baseball talk and baseball recollection among the strangers standing together before them. The familiar plaques—the immortal’s likeness, in framed bas-relief, supra, with accompanying decorative bats and laurel spray, and the ennobling text and stats below—start on the right, as you enter, and proceed by years and order of election down that wall and then, doubling back, up the left side of the room. The early texts tend to be short: Jove needs few encomiums. Ty Cobb’s five lines read, “Led American League in batting twelve times and created or equalled more major-league records than any other player. Retired with 4,191 major-league hits.” Babe Ruth: “Greatest drawing card in history of baseball. Holder of many home-run and other batting records. Gathered 714 home runs in addition to fifteen in World Series.” That “gathered” is felicitous, but all the texts—almost fifty years of them now—have a nice ring to them: a touch of Westminster Abbey, a whiff of the press box. Christy Mathewson (he died young, in 1925) was among the first five players voted into the Hall, and the shining raised lines on his plaque sound the trumpets, all right: “Greatest of all the great pitchers in the 20th century’s first quarter, pitched 3 shut-outs in 1905 World Series. First pitcher of the century ever to win 30 games in 3 successive years. Won 37 games in 1908. ‘Matty was master of them all.’”

The early likenesses on the plaques (no one seems to know the name of the first sculptor)
*
show an assurance and zest that lift them above the heroic genre. Different (and sometimes indifferent) talents have worked the portraits in subsequent years, but no matter: fine art isn’t quite the point here. Ted Williams, who waltzed into the Hall in 1966 (his first year of eligibility, of course), so disliked the looks of his plaque that he persuaded the Hall to have another one struck off and hung in its place. This one missed him, too, but you overlook that when you notice that his nose and the brim of his cap have been worn to brightness by the affectionate touches of his fans. (“I’m a
saint,
you mean?” he said when I told him about this not long ago, and he gave one of his bearlike huffs of pleasure.) In time, my visits to file Gallery became random cruises from alcove to alcove, until I would be brought to a stop by a likeness, a name, a juxtaposition, or a thunderous line or two of stats. I found Casey Stengel, Burleigh Grimes, Larry MacPhail, Hank Aaron, Rube Waddell. Amos Rusie (The Hoosier Thunderbolt) adjoined Addie Joss, my father’s favorite pitcher. Here was Freddie Lindstrom. (“As youngest player [he was eighteen] in World Series history, he tied record with four hits in game in 1924.”) And here, all in a cluster, were Yogi Berra, Josh Gibson, Sandy Kou-fax (“Sanford Koufax…Set all-time records with 4 no-hitters in 4 years, capped by 1965 perfect game, and by capturing earned-run title five seasons in a row”), Buck Leonard, and Early Wynn. Hack Wilson’s plaque showed his determined jaw but stopped just above the place where he became interesting: his mighty shoulders and thick, short body (he was five feet six), which powered fifty-six homers and a record one hundred and ninety RBIs in 1930. I found Roberto Clemente (“…rifle-armed defensive star set N.L. mark by pacing outfielders in assists five years”) and Eppa Rixey (but why did they delete his nickname: Eppa
Jephtha
Rixey?). I looked up Johnny Mize and learned something I had forgotten about the Big Cat, if indeed, I’d ever known it (“Keen-eyed slugger…set major-loop records by hitting three homers in a game six times”). The plaques of this year’s Hall of Earners—Catfish Hunter, Billy Williams, and Ray Dandridge (another star from the Negro Leagues)—were not yet in place, of course, and after I looked at the bare wall that awaited them I moved along into an empty alcove and thought about the faces that would be hung up there in bronze over the next few summers: Willie Stargell, Johnny Bench, Carl Yastrzemski, Gaylord Perry, Rod Carew, Jim Palmer, Pete Rose…I could almost see the plaques already, and I pretty well knew what the lines on them would say, but these longtime favorites of mine would be altered, in quite, thrilling fashion.

Men embronzed have a certified look to them, as if they had always belonged here, but for many of them the selection process has been far from peaceful. Great stars usually jump into the Hall on their very first year of eligibility—in the past decade, these have included Willie Mays, Bob Gibson, Frank Robinson, Brooks Robinson, and Willie McCovey. But Juan Marichal had to wait three years before garnering the requisite seventy-five percent of the writers’ ballots, and Don Drysdale waited out ten. Looking back, we detect other excruciations, some of them (but perhaps not all of them) inexplicable. Charlie Gehringer didn’t pass muster until his fifth ballot; Gabby Hartnett waited nine years and Lou Boudreau thirteen. Ralph Kiner made it on his thirteenth try, and Ducky Medwick on his fifteenth, and last, year of eligibility. Candidates who fall shy after fifteen Baseball Writers’ ballots must survive three further years in limbo before their names and feats can be taken up by the Veterans Committee—twenty-three years after their retirement from the game. Johnny Mize, whose apotheosis was decreed twenty-eight years after he had hung up his spikes, told me that he was grateful for the honor, but confessed that he had lost interest in the process along the way; he had been particularly unhappy whenever he saw his name slip lower in the writers’ estimation because of some arriviste youngster on the ballot. Jack Lang, of the
News,
who, in his capacity as the near-perennial secretary-treasurer of the BBWA, supervises the voting (he himself was voted into the writers’ section of the Hall at this year’s induction), told me that many newly eligible stars experience an early ground swell of support and then tail off in ensuing ballots. Columnists and owners and fan clubs have been known to campaign intensively for favorites (Joe Sewell, a stubby little shortstop with the Indians in the nineteen-twenties, and Bob Lemon, the big Cleveland right-hander, inspired an inundation of letters before being admitted), but the process can backfire. Phil Rizzuto, the Yankee shortstop, has become the Harold Stassen of the Hall in recent years, and Lang believes that the sort of electioneering for the Scooter conducted by George Steinbrenner and by segments of the New York media helped bring about the defiant selection of another diminutive shortstop from the same town and the same era: Pee Wee Reese. The committees have considerable power, when you come to think about it, and one must assume that the writers are more reliable today than they were at times in the past: twenty-three BBWA voters left Willie Mays’ name off their ballots altogether when he first came up for consideration, in 1979. He survived this knockdown pitch and made it home that first year just the same. Lang is uneasy when asked to speculate for long about such matters, and so is another good gray baseball friend of mine, Seymour Siwoff, the chief flamekeeper at the Elias Sports Bureau. He and I had a telephone conversation about the vagueness of the statistics emanating from the old Negro Leagues, and he said, “The numbers just aren’t there, so we have to rely on what the guys who played with him say about a player we’re thinking about for the Hall. But I don’t worry about it. When a man is in, he’s in, and we should be happy for him. We need the Hall, is how I see it. You gotta have that romance.”