The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (156 page)

Museums wear you down, and Ben and Charles and I took time off from the Hall whenever the bats and stats and babies and souvenir Astro key rings and genuine Cubs Christmas-tree balls began to swim and blur in our heads. We visited Doubleday Field, the lovely old brick-grandstand ballpark (it’s owned by the village) where an annual exhibition game between two big-league teams is played during Induction Weekend; a local high-school team and a semi-pro club play here, too, but the field was sopping on the morning we got there, and the only players on it were some robins busily working the base paths. Ben took a shot at an adjoining baseball range, and his father and I watched him swing like Yaz, like Wade Boggs, and now perhaps like Mickey Mantle and Tris Speaker and Joe D. as well. Mostly, though, we used our time away from the Hall to talk about the Hall. Ben’s favorite feature was the I.B.M. Major League Leaders computer stations, where you could punch in the names of players (nine hundred and twenty-two of them) in more than eleven hundred categories, and doodle them around on the screen. “I didn’t know all that much about Ty Cobb before this,” he said at lunch one day. “I’d read about him in books, but I didn’t pay much attention, because he was such a rat. But he was great—I have to admit it.” Charles was fond of a second-floor nook given over to the old Boston Beaneater teams and their near-prehistoric stars, like Jimmy Collins, Kid Nichols, King Kelly, Hughie Duffy, and Billy Hamilton, who had battled Ned Hanlon’s Orioles for dominance of the National League at the end of the last century. A splendid photomural of the Beaneater fans shows a thousand derbies. “I think there was a song way back then called ‘Slide, Kelly, Slide,’” Charles said, “and when I was a kid there was a ‘Slide, Kelly, Slide’ ride at Whalom Park, in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. I’ll bet it’s still there,”

All three of us loved the basement in the Hall, and we kept going back there. It was a catchall—a
basement—
full of leftovers and old board games and stuff: Abner Doubleday’s campaign trunk; a Hillerich & Bradsby batmaking lathe; an awesome red iron pitching machine (circa 1942) on rubber wheels—a farm implement, you would guess—which fired balls plateward with a mighty rubber band, after a black paddle had flipped up to alert the batter just before the
twangg!
In another sector we found an assemblage of slotted All-Time Leaders boards—lists of the individual lifetime standings in hits, doubles, runs batted in, and so forth; it reminded you of the lobby of a high-school gym. The names Aaron and Cobb and Musial ran across the offensive boards like bright threads in a tapestry. The lists were up to the minute, with Reggie Jackson’s five hundred and fifty-five home runs, putting him sixth on the Home Runs roster, eighteen back of Harmon Killebrew and nineteen up on Mickey Mantle. Nearby, I lingered over a little exhibit about the handful of perfect games that the sport has produced in its long history, from John Richmond’s 1–0 victory over Cleveland for the Worcester Ruby Legs, on June 12, 1880, down to Mike Witt’s perfecto on September 30, 1984, when his Angels beat the Rangers by the same score. (Catfish Hunter had a perfect game to his credit, too: Oakland 4-Twins zip, in 1968.) These had been quick entertainments. Cy Young whipped the Athletics in an hour and twenty-five minutes in 1904, and Sandy Koufax needed only eighteen additional minutes to wrap up his famous outing (Dodgers 1-Cubs 0) in 1965. There have been only eleven perfect, nobody-on-base-at-all games in big-league play, if you count Don Larsen’s win over the Dodgers in the 1956 World Series, and
don’t
count Harvey Haddix’s twelve perfect innings for the Pirates against the Braves in 1959. (He lost the no-hitter, and the game, in the thirteenth.) John Montgomery Ward, pitching for the Providence Grays against the Buffalo Bisons, pulled off the second perfect game in the National League only five days after Richmond’s feat, and the
next
perfect game in that league came along eighty-four years later: Jim Bunning and the Phillies over the Mets, 6–0, on June 21, 1964. You can’t beat baseball.

Now and then, I sensed a fleeting wish that the Hall were less optimistic and decorous. I think I would have enjoyed a visit to Client Corner, in a sector devoted to baseball and the language, and perhaps a downside exhibit—Boot Hall, let’s say—of celebrated gaffes of the sport: Merkle’s Boner, Snodgrass’s Muff, and so forth, right on down to Bill Buckner’s through-the-wickets error in Game Six of the Series last year. Sometimes you wonder if the Hall isn’t excessively preoccupied with the past, but the charge doesn’t quite hold up. The Great Moments display that catches your eye the moment you walk in has Joe DiMaggio’s fifty-six-game hitting streak and Johnny Vander Meer’s successive no-hitters in 1938 and Babe Ruth’s sixty homers (and Roger Maris’s sixty-one), and so on, but Roger Clemens is up there, too, striking out those twenty batters (they were Mariners) on April 29th last year. The sport is ongoing and indivisible, and the Hall’s Baseball Today room downstairs has every single Topps Bubble Gum card for 1987
and
the bats wielded by Marveil Wynne, Tony Gwynn, and John Kruk when they led off the Padres’ first inning against the Giants on April 13th this year with a first-ever three home runs in succession. “I wouldn’t give up my bat if I’d done something like that,” Ben said on inspecting this wonder. “I’d sell it. No—I’d
keep
it.”

The Hall, in any case, wouldn’t have bought Ben’s bat; it doesn’t buy stuff. Aside from a few objects on loan, all twenty-three or twenty-four thousand artifacts on view or tucked away in Curator William T. Spencer’s workroom have been acquired by gift—often a solicited gift, to be sure. The regularly incoming flood of baseball memorabilia and baseball junk is so heavy that a staff committee, which includes Director Howard C. Talbot, Jr., Associate Director William J. Guilfoile, and Registrar Peter Clark, who are the worthies most responsible for the imagination and wit and good sense evident in the present Hall, meets every Friday to decide what to accept and (mostly) what to turn down. Dozens of putative Babe Ruth home-run balls are offered by mail, and so, too, are “authentic” Babe Ruth bats, including innumerable samples of a Louisville Slugger model, once turned out by the hundreds, with the Babe’s imprinted signature on the barrel. The committee is slow to reject, however, for slim leads often yield treasures. A hesitant letter about a box full of clothes belonging to “somebody named Bender” that turned up in an attic in Washington, D.C., three years ago eventually produced Chief Bender’s dazzling white 1914 Athletics uniform, which is now to be seen in the General History sector on the second floor, next to a dandy photo of the Chippewa fireballer. Players are prime sources, of course, and some—Hank Aaron among them—have almost emptied their lockers for the Hall, possibly on the theory that immortality can always be improved a little.

Bill Guilfoile has spent a lifetime in baseball. (He writes the texts for the current plaques, among other things.) Before he came to Cooperstown, in 1979, he was assistant to the general manager and director of public relations for the Pirates, and I suspect that he may be responsible for the acquisition of the life-size wax statue of Roberto Clemente that now stands just outside his office door. This mysterious-looking effigy used to live in a back room at Three Rivers Stadium, in Pittsburgh, and one day—this was long before Clemente’s untimely death in a plane crash—Pirate trainer Tony Bartirome and pitcher Jim Rooker spirited the thing down to the clubhouse and laid it out on the trainer’s table, and turned off most of the lights. Then they told team physician Dr. Joe Finegold that Clemente had just fainted on the field, during batting practice. Dr. Finegold—or so the story goes—hurried in, took one appalled look, and felt for a pulse.

If I have slighted Mr. Guilfoile and his colleagues here, the National Baseball Library, which adjoins and is part of the Hall itself, must suffer a similar inadequate dismissal. I did pay a brief visit to the library, where the director, Tom Heitz, shrugged and laughed when I asked him to tell me about the four or five million newspaper documents, the hundred and twenty-five thousand photographs, the fifteen thousand-odd baseball books, the old radio-broadcast tapes, and so forth, that are in his care. The library is the custodian of the famous John Tattersall Collection of early-to-recent box scores, and Heitz told me that game information and biographical material about eighty-five percent of all the men who have ever played the game, at any professional level, was readily at hand. He permitted me to leaf through the files of that day’s letters and applications to visit the stacks (ten thousand or so scholars consult the library every year), and I found queries from someone who wanted a photograph of the 1934 World Series; from someone who needed the box scores of games he had attended in 1934, 1961, and 1965 (there’s a lot of this, Heitz said); from someone who wanted the name of every pitcher who had ever struck out ten or more batters in a single game (not feasible to sort out, Heitz said); an extensive communication from a Belgian scholar, Leon Vanviere, who is the world’s No. 1 expert on baseball references in stamps; a letter from Bill Marshall, a scholar at the University of Kentucky, who is preparing a work on the mid-America, lower-minors Kitty, Bluegrass, Ohio State, and Appalachian Leagues; and two or three letters asking for information about a family member or ancestor who claimed or was said to have played professional ball once. Almost a quarter of such heroes, Heitz told me, turn out to be phantoms. But, like Bill Guilfoile, he is cautious. A woman who called up the library a few months ago was found to be a relative to Ted Welch, who pitched in three games for the St. Louis Terries, in the old Federal League, in 1914 (Won 0-Lost 0; ERA 6.00). The library knew nothing else about him—not even his birthplace—but a research questionnaire was mailed off, and Heitz expects that Ted Welch will have an extra agate line or two in the next edition of the
Baseball Encyclopedia.

Before I said goodbye, I asked Heitz if his staff could dredge up the box score of a game played in the spring of 1930, in which Lefty Gomez, pitching his first big-league game, beat the White Sox at Yankee Stadium. I was pretty sure about that much, because I was there that day (I was nine years old), and because I had talked with Gomez about the game a few years back. The box score came to me in the mail two days later, and the first thing I noticed when I looked it over was that there were five future Hall of Famers on the field that day, including both pitchers: Red Faber and Lefty Gomez. Lefty fanned the side in the first inning (there was a little game summary attached to the box score), and the Yankees went on to win, 4–1.

I hadn’t planned to go back to Cooperstown at once, but when Induction Weekend came along, late in July, I couldn’t stay away. I was a little nervous about too much pomp and oratory, but what I encountered was a jolly family party of baseball. Twenty-five Hall of Fame members came back, to welcome the inductees—Hunter, Williams, and Dandridge—and so did their wives and (in many cases) children and grandchildren, and so did neighbors, brothers and sisters, and old teammates. Mary Rice, the widow of Hall of Fame outfielder Sam Rice, of the old Washington Senators, came back, as usual (Sam died in 1974), and so did her daughter Christine and her granddaughter Kimberly; this was Kimberly’s nineteenth reunion at Cooperstown. Hall of Famer Happy Chandler—former commissioner, former Kentucky governor, former Kentucky senator—turned up, still hale and handshaking at eighty-nine, and so did Willie Mays, Ralph Kiner, Bill Dickey, Robin Roberts, the Splendid Splinter (more a tree now), Campy, Cool Papa, Country, Pee Wee, the Big Cat, Stan the Man, and more. The noble, Doric-columned old Otesaga Hotel, whose lawns ran down to the glistening Otsego waters, took us all in (my wife and me included), and, hanging out in and around its lobby, bars, deep verandas, and restaurants, you heard baseball and nothing else for three steaming, cheerful summer days and nights. The fans were there, too, though at a distance—eight to ten thousand of them, heavily familied as well. The Hall had set up a long, airy tent down by the lakefront for three extended autograph sessions—all comers on the first and third days, kids only on the second—and the waiting lines were so long that they had to be mercifully truncated; the foresighted early arrivals had camped out all night to hold their places. I sought no autographs (one small girl in a Mariners T-shirt asked for
my
signature, somehow under the impression that I was Billy Williams), but I happily stuck around, and there in Cooperstown, encircled by great souls and heroes of the pastime, I bathed in a Ganges of baseball:

Johnny Mize
(at seventy-four, he is melon-faced and massively calm—unchanged):
These batters today are so nervous. You look at Winneld and he’s
duh, duh, dah-duh
at the plate. They’re doing a dance up there. I’d always walk into the box, drop my bat down, get my feet right, and then I’d be on base or out of there…. My worst day was when I got traded to the Giants and I knew I’d have to hit in the Polo Grounds all year, with that five-hundred-foot center field. It was four hundred and twenty-two feet to right-center, where I liked to hit the ball. Bill Terry hit straightaway and he batted .400 in the Polo Grounds before I got there, and to me that’s .500, easy, in any other park.

Ray Dandridge
(square and squatty, with bowed legs and broad, large hands; he wore a snowy white cap by day and an engaging smile at all times; seventy-three years old, possibly older):
I played shortstop and second base, but third base was my real position. I played with the Detroit Stars in 1933, then in Newark—the Newark Dodgers that turned into the Newark Eagles. I played all year round, mostly for fifteen dollars a week. Went to Puerto Rico, and it was fifteen dollars a week; went to Cuba, fifteen dollars a week; Venezuela and Santo Domingo and Mexico, fifteen dollars a week. I played seven years in Mexico and made some more money there in the end. We won the championship for Mexico City…. I’m a place-hitter—hit the ball to all fields. I’m a Stan Musial man. I loved to see that man hit. He’s my idol, because I hit like him—or he hit like me.