This past weekend, the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York inducted another class of baseball greats. Their plaques will be added to the existing group of former players enshrined at the equivalent of the sport’s holy grail.
When we returned from Indiana in 1987, Mark’s formative baseball experience was centered on National League teams like the Chicago Cubs rather than New England favorites, the Boston Red Sox. This was in large part due to the influence of superstations like WGN in Chicago and Atlanta’s TBS.
We didn’t own a television for the first three years we were married. Then, in 1984, having a TV seemed important. We began watching Cubs’ games and Mark’s first professional game was attended at Wrigley Field in 1985.
In 1989, we crossed the river and began renting an affordable duplex in the town where I grew up, waiting for our first house to be built. We signed up for the cable package that happened to include TBS. We began following baseball on Ted Turner’s station. Mark became a fan of “America’s Team,” which is how Turner, the Braves’ owner, took to marketing his club.
If a film director was casting about for a movie set that epitomized small town America, he’d be hard-pressed to find a place more fitting than the village of Cooperstown, with a population slightly less than 2,000 year-round residents. Of course, on one weekend in July, the town becomes the destination for tens of thousands of hard-core hardball fans, who spend induction weekend rubbing elbows with greatest to have ever played the game.
Cooperstown, NY: The home of baseball’s Hall of Fame.