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.
There’s a variation of the game’s orgin that says that baseball was actually invented in a Cooperstown cow pasture by Abner Doubleday. The myth has been refuted, but it’s likely that baseball was being played in these rolling hills of upstate New York long before the game was urbanized and professionalized in the late 19th century.
While our world at times feels like it is in danger of spinning free of its axis, there is comfort to be found in what was once was known simply as “America’s Pastime,” in hearkening back to the date of June 12, 1939. This was when the eyes of the baseball universe looked to Cooperstown and 10,000 fans descended on the community. They’d arrived to celebrate both the 100th birthday of baseball as well as dedicate the newly minted National Baseball Hall of fame.
Baseball’s first induction class-Baseball HOF (1939)
With fans jamming Main Street, they witnessed the first class of immortals pass—including Babe Ruth and Cy Young—as strains of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” got belted out by a small band. The vaunted baseball shrine had been officially christened. Since then, every July has brought a new group of legends to the shores of Lake Otsego. Fans flock there to be part of what’s become an event much larger than Stephen C. Clark, the local art collector, businessman, newspaper publisher, and philanthropist envisioned in founding a shrine for baseball’s greats in the unlikeliest of places—a town 200 miles from New York City.
I loved baseball. I inherited my connection for the game from my father and his brother, and passed it down to my son. By the time he was 11, Mark was already years into the throes of an affair with the game perfectly suited for summer, as well as forging an unbreakable bond between father and son, one that even death can’t sever.
My dad never took me to Cooperstown. It was always a place I’d hear about every year, when another group of former greats had a plaque forged and installed in the Hall of Fame’s main gallery.
The summer of 1994 was one of the last years our family of three took an extended vacation together. As Mark progressed as a player, finding a time to get away for a week that didn’t conflict with that summer’s baseball calendar became increasingly challenging. Unlike today and baseball’s diminished stature, when Mark was coming up—and especially in our household—baseball took precedent over all other things. Today, it’s tough for organized youth baseball coaches to count on a consistent contingent of players being there during the summer because parents feel it’s their purview to dictate everything, including scheduling of summer baseball games.
As such, August was usually when we’d take a camping trip to Baxter, or Rangeley, or somewhere to get away for a week once Mark’s baseball season ended, which in Little League, got extended by All-Stars.
We got to Cooperstown our first time the week when Major League Baseball decided to go on strike. Outside the Hall of Fame is a manual standings board. The standings never changed that week as we arrived the day before MLB struck, August 12, 1994. We enjoyed our pilgrimage nonetheless.
I didn’t know what to expect. Would Cooperstown be just another tourist trap, ballyhooed but when you actually arrived, delivering disappointment and a sense of being duped?
Au contraire. The place was everything we expected and more. This region of New York is rural. We camped at a nearby state park. In addition to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, there are a host of other museums and places to visit. The Finger Lakes wine country is a half day’s drive west.
Both Mark and I reverently toured the HOF and museum. Even Mary, who admittedly was skeptical about this trip, was totally impressed. Later, on a trip to Springfield, she toured the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame and stated that baseball’s was better.
Two years later, we’d return to the area when I joined a group of Mainers playing in our over-30 league. Our caravan arrived in the Schenectady/Saratoga Springs-area to play in a competitive regional tournament. We joined a family we’d befriended through Little League, the Tarrs, and visited the hall once again. Mark was now 13 and well on his way for what would be a nice ride with baseball that would culminate in a trip to the Division III World Series as a college player not quite 10 years later.
My interest in baseball has waned over the past few years. Part of that is likely due to Mark’s death. I think my ardor for the sport cooled once I was no longer coaching and even playing. I did umpire for six years, but I no longer followed the game like I had when I was a youngster and a father following my son’s progress in the sport.
Oddly, as my back woes thrust me into another summer with long periods stuck at home, I’d take a break from writing or reading to watch part of the afternoon’s programming on the MLB Network. This ratcheted up once I returned from my Father’s Day road trip.
I learned out that this year’s inductees would two players that I’d followed from the mid-1970s. They were men who I’d followed across their careers and one, Chipper Jones, was a player Mark grew up watching and rooting for.
He joined a group of only three—legendary hitters able to hit both left and right-handed and propel baseballs upwards of 450 feet with a wooden implement. Yankee Mickey Mantle heads the class, followed Eddie Murray (who played most of his career with the Baltimore Orioles), and now Jones.
Jack Morris was a member of a pitching fraternity that paralleled my development as a fellow pitcher. We were all taught that starting pitchers were successful when they completed a start. To not do so was a form of failure. Now, pitchers are credited with a “quality start” when they toss six innings and turn it over to the bullpen 33 percent shy of completion
Morris told the story in an interview about how Sparky Anderson, his Detroit manager, instilled in him the importance of finishing what you start by leaving him out on the mound to get shelled on a couple of occasions. If you’ve never pitched, standing on the mound is the loneliest of places when the opposition is having a field day against you. There’s no place to run and hide. You have to gut it out and take it. Today, this never happens at the professional level. But even at the development level, players grow up with pitch counts and coddling. I get it. It’s all about “protecting” them from harm. Again, something’s gone missing and it would take a lengthy essay to unpack it all in the context of baseball, if not society at-large.
I watched all six induction speeches: First came Jones, Tiger great (and longtime Morris teammate) Alan Trammell, then the pitcher who arguably solidified the role of the modern day closer, Trevor Hoffman. Many are calling Hoffman’s address the highlight of the six given. Vladimir Guerrero, who played the first part of his career north the border in Montreal was followed by baseball’s equivalent of Paul Bunyan, slugger Jim Thome. Morris fittingly finished the speaking portion with an emotional address.
Watching the televised coverage, I was flooded with many memories of Mark and the baseball the two of us shared over his all-too-short 33 years of life. I missed being able to talk about Chipper Jones joining fellow Braves’ mates, Tom Glavine, Greg Maddux, and John Smoltz. This was a group of players that Mark watched from their rookie years up through the Braves World Series’ win in 1995. Jones was the last of the group to leave the game, retiring at the end of 2012. This was the summer following Mark’s completion of his MFA at Brown.
I thought it might be bittersweet to make it back to Cooperstown for a third visit.