Cooperstown dreams fit all sizes

Sporting News, The, August 12, 2002 by Dave Kindred

It was just after sunrise, and mist floated on the forests and mountains, and in the valley there was a river, and all the world was green and shimmery and heavenly. I drove north on a two-lane road, and then I stopped, because it is necessary to stop if, just after sunrise, you see baseball being played.

There must have been 10 baseball fields. They were small fields for players maybe 12 years old. They were beautiful little diamonds with grass infields edged and trimmed precisely, with high wooden outfield fences painted Fenway green. Alongside New York Route 28, a sign identified the complex as "Cooperstown Dreams Park."

Cooperstown dreams.

Perfect.

There were games on every field, part of a weeklong national tournament, and the games went on into the night, for each field had its own light towers. In an hour on a heavenly morning, I saw a home run over the green monster at the 200-foot sign, a 4-6-3 double play and a baserunner so determined that after a headfirst slide he was taken to a hospital. A mother said, "Broken collarbone, they think."

Such a place, Cooperstown. It's a cameo brooch of a village.

Victorian houses in pastel finery stand near Otsego Lake, glimmering in a mountain valley two blocks north of 25 Main Street, the home of baseball's Hall of Fame.

Just down Main Street, past a bronze statue of a farm boy carrying a bat, is Doubleday Field, a wood-and-brick ballpark where, under a high-noon sun, middle-aged fantasy campers huffed and puffed in approximation of baseball movements they once made (ask them) effortlessly.

First pitch, behind the batter.

Umpire tosses out a new ball, only he throws it over the pitcher's head.

This could go on all day.

And, I ask, what could be perfecter?

From kids to old men, Cooperstown supplies dreams to fit all sizes. Ozzie Smith is the Hall of Fame's newest old kid. He told us his first glove was a paper bag. He said he used to throw a ball over the house and see if he could get to the other side in time to catch it. He said if you have the dream, you, too, can be Ozzie Smith, Hall of Famer.

Whoa, Oz. One Illinois kid used to stand five feet from a concrete step and throw golf balls against it, the better to quicken his glove-hand reflexes. His father used to throw batting practice from 30 feet--not with baseballs, with corn cobs. Hey, Oz, ever try to hit a corn cob dancing, twisting, bouncing on the air?

Only dreamers with extraordinary physical gifts make it to the Hall of Fame--which diminishes the value of the dream not at all. The rest of us use the dream the best we can. One learned to type and made sure the first letters he typed were S-t-a-n-l-e-y F-r-a-n-k M-u-s-i-a-l.

So if you've never been to baseball's Hall of Fame, drop what you're doing and get in the car. Now.

Babe Ruth's bat is there.

So is Ichiro's.

Ichiro himself came to Cooperstown last year. "He wanted it kept a secret," says Jeff Idelson, Hall of Fame vice president. "But while he was here, he was named Rookie of the Year. He did a telephone press conference and when he was asked where he was, he said, `In the United States." I guess he was paparazzi'd out."

During Ichiro's visit, he was photographed holding "Black Betsy," Joe Jackson's bat. He held it at his left hip, the barrel straight up. As it happened, Idelson recognized the pose. On his bulletin board, he now has the Ichiro photo tacked up alongside one of Ty Cobb also holding a bat at his hip. "Eerie," Idelson said.

Joe Morgan's little glove is there.

Grantland Rice's typewriter.

Al Barlick's indicator.

Only at Cooper Park, alongside the Hall of Fame, can you walk past a bronze statue of James Fenimore Cooper, a local hero who wrote Last of the Mohicans, and stand by bronze statues of Brooklyn heroes, Johnny Podres pitching to Roy Campanella.

Nowhere else will you move through a museum with pilgrims so delighted by the assembled relics that the building is alive with chattering voices, among them an old kid's heard to say, "My wife doesn't quite understand how I can look at Stan Musial's socks for 15 minutes."

Because the natives characterize Cooperstown's weather as "10 months of snow and two months of rough sledding," Idelson says most of the Hall's 350,000 visitors come in the summer. "In February we sometimes can count the attendance on the fingers of Mordecai Brown's pitching hand."

Here's another measure of Cooperstown's glory: For three days, I saw a thousand people in baseball caps and baseball shirts, and not once was the landscape despoiled by the sight of a football jersey.

Then, on my last afternoon, a young man wandered by wearing a Jason Sehorn jersey. "Folks," I said, "we should take up a collection and get this young man properly dressed." Even the football miscreant smiled.

Such a magical place, the Hall of Fame.

Is this Cooperstown?

No, it's heaven.