Cooperstown Confidential (2 page)

ONE . . .
Induction Weekend

T
here is one traffic light on Cooperstown’s Main Street, and that’s usually more than enough. The normal population is 2,032. But the last weekend in July 2007 was far from normal. Induction Weekend at the Baseball Hall of Fame is an annual event that always draws droves of fans from around the country to what the Chamber of Commerce calls “America’s hometown.” But in 2007, the place was overtaken by a crowd estimated by the Chamber of Commerce to be eighty thousand people. The previous record was fifty-five thousand fans, who had come in 1999 to honor three incoming superstars: Nolan Ryan, George Brett, and Robin Yount. This year, Cal Ripken Jr. was the draw. Tony Gwynn of the San Diego Padres was also being inducted, and Gwynn had his fans, but San Diego is a long way from Cooperstown. (Actually, almost every place is a long way from Cooperstown. The closest airport is at Albany, an hour’s drive away.) These were Ripken people.

Cal Ripken was born and raised to be a baseball hero, especially to the white working-class fans of Baltimore. He was the hardest-working man in baseball. Tutored by his baseball-coach father to play “the Ripken Way,” he ran out ground balls, chatted with reporters, signed autographs with a smile, and, most impressive, showed up to punch the clock every day for years on end. The Iron Man’s record of 2,632 straight games eclipsed Lou Gehrig’s fifty-six-year-old mark. He had 3,184 career hits. The Baseball Writers’ Association of America (BBWAA), whose members serve as the electoral college of Cooperstown, picked him on 98.6 percent of the ballots. Babe Ruth—another son of Baltimore—only got 95.1 percent.

When Ripken retired in 2001, his fans made a quick calculation. He would be eligible for the Hall in five years, which took them to July 2007. They opened their datebooks and reserved every hotel and motel room in a six-county radius of Cooperstown. I found this out when I tried to book a place to stay and wound up crashing with friends near Albany.

The village of Cooperstown has changed very little since the Hall first opened in 1939 (and in 1939, it still looked a lot like 1839). This isn’t accidental. Cooperstown works hard to maintain itself as what its leading citizen, Jane Forbes Clark, calls “a wonderfully accurate record of nineteenth-century American architectural history.” The Clark family, which owns or controls everything worth owning or controlling for miles around (including the Hall of Fame), has even bought up land around the entry points to the village to ensure that nothing modern or crass greets visitors to the American Brigadoon.

Only Main Street departs from the Victorian theme of the village. Main Street’s theme is pure commerce. During Induction Weekend, hordes of pale middle-aged people, shapeless but ample in their baggy shorts and baseball jerseys, surged up one side of the street and down the other, rummaging through the many baseball memento shops, scarfing burgers at baseball-themed restaurants, lining up to buy Hall of Fame autographs at signing tables positioned along the main drag, or just cruising for a glimpse of an immortal. Frank Robinson, looking slow and aged in a golf cap, drew applause as he emerged from the Home Plate Restaurant. Even fans too young to recognize him from his Orioles days recognized him from tele vision; he had recently managed the Washington Nationals. Other Hall of Famers passed by in relative anonymity, but if you watched closely you could pick them out by their determined stride and straight-ahead demeanor. Eye contact with a civilian could mean a request for a free autograph, but autographs that weekend were a cash proposition. There were also hawkers and eccentrics up and down Main Street peddling various kinds of baseball stuff. Jim “Mudcat” Grant stood in front of a restaurant signing copies of
Black Aces
, his book celebrating the thirteen black pitchers (Grant among them) who’d won 20 games, and delivering a loud, more or less continuous lecture on inequities of baseball toward African-Americans. Across Main Street, a fellow named Randall Swearingen, who claims to have the world’s largest collection of Mickey Mantle memorabilia, including a Harley-Davidson with a seat made of leather from Mantle’s old gloves, was hawking copies of his latest book on the Mick. During a lull, Swearingen mentioned that he also had once been the sole distributor of Mickey Mantle–themed pinball machines, which were apparently once all the rage in certain Great Plains states.

Down the block, a store was selling sacks of old baseball cards for a dollar a bag. I knew from my previous visit with Coby that these were not a bargain. For every worthwhile player, there were fifty benchwarmers in the batch, a marketing technique that weirdly prefigured the bundles of bad loans mixed with good that investment banks were selling to the public.

Near the card store I ran into Jim Rice, the Boston slugger, sitting at a table manfully signing his name—without an HoF—on baseballs. As a player, Rice had been notoriously withdrawn and uncooperative with the media, and it had cost him Hall of Fame votes from the writers. Now he had just a couple years of BBWAA eligibility left, and he was trying hard to project a friendlier public image. Exclusion rankled him. “All these guys had big numbers,” he told me, waving a very large arm in the direction of some of the immortals at a nearby signing table. “But I put up big numbers, too. Yes, I did. Did they dominate? Yes. But I dominated, too.”

“Maybe you’ll get in next year,” I ventured.

Rice fixed me with a hard stare. “If the people had a vote, I’d get in,” he said. “But I can’t influence the writers. I can’t even get a list of the ones who vote.”

“I don’t vote,” I assured him. “I’m not a baseball writer.”

Rice regarded me with a renewed interest; I might be a paying customer. His signature was going for thirty dollars a pop, high for somebody not in the Hall. There was economic logic to this. If Rice made it into the Hall (as he would in 2009), the value of his autograph would shoot up. Basically he was selling Jim Rice futures.

“I am writing a book on the Hall of Fame, though. Do you want to talk about your prospects?”

“No,” said Rice.

“Maybe it will help you get in,” I said.

Rice gave me a look of sheer skepticism. “Might make it worse,” he said.

For certain ex-players without a Hall of Fame future, Induction Weekend offers a chance to meet old friends and teammates, to reminisce with fans, and to be somebody—even a little somebody—for a day or two. The pharmacy on Main Street was offering “one free auto graph from major league pitcher John Montefusco of the Giants, with the purchase of a Coke.” Montefusco had a very respectable thirteen-year career with four teams in the seventies and eighties, finishing with 90 wins and a lifetime ERA of 3.54. Good, but not great. Still, here he was in Cooperstown, a guy whose signature was not worth nothing.

Most young boys dream, if only for a moment, that they will someday be major-league ballplayers. They play until they reach their level of incompetence. Millions start in Little League. Tens of thousands make it to high school teams or the Babe Ruth League. A small percentage go on to play in college or the minors. A tiny elite get to the top. Since the dawn of professional baseball, almost a century and a half ago, just over seventeen thousand young men have made it all the way to the majors.

John Montefusco’s name on a scrap of paper might not have much market value, but there were lots of people happy to get one for the price of a soft drink and shoot the breeze with a guy who once pitched to Hank Aaron. Seeing Montefusco made me think of the unsung heroes of my own youth—Yankee killer Frank Lary; first baseman Earl “Torgy” Torgeson; Charlie “Sunday Punch” Maxwell, the AL’s top Sabbath slugger. I’ve met quite a few famous people in the course of a long career as a reporter, but I would rather share a Coke with Torgy or Maxwell than with Kofi Annan any day, and I bet most people would. Although, who knows? There are probably kids out there today who collect UN trading cards.

I stepped out of the drugstore and found myself face to face with Al Kaline. For some reason it hadn’t occurred to me he would be here. Willie Mays, sure. Yogi Berra, Bob Gibson, Frank Robinson in a golf cap—but not Kaline. It was like running into Achilles. But there he was, sitting quietly at an autograph table on Main Street, next to former teammate Senator Jim Bunning, signing his name on baseballs with a shy, fixed smile on his thin lips.

Al Kaline and I broke into baseball together. In 1955, he led the American League in hitting with a .340 average, the youngest batting champion in history. He played in the All-Star Game outfield with Mickey Mantle and Ted Williams. The papers called Kaline (as they had once called Ted Williams) “the Kid.” That was also what I called myself (to myself) on my first Little League team. As baseball years are computed, we were practically the same age.

Detroit back then was a rough sports scene. The Red Wings Gordie Howe was revered as not only the greatest player in the NHL but also the dirtiest; he once practically decapitated Rangers defenseman Lou Fontinato in a fistfight. Lions quarterback Bobby Layne was a reliable DUI after almost every home game. The raucous spirit of Ty Cobb hung over Briggs Stadium. But Al Kaline never did or said anything embarrassing—at least nothing I ever heard about.

Not every kid on the sandlot was a Kaline man. One of our pitchers, Jimmy Spadafore, idolized Whitey Ford, an act of treason against the Tigers we attributed to the fact that Jimmy was both a lefty and a Catholic. Jimmy had an ancient uncle who would sit on the front porch and curse loudly in Sicilian, probably at the fates that had deposited him in Pontiac, Michigan, instead of a civilized place like Brooklyn.

In the outfield we had two brothers, transplanted hillbillies named Hubert and Herbert. We called them the twins, although they weren’t. For some reason, they both wanted to be center fielder Bill Tuttle. There was also a born-again Christian first baseman named Monroe who claimed to be a distant cousin of Tigers third baseman Ray Boone.

We almost never saw our heroes in person. Pontiac was an hour away from Briggs Stadium, and back then an hour was an hour. My grandfather took me to my first game—which, I soon realized, was his first game, too. We sat in right field, just behind Kaline. I had my glove with me, in case something got over his head. Late in the game, a bunch of kids jumped over the low wall and began racing around the field, trying to touch Kaline, with ushers and stadium security in hot pursuit. My grandfather nudged me gently and said, “Nu, why don’t you go down there and play with the other boys?”

The only baseball fan among my immigrant relatives was my uncle Pinchus. He had the round red face and slightly slanted eyes common among Hungarian Jews. He also shared the Hungarian inability to learn languages. After fifty years in America, he barely spoke En-glish. Pinchus was a pious man who wore a black silk skullcap of the kind often found in the loaner bin in the foyer of synagogues. He never attended an actual game. I doubt that he knew the rules of baseball. He couldn’t follow the Tigers easily, either: his Hungarian newspaper didn’t carry box scores. But he never missed a game on the radio. On Friday nights and Saturdays he would ask a gentile (or a grandnephew) to turn on the radio for him. I often wondered what he got out of it, since he couldn’t understand the play-by-play.

My uncle’s fandom, as it turned out, dated back to Hank Greenberg, the Tigers Hall of Fame first baseman. In 1934, Detroit began the month of September in a hot pennant race. A crucial game against Boston was scheduled for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year. Greenberg had promised his parents that he wouldn’t play on a holy day, but manager Mickey Cochrane convinced him to reassess his priorities. Greenberg hit a home run in the ninth to beat Boston 2–1. The city celebrated Greenberg, but a lot of Jews were disappointed.

A reporter from the
New York Eve ning Post
traveled up to the Bronx to discuss the matter with Greenberg’s parents. “It’s not so terrible,” Mama Greenberg said. “I see young guys go to the Temple in the morning and then maybe do worse things than Henry did.” Papa Greenberg took a harder line, saying that he was putting his foot down and his son would not be playing on Yom Kippur. Greenberg listened to Papa and sat the game out. As it turned out, it didn’t matter to the team—the Tigers had already more or less clinched the pennant—but for Greenberg, it was one of the greatest public relations moves in baseball history. Edgar Guest, a nationally syndicated poet (such a thing actually existed back then), expressed the general mood in a tribute called “Speaking of Greenberg.”

Come Yom Kippur
—
holy fast day world-wide over to the Jew
—
And Hank Greenberg to his teaching and the old tradition true
Spent the day among his people and he didn’t come to play.
Said Murphy to Mulrooney, “We shall lose the game today!
We shall miss him on the infield and shall miss him at the bat,
But he’s true to his religion
—
and I honor him for that!”

If that’s what Murphy said to Mulrooney, you can imagine how Uncle Pinchus felt. Hank had taken one for the tribe. His Rosh Hashanah lapse was forgiven, a temporary flaw, like Moses smashing the tablets in a fit of pique. From that day on, the Tigers were the Jews in my uncle’s opinion, and the rest of the American League teams were goyim.

As a kid, I scoffed at this kind of ethnic patriotism, but with time I have come to see that you can’t be a baseball fan in a vacuum. We love the players and teams that we can identify with. How different, really, was Pinchus from the Baltimoreans who packed Cooperstown to pay tribute to Cal Ripken? They, too, were a tribe: white middle-class folks who had grown up in the city and fled to the suburbs, refugees in their own minds, whose main tie to the metropolis of their nativity was their love of the Orioles.