Cooperstown Confidential (9 page)

The scandal didn’t cost Boggs his place in the Hall of Fame. For one thing, he had never presented himself as a beacon of rectitude. For another, he was smart enough to go on TV and confess to Barbara Walters that he was suffering from something called “sex addiction,” and Debbie stood by him all the way. After all, how much can a voter hold adultery against a guy like Boggs if his own wife takes him back? Cooperstown’s real character rule: don’t get caught. And if you do, at least get a note from your wife.

* The Frick–Ruth connection didn’t end there, either. In 1961, as commissioner of baseball, Frick ruled that Roger Maris’s 61 season home runs should go into the record books with a tainting asterisk. Frick’s effort was intended to protect the status of his former employer, Ruth, as the “real” record-holder. (The ruling was never enforced.)

* This was a bit much coming from Walker, who had a reputation of his own. He had famous affairs with chorus girls, protected illegal casinos, and was investigated for corruption. Walker was pressured into resigning in 1932 by his fellow New York Democrats and skipped the country to avoid prosecution, taking Betty Compton, one of his girlfriends, with him into exile.

* John Drebinger of the
New York Times
, for example, ghosted for Giants manager John McGraw. Ford Frick, during his baseball-writing days, worked simultaneously for Babe Ruth and the Hearst newspaper chain. These weren’t isolated incidents by any means, nor were they regarded as flagrant violations of the prevailing journalistic ethics. Drebinger was considered a man of outstanding character by his colleagues. Frick went on to help found the Hall of Fame and wound up as commissioner of baseball.

* A union had been created for the players in 1954 to settle contract disputes, but it was dominated by own ers and didn’t become a true labor union until Marvin Miller came on in 1966.

FIVE . . .
The Monks

C
ooperstown is a seasonal village. In summer, it is full of visitors to the Hall of Fame, the Fenimore Museum, the Glim-merglass Opera festival, and the other attractions of the scenic Leatherstocking region. In winter, the town empties out; the baseball memorabilia stores along Main Street close down and the bed-and-breakfast owners head to Florida. The town’s lone stoplight continues to signal, but there aren’t enough cars around to bestow it a sense of authority.

Even in good weather there is no such thing as drop-in traffic. “If you get to Cooperstown by mistake, that means you’ve been lost for at least forty-five minutes,” Ted Spencer told me. But in December 2007, the village experienced an epic snowfall, and I got caught in it. For several days I was practically the only guest at the Cooper Inn. The only visitors to the Hall I encountered were a Japanese couple and three boisterous college boys.

The arctic weather and near isolation made the Hall of Fame a cozy place, and when I first arrived the staff welcomed me into its hot stove league. They struck me as an order of baseball monks, a brotherhood of arcane scholars and pure-hearted lovers of the game. They weren’t naïve. They were aware that many of the players enshrined in the great hall of plaques were not embodiments of the Character Clause and that baseball had a checkered past. The Mitchell Report on the use of performance-enhancing drugs was due that week, and they were bracing for that, too.

But they didn’t confuse historical failings or contemporary controversies with the essence of the game. They talked baseball all day long, but the conversation was mostly swapping historical anecdotes, testing one another with obscure trivia questions, or fondly contemplating the sacred relics of the game on display in the museum or secured in its underground vaults.

One of the first monks I met was Gabriel Schechter. On the day we met, he was supposed to have been on his way to Hollywood to appear on
Jeopardy,
but just as he had been about to leave the house, word came that host Alex Trebek had suffered a heart attack, and his trip was postponed.
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Schechter seemed disappointed but sanguine. Born in New Jersey, he taught English at the University of Montana before drifting down to Las Vegas in 1980, where he worked in casinos and wrote freelance stories. Five times he was a dealer in the World Series of Poker. He knows that there are always winners and losers.

In 2002, Schechter came east to Cooperstown to research a book. A few months later he was offered a job, and he’s been there ever since. Among his tasks is fielding questions from fans around the world. The Hall gets an estimated sixty thousand each year, and the monks spend a significant part of their day trying to answer the questions of baseball fans who range from the idly curious to the obsessed. Nothing is too obscure to be researched seriously.

“Once,” Schechter told me, “two graphic designers called to settle an argument over which of two fonts was used for the numbers on the backs of New York Yankee uniforms in the 1970s. The answer was, the Yankees created their own font, so they both lost.

“Another time a woman called from Florida. Her boss, she said, had bought four baseballs at an auction, each signed by a Hall of Famer. The boss was getting ready to mount them and he wanted some information about the players.

“I asked who he had and she said: Bob Feller, Yogi Berra, Stan Musial, and Jose Alvarez. I told her there was no such player as Jose Alvarez. Later she called me back and said oh, it was
Jesus
Alvarez, as if that made a difference. The only Jesus Alvarez we could find played high school baseball in Texas.”

Although he never existed, Alvarez has attained a kind of immortality in the Hall of Fame archives. “Whenever we come across a photo of an unidentified player, we call him ‘Jose Alvarez,’ ” Schechter told me.

Freddy Berowski is another of the research monks. He was born in Brooklyn, so I naturally turned to him to solve the mystery of another son of the borough, Lipman Pike, and his phantom Coopers-town vote.

Lip Pike was reputedly the first man to play baseball for money. When he first broke in, around the end of the Civil War, baseball was supposedly an amateur sport, played for fun and exercise and the delight of the occasional crowd. Unmarried ladies, at that time, were regarded as virgins, too, unless proven otherwise, and bankers were generally regarded as models of probity if they were not actually in prison. In short, it was a credulous era, and it is possible that players before Pike were paid under the table. But Lip, the son of a Jewish haberdasher, was reported to take his money up front, like any honest workingman. In 1866, the Athletics of Philadelphia got busted for paying him twenty dollars a week.

It was a bargain at twice the price. Pike was one of the best players of the prehistoric era. A left-handed second baseman, he led the league in home runs three straight years, hit .321 between 1871 and 1881, and starred in Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Hartford, Atlantic City, St. Louis, and other venues. His career ended ignominiously in 1881, when he was banned from the National League for suspi-cious “underperfor mance.”
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Despite this, Pike remained a very pop ular fellow in Brooklyn, where he eventually opened his own haberdashery. Thousands attended his funeral service at Temple Israel in 1893.

A lot of baseball sources say that Lip Pike got one vote in the 1936 balloting for the Hall of Fame. But the Web site of the Hall itself doesn’t list him among the fourteen players who were mentioned on at least one ballot that year.

It took Freddy less than a day to get back with an explanation. It turns out that in the early days of the Hall, Veterans Committee members were allowed to vote along with the BBWAA. But those votes were only counted and made public once, in the 1936 election.

“So,” I asked Freddy, “is it correct or incorrect to say that Pike got one vote?”

“Can’t say for sure. He might have gotten votes from the veterans in other years, but those were secret ballots. And they’re still sealed.”

So we may never know how many votes Lipman Pike got. Like I said, there are mysteries in every shrine.

Tim Wiles is the director of research at the National Baseball Hall of Fame library, but he is a literary man at heart, the editor of a book of baseball poetry,
Line Drives,
who performs dramatic readings of “Casey at the Bat.” Wiles is a connoisseur of Cooperstown whimsy. He told me, for example, that there are restaurants in town owned by men called DiMaggio and Yastrzemski, neither of whom is related to his Hall of Fame namesake.

“The Hall of Fame players are great, but the guys I really love meeting are the ones who only played a year or two,” he says. “The big stars, a lot of times their profession is being themselves. But some of the other guys are great characters. Pumpsie Green, for example. Or Spook Jacobs, who has the world’s biggest collection of baseballs. And I really loved Clete Boyer. He used to come up here and sit on a bench on Main Street and sign autographs at ten dollars a pop, just for the fun of it. I remember meeting Lou Lim-mer, too; he brought his grandkids up here and he was more excited than they were.”

Wiles presides over a vast quantity of information. The Hall has a file on every man who has played major-league baseball since 1871—more than seventeen thousand in all.

The chief librarian of the Hall, Jim Gates, came to the Hall of Fame in 1995 from the University of Florida and began putting order into what had been a huge, unor ganized pile of material. Gates took me on a tour of the museum’s lower level, which contains an estimated twenty thousand books about baseball and a vast number of artifacts. The best are kept in a small, vault-like room designed to preserve and protect fragile treasures. There is a handwritten manuscript of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” composed in 1908 (by two guys who had never been to a ballgame). The original promissory note for the sale of Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees is there, as is Judge Landis’s first contract. The papers of the Mills Commission, which proclaimed baseball’s Cooperstown paternity, are carefully guarded. So are the scorecards of the first perfect game (pitched by J. Lee Richmond in June 1880) and the scoresheet kept by broadcasters Ernie Harwell and Russ Hodges of the final game of the 1951 season, when Bobby Thomson’s “shot heard round the world” home run sent the Giants to the World Series. Among the most treasured books are a first edition of Sol White’s
The History of Colored Base Ball
, published in 1907; and the
Ea gle Base Ball Club Rule Book
, circa 1854.

Experts put the value of the Hall’s memorabilia at upward of $100 million. Only a tiny fraction is ever on public display. How it is shown is up to Ted Spencer, whose job as head curator makes him a Cooperstown abbot.

As a boy growing up in Boston, Spencer rooted for the Red Sox and dreamed of becoming an artist. The combination of art and baseball has been helpful in trying to blend Cooperstown’s traditional Norman Rockwell portrait of American baseball with the United Colors of Benetton realities of the modern age.

The monks work intently at the Hall of Fame, even in the off-season. Teams and players send in material that has to be read and cataloged. Hundreds of old boxes of team rosters, scouting reports, financial statements, notes of director’s meetings and fan club proceedings, attendance slips and ticket stubs, contracts and scorecards—the curatorial staff can’t keep up with it all. Thousands of calls come into the research center (every baseball fan has his own personal Lip Pike). Still, there is always time for a cup of coffee and an intense discussion about their favorite topic: baseball. One morning, the talk turned to favorite books.

Tim Wiles was enthusiastic about
The Great American Baseball
Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book
, by Brendan C. Boyd and Fred Harris. It is a look at life and baseball in the 1970s through the trading card explosion of the time; people of a certain age and sensibility find it magical. Lenny Di Franza, a one-time punk rocker who works in the research department, picked
The Boys of Summer
, Roger Kahn’s elegiac retrospective of the 1950s Brooklyn Dodgers. Kahn has come to Cooperstown for years to work on his projects and is a house favorite. Gabriel Schechter chose Lawrence Ritter’s
The
Glory of Their Times
, which appealed to his sense of nostalgia. Ted Spencer liked Darryl Brock’s
If I Never Get Back
, a fable about traveling with the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings. And everyone kept coming back to Harold Seymour’s three-volume history of the game, written between 1971 and 1991. The monks venerate Seymour not only as the Herodotus of baseball but as a member of the brotherhood, so devout that when he died his ashes were scattered near first base at Doubleday Field.

There is also a lot of collaborative work that gets done just for the fun of it. One such project was the story of Walla Tonka. On the wall of his office, Ted Spencer had hung a framed copy of an old newspaper article, the account of a brush with the executioner’s noose on the part of one William Goings in 1897. Gradually, the other staffers began wondering who Goings was and why he merited a framed article. They started to dig.

Goings, they discovered, was a Choctaw Indian who lived in the Oklahoma Territory, and around the turn of the century he was considered a five-skill player and a bona fide star. He also had a temper. One day in 1897, he took it into his head that a woman was trying to work witchcraft on him, and he murdered her. A tribal judge sentenced him to death.

This sentence greatly perturbed the local sporting crowd, coming as it did in the middle of the 1897 baseball season. The judge bowed to public sentiment and commuted the term of William Goings’s execution until the end of the pennant race. He was allowed not only to play at home, but to travel with the team. This decision raised questions in some judicial circles. Some speculated that Goings, whose Choctaw name was Walla Tonka, would go on a road trip and never return.

This must have generated some widespread discussion in the turn-of-the-century press. Not long after the Walla Tonka project began, a member of Spencer’s staff discovered another clue: a letter in a Chicago newspaper written by Buffalo Bill Cody. Buffalo Bill said that, while he hadn’t met Walla Tonka personally, he was well acquainted with the Choctaw character and would vouch for the fact that a brave like Walla Tonka would show up as the law required. (Cody added that he would never give such a character reference to an Apache.)

Buffalo Bill was right about Walla Tonka. He showed up for the final game of the season, which was on a Friday, fully expecting to be hanged the next day. The game, however, was rained out and rescheduled for Monday. A furious legal argument broke out over the disposition of his sentence, which was interrupted when a writ of habeas corpus arrived from a federal judge. The
New York Times
reported that Walla Tonka, roused from bed to be handed the writ, received this reprieve with “true Indian stoicism.” He said, “Maybe me play more ball now,” and went back to sleep.

Two years of legal dithering ensued. The feds claimed that an Indian tribal court could not carry out a death sentence. The Choctaw judge begged to differ. In 1899, the argument came to a head. Just as a government posse was on the way to rescue Walla Tonka from tribal justice, the judge ordered him shot. Four bullets didn’t do the job, so a hose was forced down his throat and he drowned. It was the last capital sentence ever carried out by an Indian tribal court.
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