This past weekend, I travelled to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown. I could go on and on about my history of visiting the Hall of Fame going back to childhood or wax poetic about the place of baseball in the fabric of America. Or I could just share some photos we took of the place. For your sake, gentle reader, let’s go with Option B.
Not surprisingly, Babe Ruth’s image is ubiquitous inside the Hall of Fame and Museum. This promotional poster for a Far East tour presents a different look for the Babe.“The tools of ignorance.”Before there was Babe Ruth, Christy Matthewson was the undisputed king of New York baseball. The museum has devoted a generous amount of exhibit space to the Negro Leagues — a portion of baseball’s story that was under-told for a long time.It was nice to see Hank Aaron get a big exhibit. He was and still is criminally underappreciated as one of the greatest players of all time.Was there anything more fun than baseball in the 1970s? I’m biased because that is the era in which I became a fan, but still. Also, the Reggie! candy bar was damn tasty.Speaking of baseball in the 1970s…I quite enjoyed this collection of baseball personalities and notable moments interpreted as tongue-in-cheek comic book covers. The Dave Parker cover, in particular, had me laughing out loud.A Leroy Neiman piece; because if it had anything to do with sports, Leroy Neiman did a painting of it.This shelf of bobbleheads is just the tip of the iceberg of a much larger bobblehead exhibit. A nice touch was that the shelves vibrate to ensure continuous bobbling of the heads.Along with bobbleheads, there was a very substantial exhibit devoted to baseball cards and their fluctuating monetary value and place in the culture over the years. According to this, the sports market crashed after 1991. Thanks, Clinton.Trying my hand at some baseball trivia.Several generations of fans will remember Phil Rizzuto for his trademark “Holy Cow!” catchphrase. (I prefer to remember him for those low-budget TV spots he used to do for The Money Store, but that’s just me.)The entrance to the Hall of Fame Gallery, a.k.a. the part of the building everyone has come to see.The late great Rickey Henderson. Rickey never played for my team and, in fact, spent much of his career playing for teams that I actively rooted against, but I grudgingly became a fan of him as an individual player. In his prime, he was a fearsome offensive weapon. Throughout his career, he was one of the true characters of the game, in the very best sense. He left us too soon.
That bittersweet note seems like an appropriate place to end this. There are still a lot more photos from the visit that I will highlight in a future post. That post will have a theme that I won’t reveal at this point, but here’s a hint: brace yourself for lots of orange and black.
Researcher. Marketer. Teacher. Father of adult children and dogs. 20th Century holdover. Central New York native. Long-suffering Buffalo Bills fan. History nerd. Traveler. Vintage advertising enthusiast. Hat wearer.
a.k.a. V.J. 
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