A Family Visit to the National Baseball Hall of Fame Cooperstown
An IBWAA contributor recounts his family's trip to Cooperstown
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Pregame Pepper
Did you know…
. . . The National Baseball Hall of Fame opened in 1939, the first of major sports recognition locations that remain in use. The most recent baseball hall of fame to be opened was the National College Baseball Hall of Fame - and it’s soon to be on the move!
The College Baseball Foundation was formed in 2004 to begin the project of constructing a Hall of Fame for college ball. The first class was inducted in 2006, and the storage of records and artifacts for future display was held at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. However, issues with building permits and other logistical issues led the CBF to pursue another location.
In January of this year, the announcement came that the Museum at Prairiefire in Overland Park, Kansas, will build a permanent wing to recognize the history of college baseball. Few details on timeline have emerged since that announcement, however, so artifacts remain stored in Lubbock.
Leading Off
A Family Visit to Cooperstown
By Daniel R. Epstein
As the biggest baseball fan in my family, it can be hard to rally the troops for a baseball-centric outing. This is part of the reason why I hadn’t visited the Hall of Fame since 1994 when I was 11, but a few weeks ago, I made a return trip with my wife and children, ages 13 and nine. Cooperstown was the first leg of a five-part road trip, so I figured even if my family wasn’t enthralled, we had lots of other things planned on our journey.
I needn’t have worried—the Hall of Fame was a delight. Obviously, for baseball obsessives like myself, the appeal is self-evident, but I was pleasantly surprised by how captivated my family was—even though their baseball fandom is casual at best.
After we bought our tickets, we were offered customized guides. They had scavenger hunts specifically for the kids, which were perfect for keeping their interest all through the museum. For example, they had to find the model number of the bat Aaron Judge used to hit his 62nd home run in 2022. For the adults, they had exhibit guides for all 30 MLB teams.
The exhibits took us on a comprehensive journey of baseball history, starting with artifacts dating from before the Civil War and winding all the way through the present day. When we debate and discuss the Hall of Fame, we spend the overwhelming majority of our energy on who does and doesn’t get a plaque, but this is a mistake. The plaques are only a fraction of the story of baseball and the Hall strives to tell the entirety of it.
There was a photo and informational exhibit about Curt Flood, who deserves to be a Hall of Famer outright. He doesn’t have a plaque, but his contribution to baseball is still immortalized in the Hall. When we saw the area devoted to women in baseball, it went well beyond the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, from the turn-of-the-century bloomer girls to modern-day players. There was a video of Ila Borders discussing her career and the future of women in baseball, and I gained credibility with my kids because I have interviewed her myself. The section on no-hitters featured all seven hats Nolan Ryan wore when he threw his no-nos. I got to show my family the scorecards from Johnny Vander Meer’s back-to-back no-hitters—then add the context that these were some of the first night games ever played and that the batters probably couldn’t see very well.
Curt Flood, Ila Borders, and Johnny Vander Meer are not Hall of Famers, but they are certainly in the Hall of Fame. The history of baseball would be incomplete without them.
The museum helped my kids understand the story of their family as well. My wife is a Cardinals fan because her grandfather was a Cardinals fan, even though the family always lived in New Jersey. He immigrated to the United States from Poland, and Stan Musial was one of the first major Polish-American celebrities in any facet of American culture. That representation meant so much to him and his community that it reverberates to this day.
There was an exhibit called “Baseball Cards Your Mother Threw Away.” My kids texted pictures of those cards to my father who confirmed that, yes, he did have most of them when he was their age, and yes, his mother threw them away. If she hadn’t, those cards could’ve paid for their college educations!
We didn’t spend that much time in the hall with the plaques. We took pictures of only three of them: Stan Musial, Mickey Mantle (for my father), and Bob Feller—a personal favorite of mine because it’s such a disaster grammatically. The plaques just weren’t as interesting compared to the rest of the museum.
Beyond the Hall of Fame, we enjoyed Cooperstown itself. We stayed at one of the many reasonably-priced motels just outside of town on Otsego Lake. Swimming and boating would’ve been on the agenda if it hadn’t been unseasonably cold, but the lake was beautiful nevertheless. The downtown area and Main Street retain the aesthetic of the 1930s with lots of baseball shops full of cards, clothing, and memorabilia. My kids loved the live animals at the Farmer’s Museum and we found a few good restaurants, such as Doubleday Cafe, Mel’s at 22, and Bocca Osteria.
My biggest fear about visiting Cooperstown was that it would be best enjoyed by diehards like me and that my family would be forced to placate me, but we all loved the experience. The museum catered to the full spectrum of baseball fans, and it won’t take me another 30 years to make a return trip.
Daniel R. Epstein serves as a co-director of the IBWAA. He writes at Baseball Prospectus and Forbes SportsMoney.
Extra Innings
While a trip to Cooperstown is a memorable moment, one of the best Hall of Fames to visit is the Negro Baseball League Museum. Bob Kendrick, the president of the museum, is one of the elite storytellers in all of baseball (check out his podcast Black Diamonds). It’s worth a stop if you’re in Kansas City: