By Kim J. Harmon

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Going there was as much for me as it was for Benjamin – as it was for us. With work and school and then more work and more school, fathers and sons don’t often have the opportunity to do stuff like this – to transcend the backyard Wiffle Ball© game and ESPN Sunday Night Baseball and visit the game of baseball right where (accepted) history says it all began more than 160 years ago.

Cooperstown, New York.

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It was, in a way, almost perfect – when planning the trip to the National Baseball Hall of Fame, I had to call ahead to book a motel room and, of course, the first number I called was the Cooperstown Motel.

Yeah, the price was the right and, sure, it was just a 12-minute walk to the museum.

But that wasn’t it.

See, the same family has been managing the Cooperstown Motel for three generations and in 1939, when the Hall of Fame was officially opened, the man who answered the phone said – like an oldtimer would when bouncing his grandson on his knee – that he had been there that June day to shake the hand of Babe Ruth.

Now, that was it.

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Abner Doubleday was credited by the Mills Commission (appointed in 1905 for a three-year study on origins of the game) with inventing baseball by revising the rules of a game called town ball which he witnessed prior to 1839 (which may ne like saying he stole the idea).

It should be no surprise that the testimony of Abner Graves, a mining engineer from Colorado and old school chum of Doubleday, led to this version being accepted. In letters to Al Spalding, one of the first pitchers and one of the founders of the National League, Mr Graves said he had been present when Mr Doubleday made changes to this game called town ball – which involved as many as 50 boys out in a field attempting to catch a ball hit by a tosser using a four-inch flat bat.

According to the letters, Mr Graves said Mr Doubleday then used a stick to mark out a diamond-shaped field in the dirt, added bases, devised the concept of a pitcher and catcher, and created rules that limited the number of players.

The Mills Commissions’ final report on December 30, 1907 stated, in part, that “the first scheme for playing baseball, according to the best evidence obtainable to date, was devised by Abner Doubleday at Cooperstown, N.Y. in 1839.” This version of events, though, has been widely – and sometimes vociferously – disputed because, in part, none of Doubleday’s own writings ever mention baseball.

About 27 years after the Mills Commission issued its statement, a ball was found in a attic trunk in Fly Creek, New York, at the home of Mr Graves. The ball was small and misshapen, with the cover torn open and revealing stuffing made of cloth – clearly homemade. This became known as the Doubleday baseball. It was purchased for $5 by Cooperstown resident Stephen C. Clark – who conceived of the idea of displaying the baseball, along with other memorabilia, in a building that now contains Cooperstown village offices.

In 1935, when plans were being made to celebrate the 100th anniversary of baseball, former National League president Ford Frick backed the idea of a national baseball museum. It was dedicated in June of 1939 – three years after the first elections were made.

At the first election of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America (BWAA), five players were selected – Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, Christy Mathewson and Walter Johnson. When the ribbon cutting on the new museum took place on June 12, 1939, those five players joined 20 others who had been selected from 1937 to 1939 for immortality.

Annually, some 350,000 people visit the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

On Saturday, March 31, my son and I were two of them.

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When Benjamin and I climbed into the car about 6 am that morning, the first pitch of the 2001 Major League Baseball season was still about 34 hours away (the Toronto Blue Jays were going to play the Texas Rangers at Hiram Bithorn Stadium in San Juan, Puerto Rico). There was enough of a tingling sensation in my fingers and toes about that, but realizing I was just four hours or so from walking through the actual Hall of Fame gallery itself (and knowing I would get to see the plaque of my hero, Nolan Ryan) was almost too much.

The weather in Connecticut was brisk and the clouds provided a gloomy overcast – almost typical, one would think, for an early spring morning in New England. But about 45 minutes north of Waterbury, the weather turned decidedly un-spring like with the remnants of the last snowstorm still very much in evidence.

But even that was okay – and expected – but about two-and-a-half hours later, once we crossed over into Duanesville about 40 miles east of Cooperstown, it was evident something was wrong. There was upwards of 10 inches of snow on the ground and we discovered – by asking an exasperated convenience store clerk – that a storm had rolled through the night before and that another one was on the way.

It had snowed so much that the barriers between the west and east lanes of Route 20 were piled so high with snow that it was impossible to see if there was anyone on the other side. And once we started moving a little farther up into the hills, a thick blanket of fog had draped itself over us – reducing visibility to about 100 feet or so.

I realized then that our 12-minute walk from the motel to the hall of fame would now be a two-minute drive.

But that was alright.

Because we were almost there.

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William Cooper, father of the American novelist James Fenimore Cooper, settled Cooperstown in the late 18th century. The main industry – as it is now – was agriculture.

Many of James Fenimore Cooper’s novels were set in and around Cooperstown and he often wrote of the wooded hills that surrounded Lake Otsego, which Mr Cooper called Glimmerglass (there is now a Glimmerglass Opera House, which we could have visited, except it was my guess that they don’t play any Metallica there).

By the middle of the 19th century, Lake Otsego (home to the famous Otesaga Hotel, built in 1911 and recognized as a historic hotel of America) evolved into a summer retreat. That much I knew as we drove by on Saturday morning about 9:45 am, but I also knew that summer was a long way off for Lake Otsego.

Because, it was frozen over.

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Like in Nevada, where you can’t walk into a roadside convenience store without finding a slot machine or two, there is memorabilia everywhere in Cooperstown . . . in the gas stations, in the restaurants, in every window. It was right there in the small office of the Cooperstown Motel, where we signed our names and plunked down our $65 to stay the night (besides the memorabilia, the motel really does harken back to bygone days because – heaven help us – it doesn’t accept plastic).

But seeing a few old baseball cards and a couple of posters of old baseball stadiums only whetted my appetite for more.

Soon – after resting a bit and watching 15 minutes of CatDog on television – we were on our way.

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For more hours than I could count (going way back to when I started planning the trip), I was worried about how the museum would hold the interest of an eight-year-old boy. Me, I could stay in the museum for an entire day and then spend another entire day at the Hall of Fame Library, but would the artifacts of the past – say, uniforms from the old Homestead Grays, the locker of Lou Gehrig, an old woolen sweater worn by Ty Cobb – hold him in anything resembling the kind of awe that they would hold me?

I didn’t know. Benjamin is a typical eight-year-old kid. He likes playing the sports games on Playstation and he likes watching football and basketball and baseball and soccer on television, but – like a lot of eight year olds – he can be easily distracted.

Well, the tone was set as soon as we pushed our way through the turnstiles. Right there in the foyer were statues of two life-sized cows – one dressed up in the uniform of the New York Yankees and the other dressed up in the uniform of the New York Mets.

It was a celebration of the 2000 Subway Series.

Benjamin thought it was hilarious.

From then on, it was just magic.

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The 500 Home Runs exhibit and the Longest Games exhibit and the bats with the absurdly thick handles and the balls with the weird stitching and the funny-looking gloves and the video of Hank Aaron hitting his historic 714th home run and the video of Babe Ruth with his Hall of Fame acceptance speech and the voice of the famous Grantland Rice calling a long ago game – it all worked so well that father and son really were taken back in time.

We started the trip, as we almost had to, I suppose, by taking a long walk through the actual Hall of Fame gallery itself. A big exhibit at the front of the room honored the class of 2000 (Carlton Fisk, Tony Perez, Sparky Anderson, Turkey Stearnes and Bid McPhee) and aside from looking at the batting glove Fisk wore to hit his historic World Series home run in 1975 against the Cincinnati Reds, I was more interested in glimpsing the ghosts of the past.

We saw the plaques of men like Harmon Killebrew (our ersatz namesake) and Henry Emmet Manush (while playing Wiffle Ball© in the backyard once, I said, “Now stepping into the batter’s box – Heinie Manush!” and my two sons, of course, just DIED laughing) and Roger Connor (the 19th-century home run king who was born in 1857 in Waterbury) and Mordecai “Three-Finger” Brown (who had a devastating curve ball largely because he had lost two fingers in a farming accident as a kid) and Jimmie Foxx and Ted Williams and Ty Cobb (“who was so mean,” I told Benjamin, “that he once went into the stands to beat up a guy in a wheelchair!”) and Jackie Robinson (who, I was pleased to discover, Benjamin knew quite a bit about).

Before we left, though, I had to bring Benjamin to the plaque of Cool Papa Bell (the first time I was at the Hall of Fame – with the Newtown High School baseball team – I joined everybody in signing my name to a bat and for some reason I chose to sign it as Cool Papa Harmon and the name since stuck).

“They said Cool Papa Bell,” I said, as we read of his Negro League accomplishments, “was so fast he could flip the switch in his bedroom and be under the covers before the lights went out.”

“Could he really?” Benjamin asked but I just smiled and shrugged my shoulders. Some myths were just too beautiful to question.

Down the hall, in the Memories of a Lifetime exhibit culled from the collection of Barry Halper, there was the helmet Hank Aaron once wore (an old Braves helmet scarred from battle), an old uniform worn by Shoeless Joe Jackson, one the infamous Honus Wagner tobacco cards (one sold for $475,000 several years ago), and an old uniform worn by the Josh Gibson.

Gibson has always been a mythic figure to me – his amazing accomplishments (with few statistical records to verify them) and the stories that were told of him made him out to be an almost Paul Bunyon-like figure. I told Benjamin that supposedly Gibson once hit 80 home runs in a season and that he was the only man to ever hit a ball clear out of Yankee Stadium.

“And then there’s the story,” I said, “of one home run he hit when he was with the Homestead Grays. The Grays were at home, playing the Pittsburgh Crawfords, and Gibson hit a home run so high that it just disappeared. It never came down. Three days later, the Grays are in Pittsburgh and Gibson is at the plate. All of a sudden, a ball drops out of the sky and the Pittsburgh outfielder catches it. Well, the umpire had no choice but to tell Gibson, ‘You’re out – three days ago!’ ”

Benjamin just laughed – but I could tell he got, like I once did, a sense about this man Josh Gibson.

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There was more . . . many more artifacts that had at least one of us – and sometimes both of us – simply smiling wistfully, wishing we could have been there.

Like, the ball Mark McGwire hit for his 62nd home run (which looked, not so surprisingly, like it was warped) . . . the 48-ounce bat that Edd Roush of the Cincinnati Reds (all of 175 pounds he was) used to bat .325 for his career . . . an old poster promoting a game between the famed Homestead Grays and the Pittsburgh Crawfords of the Negro Leagues . . . a oddly congenial letter that Ty Cobb wrote to Bobby Doerr when, apparently, Doerr was just a youngster . . . a chunk of masonry from old Ebbetts Field . . . some old gear worn by umpire Bill Klem, who had the famous saying, “It ain’t nothin’ ‘till I call it!” . . . balls from all seven of the no-hitters thrown by Nolan Ryan   . . . a picture of the old Boston Beaneaters, one of the last good teams out of Boston (only kidding) . . . and the early 20th-century gloves (“How did they catch with that?” Benjamin asked and I had to tell him that the early ballplayers played barehanded and that Bid McPhee never wore a glove. “Never? Wow, that must have hurt!”).

We were inside the Hall of Fame for about five hours but it felt like a little more than 160 years and when we left it was with the conviction (“Maybe Mommy can come next time,” Benjamin said) that this would have to be a yearly pilgrimage for us.

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The experience didn’t dissipate at all – even after the two of us when back to the motel and scarfed down a large pizza and two-liter bottle of Pepsi while watching the NCAA Final Four. The ride home itself was interesting and not because the directions from MapQuest were a little off and had us staying on the Massachusetts Turnpike for about a thousand miles or so, but because there was quite a bit of discussion about Shoeless Joe Jackson and Pete Rose and why they weren’t in the Hall of Fame.

That, plus Benjamin has a way of asking me stuff that is impossible to answer, like, “Has any team ever won all their games by one run?” and I am forced to fashion some sort of answer that doesn’t begin or end with, “I don’t know.”

It was a good ride home – although we both wanted to turn around and go back. I asked Benjamin what his favorite part of the Hall of Fame was and besides listening to Grantland Rice and that long ago game, he said, “The cows.” That was okay, though, because once we got home and he devoured Dan Gutman’s two wonderful books (Honus and Me and Jackie and Me) about a young baseball fan using a baseball card to go back in time, I knew the Hall had reached him.

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About an hour away from Waterbury, we passed right by the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts. We were, in fact, probably less than 200 yards from the front door. Benjamin and I glanced at each, smiled just a little, but we kept on going.

That would be another experience.

For another day.

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“Whoever wants to know the heart

and mind of America had

better learn baseball.”

- Jacques Barzun