Iceman Celebration Day 2016 - Baseball Hall of Fame

 

I had cruised through the museum pretty quickly and needed to step outside for a breather. I had spent the majority of my day indoors but I was glad that I got out now because it was a beautiful Spring day. In the courtyard outside was a statue of James Fenimore Cooper, an author from the 1800s who is best known for The Last of the Mohicans. His father William Cooper was the founder of Cooperstown after he purchased and developed this land in the late 1700s. I have him to thank for this beautiful and enlightening part of my journey.

Baseball, like life, contains some tragic stories. Roberto Clemente played for the Pittsburgh Pirates for his entire career (22 years) and got his 3,000th hit on the last day of the 1972 season. This would also be his last hit as he died in a plane crash in December of that year while en route to Nicaragua delivering supplies to a country devastated by an Earthquake. He was a great player and a greater human being, and he is rightfully enshrined here (twice as his original plaque is on display as well as the corrected one to the proper Spanish format of his name to "Roberto Clemente Walker").

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I'm pretty sure that I said this before, but too much time as passed for me to go back and look to confirm it - I love the village of Cooperstown as much (if not more) than I love the Baseball Hall of Fame. Based on the impression that the town gave me, I would encourage everyone to visit even if they don't love baseball. This place has a magical charm that is really rare to find these days.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I walked around the premises to get a better idea of what this place was like on the outside. And I loved it. I loved every single piece of it. Outside they had a baseball scoreboard that had the previous day's results. It was a manual operation and I see a guy going out there every morning and changing the information. That just warms my heart because it is so old school that doesn't really exist anymore.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I already talked about the "Baseball at the Movies" section of the Hall of Fame, but in addition to that they also had some artifacts and props from those movies. Among these items was Wonderboy (Roy Hobbs' baseball bat that he carved from a lightning struck tree in The Natural) and the Babe Ruth autographed ball from The Sandlot. Since this was the Baseball Hall of Fame, I have no choice but to believe that this was authentic artifacts that were used during filming of said movies. If it wasn't, then why include it here in this hallowed place? Why perpetuate that lie when everything else here is God's honest truth? They don't stand anything to gain by submitting false material.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Home

 

 

 

 

On my 2nd time through the Baseball Hall of Fame I took more time to stop and smell the roses (not literally of course. There were a lot of things there, but those weren't the flower kind of roses in the glass displays). I didn't take many pictures, but I spent more time to look at and read about the items in the display. I caught some things I missed like Bud Selig's nameplate he had on his desk and Craig Counsell's cleats from when he scored the winning run in the 1997 World Series that gave the Florida Marlins their 1st championship.