My wife and I spent the weekend in upstate New York and took a trip into Cooperstown to take a turn around the museum. I’ve written for Mets360 for years and cover the minor league systems of the Mets. I am also an avid baseball fan and have been since the Mike Piazza era of baseball and a trip to the hall has been on my agenda for some time. Yet, my reaction to it was not what I had hoped or expected.
Firstly, the place is crowded. There are large groups of people circulating out front with school trips, team trips and families shouting and milling about. As what is sure to be an unpopular opinion, the museum should have timed admissions and a better flow. And now to seem even older and crankier, I’ve been to my share of museums and have never, in my life, seen children behaving so poorly at one. The children were running around, smacking displays and generally being boisterous. I don’t expect the baseball museum to be as hushed as the Louvre but I do expect a modicum of adult supervision and respectful behavior.
Those items are only partly the museum’s fault but the museum could and should do things to improve. Beyond timed entry the museum lacks a standard path of progress for the people visiting. This means that to see everything, you need to cycle about and go back to corners and directions you missed. This causes the space to feel much more chaotic than it needs to be. They should also assign staff to the interactive exhibits. There were a handful of very cool features in the space that were designed for children but these areas were left unsupervised and without any sort of queuing or oversight. If you’ve been to one of the newer museums in Washington D.C. or to the World War II museum in New Orleans, you’ve seen that museums can do these things correctly, but the baseball Hall of Fame does not.
The next part is perhaps my most surprising takeaway. Statues, static images and memorabilia don’t serve to give you context or convey any amount of emotion. My wife pulled me back to look again at Babe Ruth’s uniform and mitt and I shrugged. I know all about Ruth and his impact on the game. Seeing those artifacts did nothing. Baseball and sports in general is an experience that tells its story in moments. Some of these moments are illustrated to a degree but not nearly enough of them and none of them well enough to educate or convey the emotionality of the moment.
Underwhelmed and feeling rushed and jostled by the crowd I took almost nothing from the museum beyond the sections for Black and Latin American players (which are regrettably too small). Additionally, the Hall of Fame does nothing to address the darkness of the game which is part of the history. While modern historians are rehabilitating the image of Ty Cobb (which I find questionable) players like he and Roger Hornsby who did deplorable things are not mentioned for them. The steroid era of baseball isn’t discussed or noted to a meaningful degree. History, is very cleanly white-washed.
This disservice is exacerbated by the lack of inclusion for players who most thoroughly participated in the great moments that made baseball. Shoeless Joe Jackson, whose ban from baseball still smacks of far more corruption than his team’s fixing of the World Series, will never be present. Tris Speaker, who also was implicated in fixing games, has a plaque. Pete Rose, who bet on baseball as a manager, will also never appear in the Hall. Ty Cobb, who has been linked with the KKK (though this hasn’t been verified) also bet on baseball, and he has a place of honor. Barry Bonds and others of the steroid era are also notably absent. They are part of the story of the game and their absence speaks as loudly as the lack of any transparency for the darker histories of some of the baseball greats.
Finally, we came to the plaques. The room didn’t sit well with me from the onset. Not only do these plaques have barely enough information to be worth seeing but the room feels like a mausoleum. We are deifying these players, who appear on the walls for a variety of reasons and qualifications. Some are there because of their statistics alone, others for their impacts on the game, others because the biased assembly of deciders liked them. It’s arbitrary, ineffectual and more than a little creepy.
In closing, perhaps I’m a cranky middle-aged man. Perhaps my distaste for the Hall of Fame and the museum are my own failings. Regardless, I can say that I got more from watching Ken Burns’ enormously long documentary than from visiting this building and felt more nostalgia watching high school kids compete at Doubleday Field around the corner.
I’ve been to the Hall three times, although one I barely remember. The other two times were not nearly as crowded as what you experienced. I can certainly see that being a big turnoff, especially with unruly kids.
While it’s been some time since my last visit, there were definitely things the museum could have done better even then. To me, one of the least-impressive things was the room with all of the official inductees. Maybe some like the solemness of it but it could use some 21st Century pizazz.
Still, overall, I’m glad I went and would definitely go back there again.
Perhaps 10 years from now, you can go in the Fall when school is in session and have a better experience.
I don’t see why the author is disturbed by tributes to Ty Cobb. The gambling part is unproven. I did a search engine search and could find nothing about Mr. Cobb by involved with the Ku Klux Klan. Do you have a source for your allegation? I do know thatthere was an autobiography of Cobb by one Al Stump, which has been thoroughly discredited. Cobb played the game hard but fairly, and he is rightly honored in the Hall of Fame.
Wait til you get to be an old man, David. There’s still room for the floor to fall!
I grew up not too far from Cooperstown as a kid and had the chance to visit quite a few times in my teens, even back when there was a cool Hall of Fame Game at Doubleday field.
The fact that what you saw drove you to write this piece and share with us here perhaps indicates generating some dialog means the museum is being successful … at least at something.
I last went after Piazza and Junior were inducted. We seem to have caught a day when the crowds were not bad at all, but I can very much identify with the screaming kids and hordes of people. Museums such as the Baseball fight a big problem – a lot of the stuff to display is small, like baseballs, and gloves, and hats etc so that the nature of each display requires a close look and huddling in a bunch of people. It lends itself to chaos. I find it interesting that you didnt feel the whole baseball story wasnt told. I have to agree with you, but at least there is some aspect of the steroids era, like Bonds asterisk HR ball etc, but its minimal. On top of all the stuff, I think they have a mission to keep baseball in as positive a light as they can.
Once thing most people dont seem to get, and which you identify, is that there are 2 aspects of the place: a museum, and a hall of fame where the plaques are. When people go, I think the plaque hall is usually less filled with people because it does have that mausoleum feel to it. What that does mean is that when people says Bonds is somehow not represented, thats not true, because that is a story in the Museum. Bonds is represented there, even if he doesnt have a plaque. I get tired of hearing about that given how comparatively few people (in my experience) go to the plaques.
Thanks for sharing!
My wife and I made it to the Negro BB HOF & the adjacent Jazz Museum; located in Kansas City, back in late June 2021. A lot of Covid restrictions still in place, so perhaps that is why the place wasn’t crowded. However, it didn’t take away from the enjoyment we both derived from both museums. A lot of displays and information about the league, the players, and the reality of the times regarding “Jim Crow”. The statues of its most famous luminaries are placed around a room, resembling a field. It really was well done and very educational for even I, a baseball and general history nut. I highly recommend a visit to it.
Our last trip there was about 15 years ago. My wife, thinking we needed some local flavor, booked us (with our then 10-year-old son) a room in a local motel. Big mistake. It was a stopover for transient workers and none of them were working, just hanging out drinking. The rooms looked like they had last been remodeled during the Nixon era. There was a bad smell. We were booked for two nights, and we didn’t stay one. The old man running the place wouldn’t refund our money. I gave the place a bad review on Google.
I feel the same way about the HOF as I do about the All-Star Game. It’s a diversion from the diversion. Perhaps it’s because I’ve had a chance to see many of the players inducted since 1985, but I am far less impressed by guys like Catfish Hunter, Billy Williams, Jim Rice, Roberto Alomar, Bert Blyleven, Barry Larkin, Ron Santo, Craig Biggio, Alan Trammel, Harold Baines, Lee Smith, Larry Walker, Scott Rolen, Adrian Beltre, and Todd Helton than I was with the legends like Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Cobb, Williams, Mantle, Mathewson, Stengel, Berra, Feller, Jackie, Ott, Speaker, and Dean.
It’s kinda become the Hall of The Very Good. Granted there are some great players enshrined there since ’85, but the barrier to entry has been a bit watered down.
This is the type of question where WAR is really useful. My opinion is that 60 fWAR gets you in the conversation for the Hall, 70 should make you automatic and any total under 60 for a non-catcher or non-reliever we can consider as a mistake. Here’s your list:
Hunter – 37.2 – mistake
Williams – 60.4 – debatable
Rice – 50.8 – mistake
Alomar – 63.6 – debatable
Blyleven – 102.9 – slam dunk
Larkin – 67 – debatable
Santo – 70.9 – in
Biggio – 65.8 – debatable
Trammell – 63.7 – debatable
Baines – 38.4 – mistake
Smith – reliever – debatable
Walker – 68.7 – debatable
Rolen – 69.9 – for all intents and purposes, in
Beltre – 83.5 – safely in
Helton – 54.9 – mistake
So, far all of the guys you mentioned, I’d only consider four of them to be bad choices. And I’d add a fifth in Jack Morris, with 55.8 fWAR.
And while there’s no quibble with the guys you listed who started their MLB careers in the first half of the 20th Century, we shouldn’t pretend that there weren’t mistakes from that period, either. Rick Ferrell, Chick Hafey, Ross Youngs, Ray Schalk, Ernie Lombardi, Hack Wilson, Pie Traynor, Roger Bresnahan, Phil Rizzuto, Gil Hodges, Rabbit Maranville, Travis Jackson, Earle Combs, Deacon White, Frank Chance, Chuck Klein, Johnny Evers, Ralph Kiner, Kiki Cuyler, Nellie Fox, Dave Bancroft, Bobby Doerr, Earl Averill and Jimmy Collins are among the many in the Hall who fall short of 60 fWAR.
Voting has gotten significantly better through the years. And a good portion of the really bad choices – both then and now – were Veteran Committee picks. Regardless, the barrier to entry has risen – certainly in my lifetime. There are at least 50 Hall of Famers worse than Craig Biggio and at least 40 of those were elected before I was born.
Thanks for the article and the excellent comments that followed. I consider myself a pretty big baseball fan and follower of the Mets since the early 1970s. For reasons I can’t really identify myself, I don’t have much interest in the HOF debates of who belongs. I have never visited the hall and have no burning desire to do so. I loved the Burns documentary and I visit the Met hall of fame at Citifield at least once a season. Perhaps it is the political aura that lingers with the HOF.