A Home Of Their Own

Actually, the man we should thank for the Hall of Fame, but never do, is a different Abner than Doubleday: Abner Graves, a mining engineer who grew up in Cooperstown and died in a Colorado insane asylum in 1926 at the age of 92. Graves led an eventful life, to say the least. He ran away from home at 14 to join the California gold rush; he rode for the Pony Express; he became a cattle rancher in Colorado; at 75 he married a 33-year-old woman; and at 90 he shot her dead in the mistaken belief that she was trying to poison him, whereupon he was sent to an asylum.

Nothing else Graves did, though, compared in impact to the letter he wrote in 1905, when he was in his 70s, to Albert G. Spalding. At the time Spalding, a former righthander who had made a fortune in sporting goods, was engaged in a public debate with Henry Chadwick, the baseball writer who wrote the first rule book and devised the box score. The subject of their debate was the origin of the game, and it was much like the one between creationists and evolutionists: Spalding believed that baseball was truly American and had sprung from his native soil, while the British-born Chadwick maintained that baseball was merely the next step up the ladder from the British game of rounders.

To prove his point, Spalding appointed a blue-ribbon panel to discover the true origin of baseball and named Abraham G. Mills, the third president of the National League, as chairman. The Mills Commission did little more than read mail for three years; one of those letters was the one from Graves, who wrote that he remembered that in 1839, or thereabouts, Abner Doubleday had explained the game to a bunch of his friends playing marbles in front of a tailor shop in Cooperstown. The boys had then taken a whirl at playing Doubleday's game, Graves wrote, in Elihu Phinney's cow pasture off Main Street.

Since he had served under Doubleday during the Civil War, Mills seized upon that story, even though he should have realized that in 1839 Graves was five years old and Doubleday was 20, a bit old for marbles. The commission also ignored the obituary written for the West Point newspaper when Doubleday died in 1893; the Major General was described as "a man who did not care for or go into any outdoor sports."

Nevertheless, on the basis of Graves's letter, written by a man who was soon to be declared certifiably insane, the commission concluded that Doubleday had invented baseball in Cooperstown in 1839. Wrote Mills, "I can well understand how the orderly mind of the embryo West Pointer would devise a scheme for limiting the contestants on each side and allotting them to field positions, each with a certain amount of territory." Not exactly an airtight argument.

Needless to say, Cooperstown embraced the myth wholeheartedly, and in the early 1920s the town began work building a ballpark on the land that Graves had designated as Doubleday's proving ground. Nothing much else was done until 1934, when Alexander Cleland came on the scene. Cleland was the trusted aide of the richest man in Cooperstown, an heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune named Stephen Clark. Cleland wasn't much of a baseball fan, but knowing Cooperstown's claim to fame, he conceived an idea for a baseball museum while riding on a train to New York City. In a 1934 memorandum to Clark, Cleland suggested that a museum could contain such things as "funny old uniforms," as well as baseballs thrown out by presidents, and bats of famous old players.

Then, in 1935, as if by divine providence, the belongings of Abner Graves were discovered in the attic of a farmhouse in Fly Creek, down the road a piece from Cooperstown. In Graves's trunk was the missing link, so to speak, a decrepit baseball that, in the predisposed minds of the city fathers, "proved" Graves must have been right about baseball and Cooperstown. Clark bought the ball for $5 and put it on display in the Village Club in Cooperstown. With the discovery of the ball--and with the game's dubious centennial in 1939 approaching--Clark and Cleland stepped up their lobbying efforts with the lords of baseball. Cleland suggested the selection of 10 alltime all-stars as part of the celebration, and Ford Frick, then president of the National League, hit upon the idea of a permanent Hall of Fame.

The idea captured the public's imagination, and in 1936 the Baseball Writers' Association of America held its first elections for enshrinement in the Hall. Of the many players nominated, only five were named on the necessary 75% of 226 ballots: Cobb (222 votes), Honus Wagner and Ruth (both 215), Mathewson (205) and Walter Johnson (189).

By the time the centennial rolled around, 26 men had gained admission to the new Hall of Fame. On June 12, 1939, the shrine was officially opened. Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who had been lukewarm on the project for years, waxed poetic in a speech that day: "Nowhere else than its birthplace could this museum be appropriately situated. To the pioneers who were the moving spirits of the game in its infancy and to the players who have been elected to the Hall of Fame ... we pay just tribute."

Since that opening day, the annual Hall of Fame summer weekend to honor new inductees has gotten more and more publicity, and the village has gotten more and more crowded as fans and now collectors stream into Cooperstown. But through the years the Hall of Fame weekend has retained its special charm. Where else but Cooperstown, and when else but that weekend, can you see Lefty Gomez's son jogging with Babe Ruth's grandson? Or walk through the parking lot of the grand Otesaga Hotel and spy Mel Allen sitting in the front seat of his car with the door open, a beer on the dashboard and the Yankees game on the car radio? Or come across Hall of Famer Cool Papa Bell walking through the Otesaga lobby after a particularly grueling autograph session with a sign around his chest saying, OUT TO LUNCH? Or listen to David Eisenhower proudly recite to Hall of Famer Johnny Mize the famous poem with the famous verse that ends, "But not your eyes, Mize, not your eyes."