In Cooperstown, New York it’s all
baseball. All baseball, all the time. All baseball everywhere.
I’m part of the baseball mania
here, cheering for my grandson and his team, the Orinda Thunder from the San
Francisco area. Thunder is one of 104 teams competing in a week-long national
tournament for 12-year-olds.
There are, by my guess, 1,500
youngsters playing the game day and night on 25 very professional-looking ball
fields. When they are not on the fields the players are lining up to get into
the world famous National Baseball Hall of Fame on the village’s main street.
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| The Orinda Thunder |
Yes, village. Cooperstown is a
village, cuddling the foothills of the Catskill Mountains. Population 1,800,
which explodes to 50,000 during times of baseball mania. One short main street.
One traffic light.
Baseball is fun and so is being
around 12 year olds. However, too much of anything is not healthy, so I sneak
away from the baseball action to find something interesting, other than
baseball, about Cooperstown.
On Pioneer Street, not far from
the Hall of Fame, I pass an ancient building. It is the Tunnicliff Inn, Est.
1802, and on the large front window is painted: The James Fenimore Cooper
Dining Room.
Of course, James Fenimore Cooper (1759
-1851) the famous American author! I skip down to the village library to
discover if he had a connection to the village. Connection indeed. His dad,
William, founded the frontier settlement in the late 1700s and James lived
there on and off for much of his life.
James Fenimore Cooper was the
United States’ first famous novelist, writing 32 novels about the roughness and
romance of frontier life. Some of his more popular efforts: The Deerslayer, The
Pathfinder, The Last of the Mohicans.
His daughter, Susan Fenimore
Cooper, also was a writer, and an amateur naturalist. She wrote mainly about
country living and nature in a time when nature was much more natural.
Her most important achievement,
however, was founding a home for orphans and destitute children. It was
established in a large house on the shore on Otsego Lake and across from the
village cemetery.
All intriguing history but nagging
my reporter’s mind is how a village with one traffic light became the Mecca of
baseball.
Craig Muder, Hall of Fame communications
director, has the answer, which he shares with the Orinda Thunder sluggers
during a visit to baseball’s shrine.
A misty piece of folklore had
it that Abner Doubleday, an army general, invented the game for his troops encamped
at Cooperstown back in 1839. The legend, nourished by some bad research, grew
and was accepted by major league baseball owners and fans.
The Cooperstown area also was
known for growing hops used to brew beer. But by the early 1930s, Prohibition
and the Depression had knocked the stuffing out of the Cooperstown economy.
Enter Stephen C. Clark, a Wall
Street financier who had a home in Cooperstown. He was the owner of what was
known as the “Doubleday Ball,” which the legend said General Doubleday and his
troops used for the first baseball game back in 1839.
He displayed the ball at the
Cooperstown Village Club, which began collecting donated baseball artifacts.
Clark proposed a national baseball museum for Cooperstown and in 1939 the
National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum became a reality.
It is impossible to say where
first baseball game was played. That’s because it grew out of Rounders, an English
stick and ball game dating back to the early 1700s.
Certainly one of the earliest
forms of North America baseball was played in Canada. The Canadian Encyclopedia
says that a baseball-type game was played June 4, 1838 in Beachville, in
southwestern Ontario. That was two years before the Doubleday game in
Cooperstown and seven years before the birth of the New York Knickerbockers and
the “New York game,” which introduced
nine-man teams.
No matter where the first baseball was pitched, Cooperstown
is an excellent venue to celebrate the game. It is here that young players
every summer learn about team play, and how wholesome sport can build better
citizens.
As Craig Muder told the Thunder players: “Baseball
stands for something.”
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