Cooperstown: Babe and the Kid, Line Drives and Lipstick

By Art Spander   

COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. — The statue of James Fenimore Cooper sits in proper relaxation, maybe a pop fly away from the bronzes of Roy Campanella and Johnny Podres, who naturally as catcher and pitcher are located 60 feet, 6 inches apart.

This indeed is Cooper’s town. It was established more than 250 years ago by his father, in the rolling Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York, where the subjects of Cooper’s novels, the Mohican Indians, lived.

This also is baseball’s town, the site of the most famous of American sporting halls of fame, a shrine to myth and reality, where a visitor quickly comes upon life-size figures of the Babe and the Kid, George Herman Ruth and Theodore Williams.

That baseball almost certainly wasn’t invented in Cooperstown by Abner Doubleday but more likely in Hoboken, N.J., by Alexander Cartwright is of no great issue here. Legends do not require confirmation, only recognition.

What Milan is to opera lovers and St. Andrews is to golfers — sites that if not quite holy are close — Cooperstown is to baseball. There’s an art museum here. There’s also a golf course — Leatherstocking, named for a Cooper book. They are insignificant.

Baseball is the lure, the National Baseball Museum and Hall of Fame, where kids in T-shirts and shorts reach up to touch the letters of plaques honoring a Babe or a Ty Cobb or a Willie Howard Mays, as if able to grasp some bit of history.

It’s been said that one of the virtues of baseball is that it enables the generations to talk to each other. Seven years old or 70, the link is the game, grandfathers recalling their youth, grandsons projecting the future.

A half-century ago, it still was three strikes you’re out, and yes, Sandy Koufax and Juan Marichal knew how to throw those strikes the way Justin Verlander knows these days.

Main Street — what else would the main street of Cooperstown be called? — is packed with memorabilia stories and ice cream parlors. Of course.

It was the late Leonard Koppett, a fine journalist and brilliant thinker, who insisted that one of the reasons kids grow to love baseball is that at the ballgame, parents — dads, mostly — unhesitatingly buy them anything, cotton candy, hot dogs, particularly ice cream. Who wouldn’t want to go?

Maybe 10 years ago, every other shop in Cooperstown was peddling something connected with Pete Rose, who, if he’ll never get in the Hall — silly when the guy with the most hits in history isn’t a Hall of Famer — was getting wealthy from the sale of autographs.

Pete’s presence has dimmed. He was at the induction ceremonies a couple of weeks back, which drew only a tiny percentage of the usual 10,000 fans because no living ballplayer was involved, but the various stores now focus on the Yankees and Mets. That’s understandable, because the Big Apple is only about a three-hour drive away.

As with other places in the country, really the world, Cooperstown has been hurt by the economy, although at the moment most of the bed-and-breakfast locales, places with names like “Baseball, Bed and Breakfast” or “Landmark Inn,” are filled.

In another few days, as a contrast, the county sheep dog trials will be held in Cooperstown. It would be neat if the dogs could be taught to steal second. You mean they already do, grabbing the bag in their jaws and running off?

If men are predominant here, women are not ignored. There’s a shop on Main calling itself “Line Drives and Lipstick,” which despite the allusion is more boutique than dugout store.

Several shops manufacture bespoke bats or at the least engrave any name you want on any previously milled bat. “Please don’t swing the bats,” admonishes a sign at Cooperstown Bat Company. That’s inside.

Outdoors, on Main Street, where boys are trying to duplicate Miguel Cabrera, or Lou Gehrig, it’s a wonder there aren’t more broken heads or broken windows.

For Red Sox fans, and they are easily identified by their attire, it’s more a question of broken hearts. On a wall in the Hall is an enlarged reproduction of the promissory note of $100,000 the Yankees gave Boston in 1919 for Ruth. The man then in charge of the Yanks, Jake Rupert, was one of the recent Hall inductees. No reference to the Curse of the Bambino, it must be noted.

In the Hall’s souvenir shop you can buy various jerseys, including one with Yankee pinstripes and the No. 3. All well and good, except above the number is “RUTH,” which is nonsense because not only were there no players’ names on uniforms when Ruth was active but the Yankees, home or away, never had them at any time.

“Never let fear of striking out get in your way,” is the quote from the Babe, who whiffed 1,330 times in his career. Never let fear of revising his uniform get in your way, either.