Closing the Baseball Hall of Fame

Twenty-five years ago, I was enduring an afternoon of discontent in the middle of my ninth and final year of chairing Southern Illinois University’s Department of English, when I came across an ad in The Chronicle of Higher Education for the Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture. Needing something to lift my spirits, I answered its call for papers, and, to my surprise, was invited to speak at the Hall of Fame on baseball literature.

I enjoyed the symposium, but I spent most of my time playing hooky from its sessions to wander through the Hall of Fame or shop with my wife, Anita. We ate delightfully greasy food at the Bullpen Cafe and Shortstop Cafe, waved our credit card, like Babe Ruth’s bat, in souvenir shops, and sat reverentially in the bleachers of Doubleday Field.

For die-hard baseball fans, the Hall of Fame is the Church of Baseball. Once you enter the red-bricked building with its impressive colonial design and Ionic columns and pass through its green turnstiles, you become a part of the history and mythology of baseball.

While there are enough special rooms, alcoves, displays and statues to dazzle the most ardent of baseball fans, the heart of the building is the Hall of Fame gallery, and its pulse is the baseball timeline. All a baseball fan needs to do is enter the gallery, then stroll along the timeline to understand the emotional and spiritual appeal of baseball as America’s national game. Its historical artifacts honor baseball’s greatest teams and events with plaques commemorating the game’s immortals.

Since that first visit, Anita and I have made several more trips to Cooperstown, but our most memorable came in the fall of 2001. I’d just retired from SIU and had signed a contract with the University of Pittsburgh Press to edit a collection of writings on my hometown Pittsburgh Pirates. We made reservations at the Cooperstown Inn and were preparing to drive to the Hall of Fame so that I could look through the vast holdings in the Baseball National Library and select articles and essays for the book.

On the way back from Cooperstown, we planned to stop in Pittsburgh and visit the research room at PNC Park to look at its collection of Pirate photographs. We made reservations to stay overnight at the Renaissance, a new high-rise hotel, just across the Allegheny River and a walk across the Roberto Clemente bridge to the ballpark.

Though we’d have to drive several hundred miles, our trip would be after Labor Day, so highway traffic wasn’t going to be a problem. It was also after summer vacation season, so there wouldn’t be many visitors at Cooperstown.

On the morning of September 11, we were packing our bags when CNN reported that a plane had struck one of the World Trade Center towers. We thought it was a tragic accident, but when another plane struck the second tower, we realized something horrible and inconceivable was happening.

As the hours passed and the full horror of the tragedy unveiled itself, we started getting frantic phone calls from our kids, pleading with us to stay home until it was safe to travel. Anita and I spent the rest of the day watching the tragedy unfold on television and trying to decide what to do. The next day we put our bags in the car and headed to Cooperstown.

The long drive to Cooperstown was emotionally numbing, but our spirits were lifted by the sight of car after car displaying an American flag. There was one driver who didn’t have a holder for a flag, so he had his arm outside of his car window and was determinedly holding a small American flag in his hand.

When we finally arrived, Anita and I discovered that the inns, usually empty this time of year, were jammed with travelers who were headed to New York but had now taken refuge in Cooperstown. The home of baseball’s shrine had become a refugee camp.

One of the delights of...