Cooperstown buzzes about baseball

COOPERS- TOWN, N.Y. – So, this is where Abner Doubleday invented the relentless autograph seeker, the $5 pair of baseball boxer shorts marked down from $10, the triple-play ice cream cone and the Where It All Began Bat Company?

Uh-huh.

James Fenimore Cooper got his name attached to the place, but Abner’s the economic engine. That isn’t the Last of the Mohicans Wax Museum down on Main Street.

On the other hand, a business doesn’t have to have a baseball tie-in to hear the cash register ring. The local joke is that the Otesaga Hotel takes its name from an old Oneida Indian word meaning “$400 a night.”

But for all that, this is also where you’ll find a turnstile from the Polo Grounds and Buck Weaver’s letter pleading for reinstatement after the Black Sox Scandal. The scorecard that announcer Russ Hodges kept of “The Shot Heard ‘Round the World” game – he was too excited to mark down Bobby Thomson’s winning home run – is here, too.

So is Grantland Rice’s last typewriter. An Underwood.

Now, there is a sliver of the population that might get a little sentimental looking at something like that, and forget about any cheesy commerce going on outside.

This is also the case with the tributes cast in bronze to the 258 members of the Baseball Hall of Fame – a number that grows to 260 with the induction of Wade Boggs and Spokane’s Ryne Sandberg on Sunday afternoon. The ceremony and the return of 53 of the 60 living Hall of Famers (and their autographing arms) bring the world to Cooperstown this weekend – 20,000 souls sworn to baseball stampeding a village of 2,000.

It’s what’s brings 12-year-old Jacob Turner here.

Make that Jacob Ryne Turner.

He plays shortstop and second base – naturally – for his Little League team in Atlanta, and a week ago, he took a hard smash right to the nose, resulting in seven fractures. This threatened to wipe out the family vacation to Cooperstown, but a surgeon repaired the damage quickly enough for the show to go on the road. The bridge of Jacob’s nose is still a little purple, but the boy himself is true blue.

His father’s favorite player is his favorite player.

“Can you say hi to him for me?” Jacob asks when he meets a reporter from Sandberg’s hometown. “I just want to give him a hug.”

How does this happen, exactly? A Spokane kid, a Chicago kid sure. In Atlanta, the Turner family could have settled on any number of local baseball heroes – Dale Murphy from Sandberg’s prime, or Greg Maddux from the year Jacob was born or slugger Andruw Jones today.

“Well, I had a night job,” explains J.T. Turner, “and Braves games are played at night. The Cubs are on during the day, so I watched Ryne Sandberg and the Cubs play until I had to go to work. And it wasn’t hard to fall in love with the history and the atmosphere and a player who conducted himself with class.

“I tell my son all the time, ‘You’ve got a name to live up to.’ And with everything else that’s going on in sports, I’m prouder every day of giving him that name.”

And Jacob?

“I just don’t want to go bald like him,” he confides.

Hey, pure sentiment has its limits, even on this weekend.

Or maybe not.

Just down Main Street from the Hall of Fame Museum, around behind the bank, sits Doubleday Field, with just enough color washed out of the brick and slivers in the seats to make it perfect. George Brett, Hall of Fame Class of 1999, stands in an itchy, baggy Hall of Fame uniform after having helped out with Ozzie Smith’s annual fundraiser for the Museum’s education program.

Brett has returned each year since his induction – to make up for all the fun he didn’t have the first time around.

“This year is going to be a living hell for Ryne, because he’s thinking about that speech he has to make – and if he says he isn’t, he’s lying,” Brett insists.

“Before I did my speech, I went to Bermuda for a week – just to get out of Kansas City. I’d get up at 5, 6 in the morning and with a cup of coffee in my hand, I’d walk along the beach and think ‘What am I going to say about this?’ and pretty soon I’d be bawling my eyes out. Five in the morning, on the beach, crying.”

Sandberg did not seem quite such a basket case as he appeared, with Boggs and 36 other Hall of Famers, at Friday’s rededication ceremony. If it wasn’t clear before what the Hall and museum mean to Cooperstown, a $20 million renovation pretty much settled the issue.

But so does a stroll down Main. Two of every three storefronts cling to the baseball theme – the Doubleday Café, the Cooperstown Clubhouse, Mickey’s Place. Outside Home Plate Memorabilia, collectors and fans line up for autographs from Orlando Cepeda, Ralph Kiner and Rollie Fingers. Next door, TJ’s Restaurant counters with a non-Hall lineup of Paul Blair, Juan Marichal and Darryl Strawberry.

Yes, Darryl Strawberry. No, he’s not signing rookie rehab cards.

This is baseball. All is forgiven, except for Pete Rose – who is around here somewhere making a buck, too.

“We get three days a year to kind of be the focus of the baseball world,” says Mike Schmidt, standing in front of a stuffed likeness of the Phillie Phanatic. “It’s kind of an ego thing, for us guys to all get together. The game is about the guys who are playing it now, but it’s also about the guys who made the game.”

And the artifacts that have survived. If this is indeed the most enduring of sports’ many shrines, it’s at least in part because of the sheer volume of relics and curios baseball seems to generate. The extra 10,000 square feet of exhibition space will help show off some of the stuff the Hall has to keep in the basement.

But the truth is, almost everyone has a piece of the action – their own little Hall of Fame.

“It’s the little things people find in their dresser,” noted Johnny Bench, who has sent his share of memorabilia here. “I found a 1919 program from the World Series that somebody had given me probably 30 years ago – it was in one of my boxes that I’d moved at some point. How many people have something like that?”

Enough. And they come here the last weekend in July to renew that bond – to get an autograph from Al Kaline, to buy a T-shirt from the Cooperstown Clubhouse, to hear a story from Buck O’Neil and see Grantland Rice’s typewriter.

“This little town,” says Schmidt, “is the heartbeat of baseball.”