High Heat Read Free Page B

upstate New York very well. The Victorian homes of Oneonta and Milford could use a new coat of paint, and the once-proud region has too many traces of decay and downright poverty. At Hartwick Seminary, though, just south of town,
the Cooperstown Dreams Park rises up from an old cow pasture. This is where kids’ teams from across the country come during the summer months to play tournament ball. The complex is surrounded by ice cream stands, fast-food outlets, and miniature golf establishments. Of course, most are closed for the season, and on this afternoon all of them are being enveloped in a white glaze.
    Entering Cooperstown proper, I turn right onto Main Street. My wipers are so coated with ice that they resemble giant popsicles being pulled across the streaky windshield. When I spy the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, I turn left and slip-slide away downhill to the Lake Front Motel.
    â€œYou just made it,” the desk clerk says as the door closes behind me. It’s 2:45 in the afternoon. In the background, a TV hums with the latest weather update.
    â€œWhat’s the forecast?”
    â€œSleet and freezing rain until midnight,” she says. “Then changing over to snow through the morning.”
    I check into my room but don’t linger long. After changing into wool socks and more appropriate footwear, I’m outside, retracing my route on foot back up to Main Street and the Hall of Fame.
    One reason I think so many books are written about baseball is that the reference staff at the Hall of Fame has no equal. Make the strangest request about the national pastime (Did Fred Lynn win the batting title his rookie year? The answer is no, but he did win the MVP), and they will try their best to accommodate you. The only catch is that best material usually requires a visit to Cooperstown.
    Inside the main door, I hurry through the Hall of Fame Plaque Gallery. The room is T-shaped with the original five players inducted into the Hall in 1932—Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, Christy Mathewson, and Walter Johnson—holding a place of honor on the far wall. After a nod in their direction, I turn up the ramp that leads to the Hall’s theater and a bookstore. A door to the left of the bookstore’s register opens into a room with a long wooden table and six chairs on either side. This is the main reference room for the Baseball Hall of Fame.

    Sitting at one end of the table, awaiting my arrival, stands a plastic tub of files and books about many of the fastest pitchers who had ever hurled a baseball. After signing the proper release forms and donning the mandatory white gloves (all Hall materials must be handled with white gloves), I open the first file, one of three thick ones about Walter Johnson, aka “the Big Train.”
    Despite my good fortune in reaching Cooperstown ahead of the ice storm, my luck doesn’t hold. A little after three in the afternoon, Tim Wiles, research director at the Hall, announces that the museum will be closing early due to the inclement December weather.
    I reluctantly close the Walter Johnson file and return it to the plastic tub with the mounds of other material I haven’t cracked yet. I’ve been at it less than a half hour.
    â€œWe’ll reopen tomorrow morning at nine,” Wiles says. “We’ll make sure somebody is here to let you in.”
    Back outside, the sky has grown even darker, with the sleet indeed turning to snow. From the hotel parking lot, I gaze upon Otsego Lake, the Glimmerglass of James Fenimore Cooper’s imagination. The far end remains shrouded in mist. Cooperstown has been called remote in terms of time and place. A perfect locale to really begin a séance with the game’s past.
    Long ago, the town embraced baseball and, as a result, Cooperstown has done better than most hamlets between Albany and Buffalo. The village latched onto baseball even if that meant putting up with droves of Little