Cooperstown and the Basesball Hall of Fame

We had a beautiful drive today through the Adirondack area and along Lake Oswego to Cooperstown, New York. Cooperstown is a lovely town with baskets of flowers up and down the streets.

You can tell you are in Baseball Mecca - even the bakeries know!

This is what we came to see: The Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum --

Only two players have display areas devoted just to them. One is Hank Aaron. The other is my favorite of all time, Babe Ruth. His Yankee uniform and a pair of his shoes and a ball cap are shown in what his cubby in the clubhouse looked like --

There are clips of some of his home runs and games he played in as well as all sorts of memorabilia. I got a kick out of this sign for a store closure because the Babe was in town --

Every major league team had a locker display showing their official team uniforms and some of the goodies from their team. There was also a card showing which uniform numbers the team had retired. Every single team has retired Number 52 -- Jackie Robinson's number! I got a kick out of the Ichiro jersey. Even though he is not yet retired, he is very present at the Hall of Fame with the many records he has already broken.

One of the things we wanted to find was the spot where Dave Niehaus was honored for his work as the "Voice of the Mariners." The area honoring sportscasters and journalists is up on the third floor and the pictures are only 5x7s. I was a bit disappointed there wasn't more hoopla...

This is the far end of the actual Hall of Fame. The first honorees are from 1936. As we walked through reading the names, some brought back poignant memories and some we couldn't remember ever hearing.

I'm not sure what kind of games were being played at DoubleDay Field today, but there were lots of youngsters in their team uniforms at the Hall of Fame, many of them talking about the time of the next game or things that had happened during the last one. There were also quite a few Spanish speaking visitors (there is a whole area of the museum devoted to South American baseball).

Coopertown's Main Street is a pleasant place to browse and shop. There are benches in front of almost every store (which Forry appreciated!) and lots of pots of flowers everywhere. I managed to find a few gifts and also some yarn I had been looking for. We ended up having an early dinner at The Pit, then headed for home.