WHAT COULD BE BETTER?

I "Entered" the Hall in a NY Mets Cap!

Yesterday I returned home from three days in Cooperstown NY, home of the Baseball Hall of Fame. In my years of loving baseball, I have now visited the ’Hall’ three times, and each time after my subsequent visit, they changed the place on me.

The ‘Hall’ used to be a small inviting little place, with the main room as it always was, but the rest of the exhibits on a more personal scale. Not any more! Today, it could be the art museum of your large city, it has become detached from the viewer and you now have a ‘place’ outside the baseball world, looking in.

Aside form the ‘Hall’, there lies in this upstate small town with the international reputation and fame, a quiet little economy that thrives of a seasonal time of the year. The people that live in Cooperstown are not unlike the year-round residents that live in the Hamptons of Long Island. Like a person on some kind of medical procedure that is painful, they grin and bear it, until the ordeal is over. The stores that line Main Street, old dilapidated buildings, the floors squeaking and the merchandise all the same, offer nothing more than over-priced t-shirts, baseball items like baseballs, pennants and team hats, and baseball cards.

If you go around induction time, the place is crawling with tourists, vacationers and runaway screaming brats that can even disrupt your concentration at a ballgame. If you are a young dad, don’t waste your time and money taking a son or daughter under 11 years old to the Hall of Fame, because they don’t understand it, get easily distracted and start to run around, interfering with picture taking and or reading the info on each exhibit.

One of my favorite exhibits in the ‘Hall’ is the Abbot and Costello ‘Who’s on First’ routine. What I saw when I got there was a small corner of a small room with some benches, tucked around a large screen TV. On the benches were a bunch of maybe 10 to 12 year-olds busily on their I-phones, not watching the show! This annoyed me, so I stepped in between them and sat down to enjoy the show, they all scattered, leaving a few to watch the show!

Overall, it is a great exhibition that never grows old. Being an old baseball fan who loves the stats, the history and the game itself, this is a wonderful place to be. The Macaroni Man, (my nephew Chris) who comes over the house every Sunday to watch the game with me, and I drove up to Cooperstown for this occasion, and I think we both enjoyed ourselves. He is constantly testing my baseball knowledge, and always asking me questions about the game, said this when I asked him if he learned anything from his visit to the ‘Hall’. Looking out into space thinking about it, after a long pause said: Yeah, I did, but I learned more from you! THAT made my day! What could be better?