Cooperstown

The one constant through all the years Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and that could be again. Oh people will come, Ray. People will most definitely come.

-Terrence Mann (James Earl Jones)

Field of Dreams

On a weekend with plenty of bad if one were to turn on the television, which featured at one point a 90 minute rant from a retired Florida man with a government pension declaiming about his disdain for government, P and I decided a getaway was in order. But not just any escape--it was time, finally, to make the pilgrimage to Cooperstown, to be dipped in magic waters and healed with an immersion in that most American of games, baseball.

It's funny that I love baseball the way I do. Throughout my childhood, and through the years until I left for college, sports were always a part of my life, but I never played organized baseball. Soccer occupied my falls and springs through elementary school, with a couple seasons of basketball thrown into the mix. Sports drifted out of the mix in my middle school years, which consisted of multiple moves and schools, one of which was a fundamentalist Christian academy with no sports but grifting for the Lord.

In high school I picked football because it seemed to draw the most attention from the young ladies, a major concern of a skinny, pimply kid from nowhere with a funny last name. Somehow I lettered my last two years, mostly because my coaches liked me and my grandfather was an administrator with the local school district. Of course Bowman's Grandson would make the team.

But no baseball. My earliest recollection of caring at all about the game was when we moved to Atlanta in 1969, and stayed until the holidays in 1974. What a time to be in the Empire City of the South, with the chronically underperforming Braves and their loaded batting order. Ralph Garr would lead off, followed by Darrell Evans and Dusty Baker. Then Hammerin' Hank would bat clean-up, whacking his way to surpassing Babe Ruth's record one warm evening in 1974. Phil Niekro, "Knucksy", would run catchers ragged trying to keep his wild knuckleball in play. The games were called by Milo Hamilton and Ernie Johnson on WSB-AM (for "Welcome South Brother", named by its owners during the booster days of the 1920s).

On the evenings when he was home, Dad and I would adjourn out to the patio on Lee Ann Drive to sit in aluminum lawnchairs, eat roasted peanuts, him with his Budweiser and me with my Coke, and listen to the Bravos lose (usually) while the woods behind the house filled with the magical illumination of a drifting constellation of fireflies.

Once or twice a year we'd head down from Marietta to Fulton County Stadium for a game--seats were always cheap and available. All four of us were there when Hank Aaron hit his 700th when I was nine. Later, when Dad had remarried and bought the Howard Johnson's across from Six Flags, he used his connections to get us seats directly behind the Braves dugout, where we could watch Dale Murphy and the heroes of that era just beyond our reach, beers resting on the dugout roof. My lovely stepsister even ended up on the jumbotron.

I splurged in law school to take little Jimmy to a game, an end-of-season battle with the Dodgers featuring a Braves club that would go on to win the World Series that year. Later there was a pilgrimage to Atlanta most every summer to take the boys to Turner Field for a game, trying to build a bridge with them through baseball that never quite withstood the challenges of the years ahead.

But I haven't said anything about Cooperstown. Let's get back on track here.

The drive up, about two-and-a-half hours, took us through snow-covered hills and farmland lying quiet and dormant even as the first adumbrations of spring seem present in the light and the effacing winter cold. We drove straight to the Hall of Fame, and walked into a time capsule of what we all once were as Americans.

The displays go back to the mid-19th century, but I found myself drawn to those relics and images from my years of loving the game.

There's the uniform Hank Aaron wore when he broke Babe Ruth's record (with the lovey P in the background). They were handing out replica jerseys as a promotion at a game when I was nine, and I wore my Number 44 around the neighborhood constantly until it disintegrated in a miasma of little boy funk off my back.

The hall itself feels a little like a mausoleum, with plaques for the surprisingly small number of inductees lining the walls. I'd find myself babbling to P about Roger Maris or Reggie Jackson's three dingers in one World Series game (1977, I think) when I found their faces in brass on the wall.

At the end of the hall were two life-sized statues of Babe Ruth and Ted Williams (a fighter pilot, besides being the greatest hitter of all time), hand carved of wood.

Would it be profane to observe the feeling when we walked out into the late afternoon light as being comparable to the aftermath of a beautiful, high church Episcopal service in a cathedral, or maybe All Saints at Sewanee? I felt infused with something magical, with a sense of the good in the world. In its own way, Cooperstown is as liminal as the Domain. I haven't felt that in a long time.

Diving headlong from the divine to the profane, P and I decided a glass of wine and a snack were in order, and around the corner we found an Irish pub with baseball and golf on the flat screens and bad cabernet by the glass. The specialty of the house, delivered by a big, jolly bartender, were reuben fritters filled with corned beef. They were quite awful. These people up here truly can't cook.

After dutifully mucking down our ersatz Yankee hushpuppies, we drove a few blocks down the street to the shores of Otsego Lake, and our lodging for the night, the Otesaga Hotel.

Built roughly 115 years ago, the old hotel has been owned and operated by the same family ever since. It shows. The staff are friendly and helpful, the pace unhurried. There's no attempt to homogenize. It's not a part of the Marriott or Hilton or Wyndham family. It's quirky and lovely with oak paneling and sometimes peeling paint, a beautiful old lady doing her best in an era where these spaces are ever harder to find.

I particularly loved the study. I wonder if George could reproduce this at Wyldswood?

The concierge swapped us into a fourth floor room with a better view of the lake. Out there on the ice we noticed a couple pup tents, and folks ice fishing. The surface looked a little slushy to us on a 40 degree day, but the wait staff assured us the ice is still around a foot thick, and it wasn't so long ago that one might see trucks driving across it.

Apologies for the screen.

After about 19 hours, two good meals, and a couple too many cocktails for our own good, it was time to head home through the Currier & Ives winter landscape, past Oneonta and Binghamton and, finally Horseheads and Big Flats before arriving home.

There is always an urge to hang onto the magic after a weekend like that, even while sensing the tide of real life lapping all around us. Rather than watching an absurd orange man agitate a crowd while standing on a giant Nazi rune, when we arrived home yesterday we watched the first episode of Ken Burns's Baseball. Both narratives, CPAC and the history of baseball, say something true about us as a people, just like Watergate was as accurate a reflection of America in 1974 as Hank Aaron rounding the bases that night, with two impulsive, adoring fans (white guys, notably) jumping the fence to run the bases beside him. I can't speak for you, but personally I need a little more Hank and a little less Tricky Dick, a little more Chop Talk about the Braves' prospects for 2021 and a little less MAGA.

I think I'll sign up for MLB.com today, and get ready for what should be a great season. Pitchers and catchers reported for spring training a couple weeks ago. I can hardly wait.