On the plaque: Old Hoss Radbourn

Radbourn's Hall of Fame
plaque, which declares him
"the greatest of all 19th century
pitchers."

Charles "Old Hoss" Radbourn.

Let's say it up front: There's a lot we don't know for sure about Charles "Old Hoss" Radbourn, starting with the spelling of his last name. Is it Radbourn or Radbourne? The consensus spelling today omits the "e," but his gravestone, and his Hall of Fame plaque, include it.

Nor is there complete consensus on his statistical record, which is hardly unusual with 19th century players. It does seem pretty well settled, however, that he won 59 games in his remarkable 1884 season, not the 60 he is sometimes credited with.

Nor is it certain that the term "Charley horse" originated with Radbourn's aches and pains in that iron man season; there are other competing versions that have nothing to do with Radbourn. And he may or may not have been the first to be photographed flipping the bird.

But there is sufficient photographic evidence to support this assertion: Old Hoss didn't look anything like the image that adorns his Hall of Fame plaque. That face looks like a cartoon image from an illustrated "Casey at the Bat" kids book. One wonders where they got the grandiose moustache and the chiseled, jutting jaw.

A hole in the glove

A glove on display at the Hall of Fame museum with a
hole in the palm. I think this one is Frank Frisch's.

A few days ago, in writing about the mass of material at the Hall of Fame, I said I was still picking up on stuff during repeat visits to the displays. Here's an example:

In his autobiography, "Nice Guys Finish Last," Leo Durocher (Hall of Fame manager) tells of growing up in the same city in which Rabbit Maranville (Hall of Fame shortstop) made his offseason home. (Durocher and Maranville were essentially the same player — outstanding defensive shortstops with flamboyant personalities who couldn't hit a lick, and their playing careers overlapped a few years.)

The black glove is Rabbit Maranville's. It does not
have a hole cut into the palm.

Maranville advised the young Durocher to cut a hole in the palm of his glove; this, Maranville said, would give him a better feel for the ball. And Durocher did so, playing for years with his palm exposed. Then, Leo relates, as he was about to cut out the palm of a new glove, he asked himself why he was doing this — and opted instead to thin the leather instead of removing it all together.

So ... now I'm looking at gloves on display in the Hall of Fame museum, and I start noticing a number of infielder gloves from that era with holes in the the palm. Frank Frisch, for example — Durocher's manager and double play partner on the Gas House Gang — his glove has a hole in the palm.

Know whose displayed glove doesn't have a hole? Rabbit Maranville. Go figure.

The Hall of Fame vs. the museum

The blog author takes a break in a row of
seats from the long-gone Shibe Park/Connie
Mack Stadium in Philadelphia.

The sign over the door says: "The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum." And, indeed, if you pay attention, it's easy to tell the difference.

The Hall of Fame, per se, is just that: A hall. It's a long gallery of plaques — we came up with a count of 240 — of the players, umpires and executives who have been formally enshrined.

This is the place we mean when we talk about whether Jack Morris should be in the Hall of Fame.

It's also pretty close to the last place visitors are supposed to get to.

Enter the building, and you are quickly herded to the left for admission and off toward the museum. Which, as I explained in an earlier post, is an exhausting proposition. Rewarding, to be sure, but exhausting.

On one of our tours of the museum, we encountered a man (wearing a Philadelphia Phillies cap) who was surprised to find Pete Rose memorabilia in the exhibits about the Big Red Machine dynasty of the mid '70s and again in the display about the Phillies of slightly later vintage. "I didn't think they let anything about him in here," he said.

That illustrates, I think, the difference between the Hall of Fame and the museum. Rose's gambling transgressions have barred him from the Hall of Fame. They haven't kept him out of the museum. One cannot tell the story of baseball in the 1970s and '80s (and part of the '60s) without Rose, and he is well represented in the museum.

It's two different functions under one roof. (The research library, which is of more limited mass interest than the plaque room and the museum, is a third function.) We tend to get the two functions jumbled up, which is how the Phillies fan wound up surprised to see any acknowledgment of Pete Rose,

Cooperstown in the offseason

The blog author at the main door of the National
Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, all decorated
for the holidays.

I have been to Cooperstown twice, at drastically different times of the year.

The first time was Induction Weekend of 2001, when Kirby Puckett and Dave Winfield (and Hilton Smith and Bill Mazeroski) were inducted. The little village was packed with thousands of visitors; it wasn't easy to move about on Main Street or in the Hall of Fame building.

The second time was the week before Christmas. There were some visitors, but there was never a problem getting a table at lunch time at the Doubleday Cafe. Many of the memorabilia shops and restaurants that dominate Cooperstown's Main Street were closed — there's something odd about seeing a sign in a retailer's door that says Closed until after Christmas, but so it was.

Winter is the offseason for Cooperstown's tourism for cause, of course. But to a large degree, I came away from this trip convinced that if one's motive is to absorb as much about the game of baseball as the Hall has to offer, the offseason is the time to go.

Here's the thing: There's too much there to grasp in a day, or two days. My wife and I went to the Hall five days, and each day I noticed things that had eluded my attention previously. Yes, one can rush through the three floors of the museum — not to mention the plaque gallery — in a day, but understanding what's there is another matter. I found that  after one floor, my brain was numbed.

Go there in the summer, and the crush is on. Hundreds of people are trying to see the same stuff you are. Go in the winter, and you can dawdle and study without blocking somebody else's view of Honus Wagner's bat or Mariano Rivera's muddy spikes. You can take a lengthy pause at the broadcast exhibit and wait to hear Herb Carneal's call of the last out of the 1987 World Series (yes, it plays in rotation).

There are drawbacks to going in the winter. We had vague plans to visit the research library and perhaps investigate the connection between Mankato and Deacon Phillippe, a pitcher who starred in the first NL-AL World Series. But the library operates on very limited hours in the winter (and even if it had been open, they prefer a couple weeks notice to line up the material). The support businesses around the Hall are limited. And, while we were on the whole fortunate with the weather during our visit (it was 55 degrees on Sunday), winter in the Catskills can be pretty heavy on the snow.

The trip and its timing could have backfired. It didn't. And I got more out of this longer, leisurely visit that I did out of the more frenetic one a dozen years earlier.