Cooperstown, New York
While we were on our lovely farm stay at Vernon Street Farm this fall, Alex and I and made a little day trip over to Cooperstown, New York. If you’ve heard of Cooperstown, it’s likely you are a baseball fan or know someone who is, because it is home of the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Alex had already visited years ago, but he was happy to go again, and to bring me too.
The drive over is so beautiful, through rural New York. The seasons were just beginning to transition to fall, and I’m sure it was even more beautiful just a couple weeks later.
Cooperstown itself is a very funny little town, where absolutely everything is baseball-themed.
Perhaps the strangest thing about Cooperstown is that the whole story about Cooperstown being the birthplace of baseball is completely fabricated. Basically, a man named Abner Graves, made up a story about Doubleday inventing baseball in Cooperstown in order to settle a dispute over whether baseball was British or American in origin. Doubleday was a real Civil War general, already deceased, who never actually invented baseball. But the myth stuck, enough to build a whole baseball town and hall of fame here.
Into the museum we go! Look at all this vintage sports memorabilia, including epic portraiture from the late 1800s.
Our home team, the San Francisco Giants, has a long and storied history dating back to the early days of the franchise as the New York Giants. Plenty to see about our Giants in these galleries. Hall of Fame pitcher on the left, Christy Mathewson, and a look at an earlier iteration of their logo on the right.
An old handkerchief and commemorative dishware. The design of this vintage stuff is just so aesthetically pleasing.
Also love all of these old baseball sweaters and jackets. Yes. Bring all of this back.
A section about women in baseball, featuring women’s league teams from so many tiny cities of the Midwest including Grand Rapids, Fort Worth, and Springfield! And skipping ahead to the TV era of baseball, some A’s memorabilia from the 70’s.
This was one of the items we specifically wanted to see in the hall of fame museum: Alyssa Nakken’s helmet, from when she became the first woman to ever coach on the field during a major league game. Alex and I were actually at the game when it happened, due to an ejection of the other first base coach. Great to see history being made. Of course you can’t really think about the history of baseball without thinking about for the hearty doses of sexism and racism running through the sport from its inception to now. But it’s an interesting lens through which to look at America.
Old baseball-related games.
And a section about different MLB ballpark fan experiences. We saw these four little sausages as life-sized mascots racing on the field in Milwaukee when we went there!
The charms below used to serve as special season passes for VIP seats to the games. But they stopped making them after a while. And on the right, a look at some of the championship rings… including 2010, 12, and 14 for the Giants.
Barry Bonds’ helmet from home run #756. He holds the record, but there’s always going to be an asterisk by his name due to the suspected steroids usage. And he still isn’t in the actual Hall of Fame to this day.
And finally, after the extensive museum exhibits, we visited the actual hall of fame, which is this one long room with columns and these plaques on the wall.
The helpful photobooth generated this plaque for us, hahah. It clearly wasn’t designed for two people to take the photo together.
And then it was time to get our stamp in the gift shop! This isn’t a MLB stadium, of course, but our stadium book did have a section for the Hall of Fame and a couple other baseball-related attractions.
And outside the gift shop I was laughing at this exhibit of photos by Hall of Fame pitcher Randy Johnson, who is now a photographer. That’s not the funny part. The funny part is that he famously killed a bird that flew right into the path of his pitch, and exploding into a shocking pile of feathers. It was very sad at the time! And then he legitimately made that his photography logo.
Down the street from the hall of fame, you can visit Doubleday Field, which is the made up place where baseball was supposedly invented!
But it’s a little baseball field, and you can pay to play a game here, as these random grown ups seem to be doing on this Friday afternoon.
That was it for our time in Cooperstown! On our way back to the farm, we stopped by a brewery that Alex likes.
The brewery is called Ommegang, but I was partial to this little gnome-egang and I took him home, haha.
Scenic all the way back.
It’s really lovely that Alex loves baseball so much. It has brought us to so many interesting parts of America we would not have otherwise sought out.
Anna Wu is a wedding and portrait photographer based in San Francisco. She embraces any excuse to travel. Follow her on instagram and view more of her professional work at annawu.com.
