Cooperstown plays host to baseball freaks, geeks

The Baltimore Sun

COOPERSTOWN, N.Y.-- --The nation has been parted, and only the cool, the chic and the hip remain in the middle. The geeks, you see, have scattered to either coast.

In San Diego, you have more than 100,000 Marvel maniacs and sci-fi outcasts gathered for the world's largest comic book convention. This is a group that routinely dresses up in costumes year-round with no intention of trick-or-treating.

And here in Cooperstown, at least 50,000 Gwynn groupies and Cal disciples have descended on a small town for the weekend to trade memories and ogle aging All-Stars. These are people who could never get the girl's phone number and instead use that part of their brains to commit to memory Pete Rose's statistics from either side of plate in August day games.

I'd never been to Cooperstown before. And though I had always instinctively regarded it as a Mecca - both romantic and spiritual - for the true baseball fan, I wasn't fully prepared for the scene yesterday on the normally quaint, normally quiet streets in the town's historic downtown district.

Nearly 3,000 miles away, in San Diego, the Comic-Con convention contingent wore their Spock ears, drooled over Stan Lee and walked around with painted shoeboxes attached to their bodies so they might resemble Transformers. These are the people we grew up using as a reference point so that we might always feel better about our own lots in life.

In the most sociologically reliable petri dish - the high school hallway - these Xena devotees are supposed to be running scared from the jocks, their fancy mechanical pencils spilling out of shirt pockets. But in the grown-up world, the Breakfast Club archetypes just don't hold true.

The sports nuts are gathering in Cooperstown and awaiting tomorrow's Hall of Fame induction. Yesterday, the town turned into one of the nation's largest outdoor flea markets, with tables stacked with sporting goods and memorabilia and invisible "sucker" signs.

At first, I didn't notice it. I didn't see the blending of societal roles. Probably because I was a partisan participant.

The sidewalks were packed. People dressed in uniforms that featured the names of other men across their back. They sat in the Cooperstown Diner and the Doubleday Cafe, both on Main Street, and swapped stories about games that outsiders would regard as inconsequential. But to those gathered here, these were certifiably life-affirming moments. "[Roberto] Alomar hit that homer in the 10th and I was screaming so loud in my living room, my next-door neighbors rushed over to check on me," a cafe patron shared with a nearby table, counting the Orioles' 1996 playoff-clincher as a date never to be forgotten. "Sept. 28, 1996."

Inside the Baseball Hall of Fame, fans pressed against glass display cases like teenagers rushing the stage of a Green Day concert. They whipped out their camera phones and took grainy photos of socks and shoes and caps worn by men whose sole claim to fame was the ability to play a game better than most.

When fans exited the museum, they saw some of those same men in person and paid hundreds of dollars to watch them write their names on a photo or a piece of cardboard or a ball. Somewhere in San Diego, there's a 45-year-old computer programmer dressed as Boba Fett who'd fall off his starcraft laughing at the notion.

And, admittedly, a lot of it is silly. Sure, you can see Reggie Jackson and Frank Robinson in the flesh. But Jesse Barfield - Jesse Barfield - is on the streets of Cooperstown charging people for his autograph. So are Pete Rose and Denny McLain. And - I'm not making this up - John Montefusco is signing today for free at the downtown CVS Pharmacy.

This isn't normal behavior, and it isn't necessarily admirable, either. But there's no shame involved. Not for the fans who flock here every year, and not for someone like me, witnessing the street circus for the first time. Everyone has a shared passion for this game, its history and its legends. There's something geeky about caring so much about something that's completely lost on others. But those who understand the game also understand each other.

"Who's that?" I asked a guy wearing a Carl Yastrzemski jersey. He was tiptoeing in the street gutter, trying to look over a crowd gathered near a table.

"I'm not sure," he said. "But I think I see Goose Gossage's moustache."

"Cool," I responded, and we goosenecked together, because even though others might prefer a Superman comic or maybe a Meg Ryan movie or a Harry Potter book, we wanted to see the Goose's 'stache. (And it was tremendous, by the way.)

Some of our sports heroes might marry Hollywood beauties. They might date supermodels, drive classic cars and hang out with rock stars. But those who follow the game religiously, we can tick off the roster of our fantasy team quicker than we can name all our cousins, and it's actually a point of pride. It's a game of numbers and nuances, and everyone gathered here this weekend appreciates those intricacies.

This weekend, we are here at the baseball Mecca, canonizing another batch of ballplayers. From above, the streets must look like a chess tournament spilled onto a Norman Rockwell painting. There's beauty to this town, but this week Cooperstown is definitely for the geeks.

And you know what - there's no place like it, and certainly no place a baseball fan would rather be.

rick.maese@baltsun.com

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