Before I get into my trip back to San Diego, I should talk about my brief stop at the Baseball Hall of Fame on my trip to Chattanooga. A quick uber got me from the Amtrak station in Utica to the car rental place where I rented a mid-size vehicle, adjusting my Michael Phelps like frame (I’m 6’2” and I wear 30 inch inseam pants. You do the math.) into the car designed for normal people, pulling the seat forward and leaning it back, so I could see out the windshield and reach the steering wheel at the same time. The 45 minute drive to Cooperstown proved to be anxiety-provoking if not exactly difficult. The in-car direction finder was powered by a cooperating cell-phone using an app I didn’t have, so I did things the old fashioned way using directions I had printed out from Google.
As someone used to California’s freeways with signs every 100 yards or so, Upstate New York presented me with a foreign experience. It was no longer farmland but still demarked as if it were with rolling fields and widely separated houses that probably once were small family farms. It may sound odd coming from someone used to deserts and long open spaces, but, to me, it seemed devoid of navigational landmarks. The problem was that there were countless roads leading who-knew-where, usually with no signs, so I was constantly monitoring the odometer in the hope of not missing the proper turn-off. The one that fooled me was when I reached a small town, and my directions said to turn left on North St. I did that thing but found myself on South St. Thinking I had made a mistake, I executed a U-turn. I soon discovered that the road I was on was called North St, north of the intersection where I had turned and South St. on the other side. Of course! I smiled to myself recalling classic faux pas among non-locals such as when a tourist in San Diego is directed to Ham-a-shaw Road—actually spelled Jamacha–or the time my English teacher told us about a train ride in England where his stop was Worcestershire, and he ignored the conductor’s call of “Next stop, Wooster.”
Eventually I finally found a sign that read Cooperstown 8 Miles. There was no directional arrow of course unlike the cornucopia of arrows pointing everywhere with a name attached to each lane or turn-off that I’m used to in nanny-state California. Somehow I hadn’t gotten lost after all! I found my way to the Rose & Thistle Bed & Breakfast, and checked in, taking the opportunity for a shower. Patti and her husband Bob offered to have me come along with them to dinner at the newly renovated restaurant of a friend, so I did that, and we had a very pleasant conversation as they explained how the restaurant had gone from antiquated dive to its new fancy, modern look. They also dished on local lore about James Fenimore Cooper and the local family that had founded and still ran the Hall of Fame.
It was easy enough to catch a local bus for the short ride into town the next day, and I did the nickel tour of the Hall of Fame. One of the big exhibits was on A League of Their Own. I say it that way because the exhibit seemed to owe more to the movie than the actual league itself. One small wing was also dedicated to mascots likely the Philly Phanatic. It prominently featured a life size statue of the progenitor of all MLB mascots, the Chicken. I got to explain to interested onlookers how he had started out as a one-time promotion for a local radio station. He was originally known as the KGB Chicken after the station’s call letters. The Soviet hockey team came to town to play the Gulls, the local minor league hockey team, to many raised eyebrows from the Soviet team, confused by the crazy pantomime antics of a man dressed in a chicken suit with the letters KGB on his chest. The Padres were an expansion team in their second year in 1970 (when the Chicken debuted) and terrible, and he went to the ballgame on a lark and performed his antics, expecting to be thrown out at any time. Instead, the next day, he got a call from the Padres President Buzzie Bavasi offering him season tickets to perform at all the games since he gave the fans something to do while watching the overmatched Padres get pummeled by their opponents. Eventually the Chicken became so popular that the radio station couldn’t afford to pay their new star what he was worth. That led to the on field “rebirth” of the Chicken, first as The San Diego Chicken and eventually as just The Famous Chicken.
I paid my obeisance to Tony Gwynn’s plaque of course, as well as Trevor Hoffman’s and all the other Hall of Famers who once played for the Padres, but made their careers elsewhere like Dave Winfield, Ozzie Smith, and Roberto Alomar or ended their long careers with a brief stint in the orange and brown like Willie McCovey, Gaylord Perry, and Rollie Fingers. The plaques were arranged by year of induction with a handy wall sign letting you look up the players alphabetically and find their year of induction.
Unfortunately I had no opportunity to tell my favorite baseball anecdote about Ernie Shore’s “perfect game”. You see in 1917, a Red Sox pitcher started a game, walking the first batter. He disagreed violently with the umpire on the calls, and by some accounts actually assaulted him, leading to his ejection. Shore came on in emergency relief, and the runner was promptly caught attempting to steal second, while Shore proceeded to retire the next 26 batters, allowing none of them to reach base. For many years, it was listed as a perfect game, but then in 1991, a committee on reconciling old statistics declared it instead to be a “combined no-hitter”. A travesty in my opinion for a unique achievement. Oh, and BTW, the starter who was thrown out of that game—Babe Ruth. Baseball, it’s got a million stories. That’s why I wrote a story about The Man Who Saved Baseball.
Musings of a Restless Mind 