WE MADE IT! After 19 hours in the car, we arrived at the Cooperstown Hall of Fame museum 11:00 am on Friday. We were welcomed by a sea of Twins jerseys. Twins fans have travelled well to celebrate Joe Mauer and his career this weekend.
We were lucky enough to find a parking spot only a couple of blocks away from the museum. Almost immediately into getting in, you’re welcomed with the legendary Plaque Gallery: 346 players, managers, pioneers, and umpires are immortalized here across all eras of baseball. This room is the busiest part of the museum. Fans from each team wander through the hallowed halls searching for their favorite players.
Right outside of the gallery, I ran into Dick Bremer, who had just gotten into town also. He and his wife, Heidi, flew into Hartford and drove in together, and were able to avoid the complications of the massive computer outage that disrupted flights around the country. He told us that the Mauer family was delayed by the outage, but that they were on their way and would be here for Saturday’s festivities.
I wandered the gallery for about an hour, first finding all of the players sporting the M or the TC: Killebrew, Carew, Oliva, Blyleven, Puckett and Kaat. I’ll also track down the players who spent portions of their careers with the Twins: Winfield, Molitor, Morris, Thome, and Ortiz (and Steve Carlton, lol).
346 plaques is a little overwhelming, especially considering legends like Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, Sandy Koufax, Willy Mays and Hank Aaron waiting. There is so much history and so much to learn. So I take it in chunks. After the Twins, I pay homage to the Washington Senators players like Walter Johnson, Bucky Harris, Goose Goslin, Sam Rice, Heinie Manush. Then I track down the players I grew watching and idolizing: Greg Maddux, Ken Griffey Jr, Derek Jeter, Randy Johnson, Chipper Jones.
There are three levels of the museum: the plaques are on the bottom floor, then the museum is set up on the next two floors. Hundreds and hundreds of baseball artifacts dating back to the 1850s. The Hall features things like a baseball used in a Walter Johnson no-hitter, the full uniform that Babe Ruth wore in his final game at Yankee Stadium, the infamous George Brett pine tar bat, the shoes Curt Schilling wore in the Bloody Sock game, the onemillion-dollar Honus Wagner baseball card, and those embarrassing Chicago White Sox shorts uniform.
Major League Baseball didn’t get to Minnesota until 1961, so there isn’t a ton of Twins stuff in the hall but what is here is pretty remarkable. Here are a couple of awesome things that we found:
The ball from Gene Larkin’s series-winning hit in the 1991 World Series
A directional sign and a brick from Metropolitan Stadium
Johan Santana’s jersey from his Triple Crown season in 2006
The helmet Joe Mauer wore when he recorded his 2,000th hit
Jim Thome’s 600th home run ball
A shovel used in the ground-breaking ceremony for Target Field
Jon Rauch’s uniform…Rauch is the tallest man to ever play professional baseball
Joe Mauer’s 2009 AL MVP Award
We also found this display that will soon be updated: Jose Miranda’s bat that he used during his 12-consecutive hits streak is on it’s way to Cooperstown, but is not part of this display yet.
On deck for the rest of the weekend: there is a Hall of Famer golf tournament that tees off at Leatherstocking Golf Course that tees off at 8 am. There are numerous autograph signing events throughout the village all day, Mauer will have some media availability around 1:30, then the Parade of Legends will close out the day as 54 Hall of Famers parade down Main Street to the museum to partake in a Hall of Famer-only social gathering at the museum to initiate the four new members in Mauer, Todd Helton, Adrian Beltre and Jim Leyland.