Willie, Mickey and...the Scooter?

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But to players and fans, it does make a difference. Each year the announcement of the Hall of Fame selections provokes both exultation and bitterness. Yet these responses can be based on deeply flawed judgment, on boosterism from the fans and cronyism by the players. The Hall of Fame voters can be myopic too; they have ignored important stats (like the size of the player's home park) and packed the Hall with sluggers from the 1920-45 era. James' mission has always been to bring reason to heated baseball debates. That's what he does in his new book, dispersing the mist around the careers of those who haven't made it and those who have. He also proposes a much broader selection process, involving writers, players, executives, fans and baseball historians.

The book percolates with wit. On the qualifications for writers to serve on one of the early committees: "I suspect it was defined by career alcohol consumption." On those revisionists who would forgive Shoeless Joe Jackson's complicity in the 1919 Black Sox scandal: "The people who want to put Joe Jackson in the Hall of Fame are baseball's answer to those women who show up at murder trials wanting to marry the cute murderer." On the burghers of Cooperstown: "They're just local guys who stumbled into this golden, glowing idea, the Hall of Fame." Could that be why you won't find The Politics of Glory on sale at the Hall of Fame gift shop? (A bookstore down the street sold 24 copies in a week.)

We have to realize that the Hall of Fame is two things: a seal of approval for some very good athletes and a three-story attic full of artifacts and photographs -- the collective baseball memory made visible. "The best thing about baseball today," sports historian Lawrence Ritter has written, "is its yesterdays." And Cooperstown, an upstate village (pop. 2,300) named for James Fenimore Cooper, offers validation for America's dream of a bucolic past. On the undulating farmland that radiates for miles in any direction, the main crop seems to be grass, as luscious as a Rousseau forest; it could, and should, replace the carpet in every turf stadium. A banner draped across Cooperstown's main street (called, of course, Main Street) lures locals to the Junior Livestock Show.

Nearly everything else on Main Street is dedicated to the relics of baseball. Shop for fetishes at the Dugout, Cap City or the "Where It All Began" Bat Company. Have a Cooperstown Christmas in July: one store sells tree ornaments year-round, including an angel in a ball-club uniform. Enjoy a historic night's sleep at the Baseball Town Motel, rooms from $48. Dine amid more memorabilia at Mickey's Place (for Mantle) or at the Doubleday Cafe.

It was Abner Doubleday who in 1839, according to Cooperstown legend, laid out a diamond-shaped path at the local Phinney's Field (now Doubleday Field) and decided that for nine innings nine men would play a game rather like baseball. That cow pasture was the very spot, as James writes, "where baseball could have been invented if only all those other people hadn't invented it first." The Hall of Fame, proposed 60 years ago this spring, was erected nearby.