Willie, Mickey and...the Scooter?

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James is right that the Hall of Fame, like the Miss America Pageant or the Mount Rushmore sculptures, was essentially a Chamber of Commerce inspiration to lure tourists. But when the Hall opened in 1939, it became a secular shrine, the Lourdes of baseball. It still is. The place evokes a simpler time of grace and grit and innocence, when players didn't seem so greedy or owners so stupid and when both sides apparently realized that the franchise they held was on loan from the fans who had invested so much of themselves in it. This vision is partly fantasy -- the sport excluded blacks and kept even its top stars in indentured servitude -- but to a fan, soft-focus reverie can be as real and pungent as Phil Rizzuto's laugh.

Take a walk through the Hall of Fame gallery, where the elect are commemorated with an all-American mixture of hoke and majesty. Guys try explaining to their wives some athletic epiphany in the career of a stranger. One swing of a bat, one sliding catch, a third strike from a half-century past can mist an old man's eyes. And just as a player can win a game by coming home, so the old teach baseball memory to the young. Last week a boy stared at a three-panel portrait of Mays, Mantle and Snider; the caption read "Willie, Mickey & the Duke Triptych." Looking up at his mother, the boy asked, "Who is Duke Triptych?"

Why, he's the next inductee, son, in the Baseball Hall of Names.