My trip to Cooperstown, N.Y., in late October 1994 was memorable on a couple of levels, one expected and another unexpected.
The expected was seeing the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame, something that at the time had been at the top of my list of places I wanted to visit (this was before the term "bucket list" became popular to describe that kind of thing).
The unexpected was the spectacular autumn colors in the Allegheny Mountains that I would see on the drive across western New York en route to Cooperstown. Sadly, I did not pull over to photograph any of those scenes. Today, I'd have done so in a heartbeat.
I saved all my picture-taking on the trip for Cooperstown, and specifically, for Doubleday Field and the MLB Hall of Fame.
Some of those shots -- all taken with the Kodak Star 335 (see previous post) are sprinkled throughout this post. I'm not claiming any are spectacular; their purpose for inclusion in a post is merely historical. In fact, several of the shots of Doubleday Field were marred by discoloration after the film was inadvertently exposed to light (probably in either the loading or unloading from the camera) before processing, so ... I cropped around those glitches and healed where I could.
Leading off the post is a shot of the main entrance to Doubleday Field, which is just a few blocks from the HOF and is where for year MLB has held its annual Hall of Fame game between two teams from the big leagues on the weekend of the HOF induction ceremonies in August.
Below is the main entrance to the HOF, which I took after leaving the museum for the day. It was late afternoon, and there was considerable noise, so I processed this image in my Noiseware software.
The statues of legends Babe Ruth and Ted Williams (above) greet visitors just inside the main entrance. I don't remember now exactly where the photo below of the very first induction class of 1936 was displayed, but I'm sure it had a prominent place.
The HOF has a whole open area devoted to the Hall of Fame member plaques. The photo above is a perspective shot, the first below is a section of four, a composition I made to include one of boyhood heroes, Hank Aaron (upper left). The second photo below was my other boyhood hero, Eddie Mathews. Both Aaron and Mathews got their start with the Braves franchise, which had several outstanding teams -- including National League pennant winners in 1957 and '58, and World Series champs in '57 -- in Milwaukee when I was growing up.
The shot above and the first two below are from an exhibit dedicated to the National League Braves' period in Milwaukee, which lasted from 1953 (when the team moved to Milwaukee from Boston) to 1965, when the franchise moved to Atlanta.
Above: An exhibit dedicated to Hank Aaron, who are the time I visited was baseball's all-time home run king. In my humble opinion, he still is.
Above: An exhibit dedicated to the Brewers, which started as the new Seattle Pilots franchise in 1969, and after just one year, moved to Milwaukee, where the Brewers have been ever since, being one of the rare teams (I believe the Houston Astros are the only other) that have spent time in both the American and National leagues.
Ty Cobb, the all-time hits leader until Pete Rose erased his record on Sept. 11, 1985. As controversial of a player that Cobb was, I've always had a soft spot for him since I learned that he once said of Eddie Mathews early in Mathews' career: "I've known three or four perfect swings in my time. This lad has one of them."
A co-worker at The Indianapolis Star was a fan of the National League Giants, and I'm sure I took the pictures devoted to the 1951 pennant-winning New York Giants above and the exhibit below for Candlestick Park, where the Giants first played after moving to San Francisco in 1958, for his benefit.
I didn't take the photo of the Ebbets Field exhibit above for anyone in particular. I've always had a fascination about that ballpark ... maybe because of how it was magnified in Roger Kahn's "The Boys of Summer" book. Ebbets Field was the home of the Brooklyn Dodgers until they moved to Los Angeles in 1958, and the Brooklyn stadium was torn down not long afterward.
I'm one of those baseball fans who always detested and rooted against the New York Yankees, but I'm big enough to acknowledge that the Yanks had some fabulous teams through the years and amassed an incredible string of American League pennants and World Series championships. The franchise exhibit is above; one devoted to the team's great home-run hitting and run-producing tandem of Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth is below.
The shots above and below are the three photos I took inside Doubleday Field that are presentable for the blog. I had to do some touch-up on the one above and applied a radical crop on the right side of the first one below (you can kind of see the fringe of discoloring on the right side. I liked this first one below so much because it showed the autumn leaves sprinkled on the outfield grass. And the trees in the background of the one above give you an idea it was late October: There is still a hint of color in the leaves.
No comments:
Post a Comment