Books: One man's ticket to the Baseball Hall of Fame

COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. — "I was the worst ballplayer in the history of Little League," I told the crowd gathered in the cozy Bullpen Theater (capacity: 55) at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. "The only way I could get invited to the Hall of Fame was to write this book."

The people laughed, especially the two kids in the front row wearing Red Sox caps, who no doubt play the game better than I did.

They all had stopped by the theater recently to hear about "Fifty-nine in '84: Old Hoss Radbourn, Barehanded Baseball and the Greatest Season a Pitcher Ever Had." They hailed from Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio and elsewhere -- united by a passion for the great game and the irresistible impulse to smile that one feels in this magical building.

Few honors in my life have matched this one -- signing a pile of books and talking baseball with my fellow pilgrims just up a bending ramp from the sacred Hall itself, a soaring cathedral of bronze plaques celebrating the greatest stars since the game's obscure dawn.

My man, Charles G. Radbourn, who won 59 games for the Providence Grays in the single season of 1884 (more than any other pitcher in major league history), was a member of the Class of 1939, one of the first enshrined, the year the main building opened. His plaque is not far from the entrance, right next to that of Yankee Lou Gehrig -- the Old Hoss beside the Iron Horse.

About 350,000 people a year are drawn to this place, improbably situated in a trim and lovely little town on Otsego Lake, precisely in the middle of nowhere. They come in on two-lane roads that coil through pastures and hillsides and impoverished mill hamlets. Suddenly, they arrive at the famous building on Main Street.

Bernard Malamud, the great novelist who wrote "The Natural," once observed: "The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology."

That is certainly true within these walls, where pieces of ancient leather, cloth and horsehide are imbued with a mystical aura. After my talk, my wife -- who seemed to view these items as a bunch of musty caps, baseballs and bats, rather than talismanic objects signifying epochal brilliance -- left me for three hours to wander the rooms with my fellow wide-eyed celebrants. I noticed that in the leafy park outside, every bench was occupied by a woman patiently reading a book.

They missed some of the Hall's 38,000 amazing artifacts.

There's Curt Schilling's blood-spattered sock, symbol of his gritty heroism in the 2004 playoffs, en route to ending 86 years of futility by the Red Sox.

There's Ty Cobb's fat-fingered fielder's glove from 1906, not much larger than that ferocious player's hand.

There's a picture of moon-faced Babe Ruth in the uniform of the 1914 Providence Grays, shortly before being called up to the Red Sox.