Car Sticker Update: National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum

At the National Baseball Hall of Fame we found some stickers for the back window of the car. Dad put them in the center of the back window. One is a bumper sticker that says National Baseball Hall of Fame, Cooperstown, N.Y., Est. 1939. Next to that he put the National Baseball Hall of Fame logo sticker.

Mik's Mini Bat Collection: 2008 Hall of Fame Induction

Mik got a second bat at the National Baseball Hall of Fame because they had a special bag of goodies for only $8 that included this mini bat, a postcard, a ice cream helmet with the museum logo, and two 2008 pins. The bat is gold colored. It has the 2008 induction logo on it which includes the names of the 2008 class (Gossage, Dreyfus, Kuhn, O'Malley, Southworth, and Williams).

Kj's Baseball Collection: Gold 2009 Hall of Fame Induction

At the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum I got a baseball commemorating the 2009 inductees. The ball is colored gold. It has a logo for the 2009 induction. It has the names under the logo (Gordon, Henderson, Rice). On the other side it says July 26, 2009, Cooperstown, N.Y. The other part of the ball has the three inductees signature logos.

Mik's Mini Bat Collection: Brown National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum

At the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum Mik choose the dark brown colored bat. It has the logo of the Hall of Fame in gold colored ink.

Baseball Museum 9: National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum

On Monday, June 29, 2009, we visited the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York. It is not a bad museum and definitely a must see for any baseball fan, however, the overall experience is not as good as visiting the small Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame. There is of course a lot more to see, which is one thing that makes it better than the Canadian one. However, the fact that there is not much staff around the exhibits and none that seemed any where near as knowledgeable about baseball as the one at the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame and their better up-to-date exhibits makes them on equal grounds of worth visiting in our opinion.

We started our visit to the Hall of Fame by seeing the movie on the second floor. The movie theater is made to be like a baseball stadium. It is pretty cool, but its handicap seating is not that great. There is not an actual spot to roll the chair into, so Mik just sat in front of the seating with the wheelchair logos on them. Not horrible, but rather odd. The movie really is not all that special, but I did like how giant baseball cards were slowly lit up and revealed hanging from the ceiling at the end.

After the movie we began moving through the second floor of the museum, which is organized in a time line way from the 19th century through to today's game. There is plenty of interesting things to see, but the going through it was extremely slow due to the amount of people slowly moving by the exhibits. It was especially hard with Mik because we would be waiting patiently for room to move up to the exhibit and then people would squeeze into the small spots that he could not fit into and making it take forever for enough room to clear to get up to the display cases. This really ruined the whole experience and part of why even though there are a lot of things to see here it is not as worthwhile as the few things that are easy to see due to few people being at the Canadian Hall of Fame. Anyways it is still pretty interesting to see the artifacts related to the history of baseball even though a lot of the information I have read in books before. At least they do have the information along with the artifacts, which is what the Negro Leagues Museum was not very good at. By the way the Negro Leagues exhibit here is pathetic in comparison to that museum. Sure it has all the important information, but it is mostly walls of words with very few artifacts.

The third floor of the museum had some of the more interesting things, but it is also what ruined the credibility of the museum. Sorry, but it is hard not to wonder what inaccuracies they made me believe when the ballpark exhibit called Sacred Grounds is not just a few months out of date by saying Yankee Stadium is still in use, but years out of date by also frequently referring to the Dbacks Chase Field as Bank One Ballpark. Sure I still often call it the BOB, but that is out of remembering it once being called that and that type of inaccuracy does not belong in a museum that can keep the active leader stats up-to-date every week.

Besides the Ballpark exhibit not being that great there is plenty of interesting things worth seeing on the third level. Mik really liked the wall of balls from no-hit games that have been pitched since the late-1930s. I enjoyed seeing the pins from almost all the World Series. Also, interesting was the display of baseball cards through the years.

The last part of the museum we visited was the first floor, where the actual Hall of Fame is located. Also, behind the hall of fame is a small exhibit on reporters and announcers. There is also an exhibit on Baseball Movies, which includes props from various movies and trailers playing on a television in the exhibit.

Mik’s Mini Bat Collection: 2009 Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame Induction

Mik was excited at the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame that for once he got a mini bat and I was not able to get a baseball. They usually seemed to have baseballs, but with Induction Weekend having been the week before they were out of a lot of things they normally had in stock. They did still have some 2009 Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame Induction mini bats, though.

The 2009 Canadian Hall of Fame Induction mini bats are two colored with natural coloring on top and a reddish brown color on the bottom. One of the interesting things about this bat is that it is made by KR3, which is a Canadian bat manufacturer, rather than Louisville Slugger or Cooperstown Sports like most of the other mini bats in his collection. The mini bat has a small logo of the Canadian Hall of Fame. It says 2009 Induction June 20, 2009 and has the names of the four inductees this year (Roy “Doc” Miller, Bernie Soulliere, Larry Walker, and Ernie Whitt).

Baseball Museum 8: Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame

We went to the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame back on June 26, 2009, on our way to the campground in the Toronto area. Well, it was not exactly on the way, as the distance from it to the campground was about the same as the distance from Niagara Falls to the campground and it took three hours to get there from Niagara Falls. Anyways it was a very worthwhile detour and the only baseball thing that was enjoyable in Canada. In fact it was an even better overall experience, although there was not as many things to look at, than the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.

The Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame is really small. The Cincinnati Reds Hall of Fame at Great American Ballpark is actually at least twice as big as the Canadian one and that one is just about one team. It is about the same size as the part of the San Diego Hall of Champions devoted to baseball, but that is just for one city and not one country. It is not that the museum does not have enough stuff to make a bigger museum, as they way they are they have quite a lot crowded on display, but just that baseball is not that big of a thing in Canada and they do not have the resources to have a larger exhibit space.

The Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame is located inside a house tucked back in a mostly residential area of the small town of St. Mary’s in Ontario, Canada. The house is adapted to have a ramp up to it, so it is just as accessible as a regular museum building. It is a little cramped inside, but only because they have so much they want to display at one time (by the way they try to rotate what is on display regularly) and have such limited space. It may be to the point of almost cluttered, but there was still adequate space for Mik to go through it. Also, the bathroom is very accessible, as it is the original one from when it was just a residential house with the tub removed. For such a small museum it is amazingly accessible and part of why it was so disappointing to see the lack of consideration for wheelchair in the Rogers Centre accessible seating rows.

There are only two rooms in the museum, but there is plenty of interesting things to discover. One of the things that caught Mik’s attention was an old pitching machine, which had an interesting sign about how a similar one was actually used as the pitcher in a college baseball game once. Other things included some Babe Ruth memorabilia and info on his connection to Canada, such as hitting his first professional home run in Toronto. There was also some Jackie Robinson things, as he played for the Montreal Royals Minor League team before debuting in the Majors.

Induction Weekend was the weekend before we visited, so they had some exhibits on this year’s inductees, such as Ernie Whitt and Larry Walker. They also had some other recent memorabilia, such as things from the Canadian team playing in the Beijing 2008 Olympics and the ’09 World Baseball Classic.

Overall the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame was a lot of fun to visit. There was a good amount of items to see and it was interesting to the Canadian connection to MLB, which has increasingly become almost exclusively in the United States, but used to have more of its teams (i.e. Montreal Expos) and Minor League teams in Canada. Also, the one employee there was very knowledgeable not only about the things in the museum, but also Canadian baseball history and general baseball history as well. It was so nice after visiting places like the Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural Site that had people that barely knew the script for showing the site to have a person that knew a lot about the place and also had passion about it. By the way I was impressed from the start when I noticed a little sign about the history of the house the museum is located in.