Baseball Buffs Heaven

Hall of Fame Library research center is a treasure trove

By Eric Angevine
October 20, 2008

COOPERSTOWN—Next time you're at the Hall of Fame, pay a visit to the bookstore on the second floor. You'll see a nondescript door next to the cash register, labeled "A. Bartlett Giamatti Research Center". You may be reluctant to walk through, lest you interrupt the work being done inside, but you shouldn't be. This is your portal, granting access to the accumulated knowledge of the national pastime.

Accessibility is of utmost importance to the staff at the Giamatti Center, which welcomes everyone from curious walk-in visitors to well-known authors who plan weeks of deep digging in the archives. Research director Tim Wiles says most basic inquiries can be answered by using the center's online catalog, the cheekily named American Baseball Network for Electronic Research (ABNER, for short). For those who prefer to do things the old-fashioned way, Wiles and his staff still answer faxes, phone calls and handwritten letters as well.

The library welcomes 10,000-20,000 visitors a year. There are times when the long table in the main room is full of baseball researchers sitting shoulder-to-shoulder, leafing carefully through bound volumes or peering at official scorebooks. With such voluminous lore on tap, it can sometimes be difficult for a focused researcher to tread the straight and narrow.

"Getting off topic is always a danger" author Jeff Katz says. "The inessential stuff is really entertaining."

While researching his first book about the Kansas City A's, Katz says he would often sneak peeks at Ty Cobb's letter to Bobby Doerr, and photos of Cy Young brandishing trophies on the running boards of his car. What was inessential to his narrative was lifeblood to the baseball fan inside.

The main level of the Giamatti library is just the beginning, however. A staff of 17 oversees the growth and health of the collection of documents, photos, tapes and films that make up the core of the center's holdings. The hall rarely purchases archival documents—most are donated—with limited space available, the center staff meets weekly to review incoming donations and determine the strength of the data within.

"Sometimes an item duplicates something we already have," Wiles says. "Sometimes there's a little bit of baseball information in a work that's really about something else, so there's not enough baseball focus."

In those cases, the useful bits are generally photocopied and filed by subject. Donations that do make it through the vetting process often require a fair amount of hands-on work before they can be added to the collection. On this day, several sealed shoeboxes from an estate sale were stacked on a table, ready for their contents to be sorted, stored and preserved. In a hallway, neat ranks of file boxes sent over from the demolition of old Tiger Stadium were also waiting to be processed.

There's just so much history, and so little time.

First Step Is Triage

With historical items arriving in varying states of health, the Giamatti center staff must decide what kind of treatment each one requires.

"Everything here is made of soap," says Wiles, employing a favorite metaphor. "At first it has a nice, solid shape, and you can read the words on it. But over time, it will wear down to a sliver. Our job is to make that happen as slowly as possible."

The first step is preservation. Gloved hands place paper documents in plastic sleeves. Access to natural light is restricted, and everything from books to photos to films is permanently stored in rooms beneath the library where temperature and humidity are rigidly controlled. In fact, if you're checking out the film room, it may be best to bring along gloves and a sweater, even in the middle of summer.

Some stuff needs extra TLC, and that's where the technical services department comes in. Wiles unwrapped a tattered broadsheet poster from 1900 to illustrate the condition of some items when they arrive at the hall. He estimated the poster could cost up to $1,000 to restore, if such a process is deemed necessary.

"This was meant to last maybe one week, hung up on a fence somewhere," he says, "not 108 years."

The hall sometimes farms crucial projects out to the Northeast Document Conservation Center in Andover, Mass., where papers can go through treatments as familiar as dry-cleaning to arcane processes like magnesium bicarbonate buffing. Taking a single microscopic fiber from this poster, a restoration expert can use chemical analysis to tell what kind of paper it is, whether it's had coffee or tea spilled on it, how much natural light it has been exposed to, and if a cigar smoker ever owned it. The center often prepares chemical baths that can neutralize anything detrimental to the future life of the object, and it can even float words and images off their original backing and onto acid-free paper without harming them. This is real James Bond stuff.

Back at the hall, the frigid rooms downstairs hold many relics that have gone through similar processes. Wiles pointed out a stack of oversized books on one shelf, identifying them as Babe Ruth's personal scrapbooks. The entire collection—roughly 15 books—went through the preservation and rebinding process, at a cost of $100,000. The federal government paid half the tab through the Save America's Treasures program. The other half was donated by a certain New York-based shipping magnate who prefers to remain anonymous.

Plenty Of Rarities

The rarest of the rare are hidden away in a small room inside one of the larger chambers. This includes 19th-century rule books, one-of-a-kind documents from the Negro Leagues, and even baseball-themed comic books, carefully stored in a room that on its surface looks no different from the storage closet in any other office building in America.

Perusing the flyer that the St. Louis Cardinals issued to introduce the first farm system, we turned our attention to a tiny, library-bound book labeled "Ty Cobb's Diary—1946". Wiles flipped open to a random page in the diary, noting that Cobb wrote only in green ink, for some reason. On one spread was a more complete image of the Hall of Famer than you could find in any second-hand account.

In his own scrawl, Cobb noted that he had left a donation at an unidentified orphanage—above and beyond his previous largesse at the same institution. On the facing page he celebrated being named "Player of the Half-Century" by United Press International, particularly enjoying that he was selected over the Babe, and took special pride in the fact that he stayed sober at a dinner party.

And those were just two entries; imagine the thrill of reading the whole book. What's most amazing is that you can. Despite the rarity of these items, each is meant to be used. Staff members assist researchers with some of the older books, sometimes turning pages with spatula-shaped devices. Cameras are trained on every part of the main research room.

"If an item is so fragile that it can't be touched, we may not even collect it" Wiles says. Every effort is made to keep baseball's history available to the general public.

Next time you need to settle an argument with a friend, or satisfy you curiosity about the way the game used to look and feel, give ABNER a try. Or maybe you'd prefer to fax in a request, or visit and inhale the old-paper smell yourself. Regardless of how you choose to experience it, baseball's permanent record lives on at the Giamatti Research Center. It's there, waiting for you.

Eric Angevine is a freelance writer who lives in Charlottesville, Va.