When I first heard about the Hall of Fame, the players being inducted were guys I'd barely heard of. As I grew up and followed careers (you could still follow a ballplayer's career via newspapers and baseball cards), the names became more familiar, and over the years they kept getting younger (relative to me, that is; they were still old guys).
When Juan Marichal was chosen in 1983, I was living in a Dominican neighborhood. People there chartered buses to go to Cooperstown for the ceremony.
My parents, back in the day, had friends who actually lived just outside of Cooperstown, and one weekend I went with them (the parents, that is). It was an odd house; I think I took pictures, but if so they're in the box with the shots of the World Trade Center, and I'm still not up to looking at those. The Sunday of that weekend, Dad drove us all to Cooperstown proper, and we parked somewhere and walked (this was before the diabetes and the neuropathy and the arthritis and we strolled everywhere, and in fact, this drive and walk has turned up a couple of times in dreams) to the Hall of Fame.
Where I turned into an obnoxious monster. Well, no. But the baseball fanatic GOSHWOW was rolling off me in waves. Did I mention that when we moved in 1965 we somehow ended up with the phone number of a Famous Retired Ballplayer? He's in the Hall. (When I say "in the Hall" I mean "has a plaque." Pete Rose's accomplishments are mentioned and there was, if I remember correctly, a huge picture of him, but he doesn't have a plaque.) Lots of players that I had actually followed from their rookie years on were honored. Equipment one could actually touch.
Museum foot eventually intervened, but not before I got to utterly horrify my mother by squealing and becoming generally incoherent over an exhibit on the National League playoffs in 1959. Dodgers v. Braves (who were then in Milwaukee). I had managed to see one of those games on TV. I was probably not supposed to be up that late.
Rickey Henderson was a baby then.
(Yeah, now they're younger relative to me, and they're younger.)
Anyway, maybe he'll stick around and give some of the A's base-stealing tips. They need them.
In other baseball-related news, Jonathan Sanchez of the San Francisco Giants pitched the year's first no-hitter.
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