My new book, Cooperstown at the Crossroads, offers a nine-point plan to reinvigorate the National Baseball Hall of Fame. (The book is now available from Niawanda Books.) I’m going into detail about each of my nine proposals on successive Fridays in this newsletter. Today — Point No. 9, an updated look.
David Ortiz was no different from other baseball fans. He found the Hall of Fame’s plaque gallery to be an awe-inspiring place.
Ortiz paid his first visit to Cooperstown on May 2, 2022, almost three months prior to his induction ceremony. He donned the appropriate uniform — a Hall of Fame cap and jersey — and made his way through the exhibits. He enjoyed privileges that would never be extended to the average tourist, including a chance to heft the bat that Ted Williams used to hit his final home run in 1960.
But the gallery was the highlight of Ortiz’s visit. He paused when he reached the entrance, taking a moment to gaze at the 333 bronze plaques neatly arrayed in marble-columned alcoves along the side walls and semicircular back wall. Each plaque was secured to a marble backing board by small screws with heads shaped like baseballs. The backing, in turn, was affixed to oak walls soaring more than 20 feet to a series of skylights.
“This is like a dream come true, to be honest with you,” Ortiz finally said. “I still can’t believe it. It’s gonna take me a minute to get there. This is it. This is it.”
He examined the plaques of friends and contemporaries: Pedro Martinez, Juan Marichal, Vladimir Guerrero, Frank Thomas, Kirby Puckett. He lingered in front of the space for Puckett, whom Ortiz had met as a prospect with the Minnesota Twins. “That was my guy,” he said brokenly, wiping his eyes.
Ortiz gradually made his way to the spot reserved for him. His plaque wouldn’t be hung until induction week, but the backing board was already in place. He scrawled his signature on a portion of the marble that would eventually be covered. “Man, it has been a long road,” he said. “This is my first time ever being in this room, and when you walk around, you get goosebumps.”
Who could possibly find fault with such an amazing place?
Well, if we’re going to be honest, there are a few long-standing problems that need to be addressed.
Subscribe — free — to Baseball’s Best (and Worst)
A new installment will arrive in your email each Tuesday and Friday morning
The first problem is the erratic quality of the plaques themselves. The Sporting News began complaining as early as 1936, three years before the hall opened its doors. The plaques for the original five inductees had already been prepared, and the newspaper groused about “an unfortunate lack of consistency” in their wording.
Babe Ruth’s plaque hailed him as the “greatest drawing card in [the] history of baseball,” though it said little about his accomplishments. Walter Johnson’s plaque called him the “fastest ball pitcher in [the] history of [the] game,” but devoted only two sentences to his magnificent 21-year pitching career.
The Sporting News called for fewer adjectives and greater detail. “Perhaps it would be just as well to omit the superlatives and the flowers and confine the citations to simple statements of facts, instead of calling one individual the ‘greatest of all’ and ignoring the greatness of others,” the paper said. The editorial suggested that future players were likely to exceed the records set by the first inductees, rendering the initial descriptions inaccurate.
Some of the early listings were maddeningly vague. Connie Mack was still managing when he was inducted in 1937. This is what his 30-word plaque said then — and still says today: “A star catcher, but famed more as manager of the Philadelphia Athletics since 1901. Winner of 9 pennants and 5 world championships. Received the Bok Award in Philadelphia for 1929.”
Mack’s catching career and civic prize, which had no impact on his induction, weren’t worth mentioning. His pennants and world titles were greatly important, of course, but the plaque said nothing of Mack’s all-time records for managerial wins and losses or his key role in establishing the American League. An update after his retirement in 1950 would have been useful.
Sixteen men were admitted to the Hall of Fame in its first three years, 1936 to 1938. The average length of their plaque descriptions was just 30.7 words. Nap Lajoie received the shortest shrift, only 22 words to summarize 21 seasons of excellence. Even Morgan Bulkeley was given greater coverage — 24 words — and he hadn’t accomplished a single thing.
Baseball’s Best (and Worst) 2023 Yearbook
A complete rundown of 2022 stats — and a look ahead at the season to come
The Hall of Fame has rotated its approach 180 degrees since those early days of excessive superlatives and rigid brevity. Plaques of recent vintage are crammed with bureaucratic phraseology and copious statistics.
Harold Baines, for example, is described as a “respected and clutch left-handed hitter whose professional approach and humble demeanor made him one of the most consistent and reliable players of the 1980s and 1990s.” That’s a 26-word sentence — exceeding Lajoie’s entire plaque — and there are 62 more words after that. The typeface used for Baines’s description is so small and compact that some fans find it difficult to read.
Baines was among 16 honorees who entered the hall between 2018 and 2020, matching the total for 1936-1938. The average text length for the newer group was 94.7 words, roughly triple the average of 30.7 words for the original inductees. A similar degree of inflation can be seen in a comparison of the plaques for the five commissioners in the gallery. Their years of induction are in parentheses:
Kenesaw Mountain Landis (1944): 25 words
Ford Frick (1970): 19 words
Happy Chandler (1982): 38 words
Bowie Kuhn (2008): 81 words
Bud Selig (2017): 102 words
Landis was allotted one word for each of his 24 years as commissioner, with one additional word as a bonus. Selig’s description is four times longer. The text on his plaque is so tightly squeezed that it’s nearly illegible.
This generational disparity does not extend to the upper half of each plaque, the place where each member’s portrait is displayed. Old and new inductees have suffered equally at the hands of the hall’s artists. Many of the bronze images of legendary players — not all, but a surprisingly large number — are remarkably unlike their photographs.
Just take a walk through the gallery. A grim, bloated Babe Ruth stares bleakly as you pass by. Christy Mathewson’s face is unexpectedly fleshy for such a trim athlete. Tris Speaker appears to be a heavy middle-aged man, not a fleet outfielder. Cy Young looks to be aged and dour. Joe DiMaggio bares his teeth as if he senses a foul odor. Faces purported to be those of Mickey Mantle, Sandy Koufax, Bob Gibson, and Marvin Miller are virtually unrecognizable.
An additional peculiarity is evident in several instances. Some players are depicted in caps with unexpected logos, others in hats without any identifying marks.
The Hall of Fame prefers to link an inductee to a single team whenever possible, even if he starred for two franchises or even more. Gary Carter and Andre Dawson respectively believed that they had played their best ball for the New York Mets and Chicago Cubs, yet the hall portrayed both in Montreal Expos caps.
“Here I am, representing this team as a Hall of Famer,” Carter said unhappily in 2003, “and we don’t know where their future is.” (It turned out to be in Washington, where the Expos relocated in 2005.)
Reggie Jackson, Dave Winfield, Vladimir Guerrero, and Wade Boggs were other honorees whose hat choices were widely discussed before the hall issued its final edicts.
A few Hall of Famers have avoided controversy by donning blank caps. Catfish Hunter, Greg Maddux, and Tony La Russa prospered with multiple franchises. They didn’t express preferences for their hats, and the hall let them slide. La Russa, who had managed the Chicago White Sox, Oakland Athletics, and St. Louis Cardinals, explained his neutrality as a conscious decision, attributing his induction to “the totality of the success of each of those teams.”
The plaque gallery — despite its shortcomings — still manages to project a sense of majesty, as David Ortiz discovered during his tour. But several improvements must be made. Here is the plan of attack:
Plaques for players will be grouped in one wing, as noted in a previous part of my nine-point plan. Other contributors will be placed in a separate gallery.
Plaques will be redesigned. They will have a fresher appearance, using photos instead of sculpted images. The text will be livelier, more expressive, and solidly based in fact. Descriptions for different honorees will be of similar length.
The ideal plaque design will be sufficiently large to include more than one picture, allowing a mixture of action photos and head shots. If an inductee played a prominent role with multiple clubs, there will be space to represent them.
Plaques will be produced for the 119 writers and broadcasters who are being elevated to official status.
Separate plaques, perhaps of a larger size, will be designed for the clubs that are inducted. The extra space will allow the display of team photos.
There is one final question to address: What about the Elite 100?
Membership in Cooperstown’s most exclusive gallery will be the highest possible honor for any Hall of Famer, a distinction that must be reinforced by its display. Plaques would be too pedestrian, too reminiscent of the players’ and contributors’ wings. The 100 honorees deserve something greater, which is why they will be immortalized in small busts.
Let’s hope the hall’s artists do a better job than they did on the plaques.