On Wednesday, August 26, the Rotary Club of Little Falls met for their weekly dinner meeting at the Elks Lodge in Little Falls.
Members were treated to a presentation by the Communications Director of the Baseball Hall Fame in Cooperstown, New York, Craig Muder.
Muder was full of anecdotes, statistics, and great stories of baseball lore. His first question was who were the first five members of the baseball Hall of Fame in 1939.
Give up?
Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, Christy Mathewson and Walter Johnson.
He explained that making it to the big leagues meant that that player was one of the best baseball athletes on this planet. There have only been 23,000 big leaguers in the history of the game. That would barely fill up half of the Syracuse Dome and yet the game has been played for nearly 130 years.
Of those 23,000 big leaguers only 281 players have been voted into the Hall of Fame. That’s slightly more than one percent of the players who have ever played the game.
He stated how lucky it was that the Baseball Hall of Fame had the bat from the first home run hit by Aaron Judge. They otherwise would not have had the bat but on August 13, 2016, Aaron Judge and teammate Tyler Austin became the first pair of teammates in MLB history to hit back-to-back home runs in their very first major league career at bat. Because the moment was completely unprecedented, the bats used by both Judge and Austin were secured to permanently enshrine the milestone.
The museum is actually three entities in one:
1- The museum which contains three floors, houses a massive collection of over 40,000 artifacts, jerseys, historic bats, and interactive exhibits detailing the history of the sport.
2- The Hall of Fame (Plaque Gallery): The iconic, reverent space lined with oak walls and marble columns where the bronze plaques of inducted players, managers, umpires, and executives are displayed.
3- The Research Library: a world-class repository established in 1968 that archives baseball literature, historical photographs, documents, and multimedia files.
Muder said the Research Library section contains a letter from the President of the United States Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who asked the museum to remain open during World War II to help keep up the morale of the American people.
If you haven’t been to the baseball Hall of Fame recently, maybe it’s time for a revisit – says Craig Muder.
If joining Rotary interests you send us an email to lfnyrotary@yahoo.com
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