National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum
The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum is a history museum and hall of fame in Cooperstown, New York, operated by private interests. It serves as the central point of the history of baseball in the United States and displays baseball-related artifacts and exhibits, honoring those who have excelled in playing, managing, and serving the sport. The Hall's motto is "Preserving History, Honoring Excellence, Connecting Generations". Cooperstown is often used as shorthand (or a metonym) for the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.
"Baseball Hall of Fame" redirects here. For other uses, see Baseball Hall of Fame (disambiguation).Established
1936 (Baseball)
Dedicated June 12, 1939
Cooperstown, New York, U.S.
- August Herrmann Papers
- Gene Mack Cartoons
- Roger Kahn Papers
- Federal League Litigation
- Photo Archive
- National Baseball Hall of Fame Library (Manuscripts, Books, Publications)
- Recorded Media Collection
- Artifact Collection
- 250,000 photographs
- 14,000 hours of moving images and sound recordings
- 40,000 three-dimensional artifacts
260,000/year
(average as of 2018)[2]
Josh Rawitch[3] (since 2021)
Jane Forbes Clark[3]
(Board of Directors)
Tom Shieber[3]
(Senior Curator)
The Hall of Fame was established in 1939 by Stephen Carlton Clark, an heir to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune. Clark sought to bring tourists to the city hurt by the Great Depression, which reduced the local tourist trade, and Prohibition, which devastated the local hops industry. Clark constructed the Hall of Fame's building, which was dedicated on June 12, 1939. (His granddaughter, Jane Forbes Clark, is the current chairman of the board of directors.) The erroneous claim that Civil War hero Abner Doubleday invented baseball in Cooperstown was instrumental in the early marketing of the Hall.
An expanded library and research facility opened in 1994.[4] Dale Petroskey became the organization's president in 1999.[5] In 2002, the Hall launched Baseball as America, a traveling exhibit that toured ten American museums over six years. The Hall of Fame has since also sponsored educational programming on the Internet to bring the Hall of Fame to schoolchildren who might not visit. The Hall and Museum completed a series of renovations in spring 2005. The Hall of Fame also presents an annual exhibit at FanFest at the Major League Baseball All-Star Game.
Notable events[edit]
1982 unauthorized sales[edit]
A controversy erupted in 1982, when it emerged that some historic items given to the Hall had been sold on the collectibles market. The items had been lent to the Baseball Commissioner's office, gotten mixed up with other property owned by the Commissioner's office and employees of the office, and moved to the garage of Joe Reichler, an assistant to Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, who sold the items to resolve his personal financial difficulties. Under pressure from the New York Attorney General, the Commissioner's Office made reparations, but the negative publicity damaged the Hall of Fame's reputation, and made it more difficult for it to solicit donations.[56]