#130. Cooperstown (Sunday, March 16, 2025)

What was your best day…of risking your life unnecessarily?

For someone who had loudly claimed for most of my life to that point to be “the biggest baseball fan I knew” and lived only a four-hour drive away, I certainly waited way too long—nearly three decades after I watched my first full game, and eight months before my last (#6)—to actually visit the Baseball Hall of Fame for the first time.

The main problem? Cooperstown, the village of less than two thousand people where it’s located, is literally in the middle of nowhere. The only way to get there is by driving.¹ Which was a bit of a problem for me, given my lack of “driving sense” (#52), and the fact that I never actually owned or drove with any regularity… and the fact that nobody close to me (i.e. my parents and brother) was nearly as much of a fan as me to make that trip to see baseball stuff and do nothing else.

Well, amid a rather emotionally volatile four-month span in early 2025², I spontaneously decided that this would be the weekend I faced my fears (and incompetence) and make that one solo trip I’d been longing all these years.³

And the drive there wasn’t as dangerous as my incompetence might have suggested. Partly because it’s all medium-speed regional roads from Ottawa to Cooperstown that are very sparsely populated, with no cities of any note along that path. With the dreary March weather and swaths of emptiness, the whole route actually felt uniquely serene: like I was seeing a part of the continent I’d never seen before and would never have occasion to again. For the trip, I impressively only had three moments of minor panic:

When I crossed the border and had to figure out if I could change the speed settings of my rental car from kilometres to miles (thankfully, I could).
When I had to a few highway interchanges at the city along my way with any semblance of civilization (Utica of 65,000).
Two or three instances of noticing one of those Amish horse-drawn buggies travelling on my side of the road going half my speed—at a distance that was a little too close for comfort. (They oddly blend in with the scenery.)

I arrived in Cooperstown in mid-afternoon. The village itself is genuinely quaint and charming, in a way you can say for very few places in North America. They’ve got one main street, where the Hall of Fame building and baseball memorabilia stores and restaurants all are, and outside of that it’s just a cluster of hotels that each looks like a Victorian-era bed and breakfast mansion each with its own handcrafted design. Everyone who’s visited will tell you that it instantly makes you feel transported to a hundred years earlier. Especially the case at that time of year, well outside tourist season.

Since the Hall closed at five, I spent the rest of Saturday exploring the shops. Given the central theme and attraction of this town, you can imagine there was some legit baseball merchandise of pretty much all varieties. Between the vintage unopened trading card boxes from forty years ago and signed jerseys for pretty much every player of significance (and insignificance), I was fairly close to making two notable purchases:

A baseball that was signed by Johnny Vander Meer, the only pitcher to ever throw no-hitters in consecutive starts (and likely the only one for the rest of baseball history), with the two 1938 dates written on the ball. Out of a display of thousands, that one caught eye, and I initially thought it was one of the balls he actually threw in one of the no-hitters. Which made the $150 USD price tag nothing. But then some quick research on my phone showed that not only was it just a random ball, but I could’ve just bought it online for the same price. Lame.
So I decided to make a purchase I could only make there, and I already had an idea what that would be. For the longest time, I had proposed the wild idea to myself (and annoyed friends) that I would buy a cap for all 124 North American sports teams, and each day wear the cap of the team that had the most “successful” (by my own objective metrics) day the day before—for the rest of my life. Problem was, literally no online retailer offers any kind of bulk deal. However, at the preeminent baseball store here, the shopkeeper—who was only mildly alarmed at my request⁴—was willing to cut me a package deal of 20 percent off for all 30 MLB caps. And I likely would’ve taken it too… except this was 2025 amid the U.S.-Canada tariff war, and since my trip was less than 48 hours, I realized (just before buying) that I’d have to pay like a 50 percent charge on this glorious spectrum of headwear I’d be bringing back.

But the highlight of my trip there had to be nighttime. With all the shops closing fairly early⁵, there was only place to go. Doubleday Field, the small baseball diamond right next to the Hall. Most famously, setting for the credits scene of A League of Their Own (the most recent of my “big emotional emotional movies”, #57). Surprisingly, the gate was open and I was allowed to just walk in and sit in the bleachers. And so, that’s what I did—just sit there for two hours in the bristling wind, staring at the diamond and the starlit sky, pondering life in a serene, uninterrupted way that I knew would never be replicated.

The next day, Sunday, was Hall of Fame day. And despite me setting a hard stop at three (in order to make it back home before dark), I was able to see—and, for a few particularly important historical artifacts⁶, spend the proper ten minutes each admiring—everything I wanted in the Museum. The most interesting, unexpected part was the Hall of Fame itself: a separate chamber, sealed away from everything else, which contained the plaques of each of the 351 players inducted (which I obvious read one-by-one). The whole chamber had this pristine, quiet air—like you unironically had ascended to heaven with all those (very poor sculpted, in many cases) faces of those baseball legends staring back at you.

Thankfully, this special experience did not end up getting ruined by the drive back. I was even more cautious than on the way there. And this time, I needed to be; because halfway through, it started pouring. Non-stop and without mercy. Combine that with my baseline level of apprehension, the already mediocre visibility of a March late afternoon in a landscape of barren trees and gray roads, and another handful of Amish buggies that popped out when I least expected it, and the next hour in theory should’ve been one of the most nerve-wracking (with real stakes) in my entire adult life. But somehow, just like things did in #52, it all kind of blurred together for me—into the simple instinct of navigating through this rainstorm (and other obstacles) in the most natural way possible.

Yes, I made it back to Ottawa early Sunday evening in one piece. And I knew, as I parked in the Enterprise parking spot, almost hugged the black Honda Venue that had been my dearest companion for those eight hours (especially the last four), dumped the keys, and breathed one of the deeper, most visceral sighs of relief I had in a while, that, successful as it all was, nothing about this two-day weekend journey was going to be replicated.

I had proven to myself that I could safely handle an extended road trip, by myself, in a completely foreign land (relatively speaking); and I never needed to do it again. And I had visited the pinnacle location around which my deepest sports fandom converged. The glaring bucket list item closed, only eight short months before it stopped mattering entirely.

I won’t say “literally only”, since there is a series of buses you can take from Ottawa to Syracuse to Utica to Cooperstown that’ll take you a breezy twenty hours, long stopovers included.
Volatile, because I had fallen hard for a girl; harder than any girl since the Chenling relationship ended ten years earlier (#87). The girl shall remain nameless, as she has no further relevance to the rest of this entry (or list).
Note I had only gone on one solo road trip in my life before, and that was a two-hour drive on a familiar road to see my brother at McGill six years before.
Apparently he gets it often from school groups who visit, though usually the package is for “any” 20-30 baseball caps, not the one-of-each that only seriously baseball-obsessed (and generally weird) individuals would want.
The only place open late was a whiskey distillery, where I did an extensive tasting of all their baseball-themed spirits. I ended up picking up a “Spitball” cinnamon whiskey, whose 50 percent duty the border guard generously waived.
Notably, the bats used Joe Carter’s World Series-winning home run from 1993, and the bat and cleats from the walk-offs in Game 7 of the 1997 and 2001 World Series. Items that had an indescribable hallowed meaning to me… until their context was completely poisoned by what happened eight months later (#6).