Cooperstown & Baseball Hall of Fame

The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York, enshrines the history, culture, and statistics of America's national pastime across 50,000 square feet in a three-story brick building on Main Street. The museum was founded in 1939 on the romantic but historically disputed claim that Abner Doubleday invented baseball in Cooperstown in 1839; whatever its mythological origins, the institution has grown into the world's most comprehensive baseball archive, holding 40,000 artifacts, 130,000 baseball cards, and over three million library documents including the personal papers of Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, and Jackie Robinson. The Plaque Gallery on the museum's third floor contains bronze plaques for each of the Hall's more than 300 inductees, arranged chronologically from Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, and Honus Wagner (all inducted in 1936) to the present. The Pride of Puerto Rico gallery traces the island's extraordinary contribution to the major leagues. An entire floor is devoted to the evolution of the game's equipment, uniforms, and media coverage. Cooperstown itself is a small, well-preserved village of Victorian and Federal architecture on the southern shore of Otsego Lake — James Fenimore Cooper set his Leatherstocking Tales here and called the lake Glimmerglass. The village's Main Street is lined with baseball memorabilia shops, and Doubleday Field, a historic ballpark adjacent to the museum, hosts amateur games through summer. Induction Weekend in late July brings Hall of Fame inductees and tens of thousands of fans to a ceremony on the Clark Sports Center grounds, transforming the quiet village.