ABSTRACT

Many experiential accounts of the Baseball Hall of Fame rely on the trope of the journey and the traveler, and, moreover, they often construct Cooperstown as a sort of mecca for baseball lovers. In this vein, Benjamin Rader wrote: "The Doubleday-Cooperstown Myth helped establish baseball as a secular, peculiar American religion. According to Jonathan Yardley, Cooperstown is somehow more authentic because it is not really a tourist trap and because it offers an escape from commercialism. Of course, the passage obscures the history of a local strategy carefully designed to produce an attractive tourist destination, as well as the degree to which the typical visit to Cooperstown might be described as a "consumption ritual." On September 29, 1990, a dream that had been conceived by Kunihiro Kurata in December 1989 was consummated when an amateur baseball team"—"the Osaka Old Kids"—played a game on Doubleday Field.