Royals in Cooperstown

…what answer would reflect most poorly on the good folks in Cooperstown?

Semi-off-topic story:
In my office, I have a framed copy of a pamphlet containing Alexander Cartwright’s “Rules of the Recently Invented Game of Base Ball.” These are the original 20 rules adopted by the New York Knickerbocker Base Ball Club on September 23, 1845 (as it says right there in the pamphlet). This pamphlet was originally printed some years later, and what I have is a reproduction printed off of the original plates sometime in the last 20 to 30 years. It looks great, BTW.

Three or four years ago, I became aware that some reprints of this old pamphlet had been made, and I thought I’d try to get and frame a copy for my office. As a lawyer obsessed with baseball, this made sense to me (maybe I should get a reproduction of the US Constitution to go next to it… then I’d have all the significant founding documents of the world in which I live). At the time, I was considering writing a scholarly article about the way that baseball’s rules have been interpreted in difficult cases (think pinetar here, for an obvious example). So I had done some research into the history of the rules and had an interest in obtaining a copy of the 1845 rules.

Anyway, I called around, looking for someone with access to this thing, including at least a dozen calls to people at the baseball hall of fame. I looked for a copy off and on for two years, actually. The folks at the HOF were some of the least helpful people I encountered in my search. Nobody there seemed to understand why a person would want such a thing, or why I would expect them to know anything about it. Ultimately, one of the many emails I sent off led to the discovery of who held the copyright on the version I was looking for… which later led to the discovery of who actually owned the plates… which later led to the discovery of who had borrowed them to print some copies.

As it turns out, there is a place called “The Farmers Museum,” in cooperstown, NY—literally 2 miles down the road from the HOF—that happens to own a working printing press of the same type that originally produced this pamphlet but they don’t have any plates to go with their printing press. So, they borrowed the plates to the baseball pamphlet for the purpose of demonstrating how the press worked. Afterwards, they had a bunch of copies of the baseball pamphlet on their hands. Apparently not knowing what else to do with them, they have been selling them off in their gift shop for a couple of decades now at $5 each.

Funny thing is, if someone from the HOF were to drive those 2 miles and buy out the stock at the Farmers Museum, I have little doubt that they could mark them up to $25, and sell out in one weekend. But, instead, they seemed to think I was an idiot for thinking they might know how to locate this particular artifact of the game’s origin.