NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME
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Fast Facts
The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum is located at 25 Main Street in Cooperstown, New York.
According to the Hall of Fame, approximately 350,000 visitors enter the museum each year.
The Hall of Fame honors persons who have excelled in playing, managing, and serving the sport.
The Hall's motto is "Preserving History, Honoring Excellence, Connecting Generations".
The Hall of Fame's five initial inductees in the 1936 class were Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson, Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner.
The Hall of Fame was officially dedicated on June 12, 1939.
Not one single player in the National Baseball Hall of Fame has even been selected with 100% of the possible ballots.
Tom Seaver received the highest Hall of Fame voting percentage total at 98.8% in 1992.
Biggest Baseball Myth Revealed
The Hall of Fame is in Cooperstown, NY because the Mills Commission, which was appointed in 1905 to determine the origin of baseball, stated that it believed that Abner Doubleday invented baseball in Cooperstown, New York, in 1839. The Doubleday Myth was perpetuated by the local businessmen who founded the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1936. They used the myth to establish a geographic link between the new museum and the origins of the game that it honored.
In reality, Alexander Cartwright is the man who deserves credit for establishing the fundamental rules of baseball and for organizing the first baseball game in 1846. The first "officially recorded" baseball game between two different teams was played on June 19, 1846 at the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey. The two teams, the "Knickerbockers" and the "New York Nine", played with Cartwright's twenty rules. Cartwright’s team, the Knickerbockers, lost 23 to 1 to the New York Nine club in four innings. Some say that Cartwright's team lost because his best players did not want to make the trip across the river from Manhattan, NY. Cartwright was the umpire during this game and fined one player six cents for cursing. In 1953, Congress officially recognized Alexander Cartwright as the inventor of modern baseball.