- George Brace / AP Photos
- Babe Ruth and his wife, Claire, captured by famed baseball photographer George Brace.
Rifling through old files the other day, I came across a good idea I’d reported in a column in 1996. The status of writers and broadcasters has always been ambiguous at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. Neither trade belongs formally to the hall but both are celebrated there, in spaces honoring recipients of the J.G. Taylor Spink Award (chosen by the Baseball Writers Association of America), and the Ford C. Frick Award (chosen primarily by former winners). If you insist it’s possible to be within the hall but not in the hall—well, you’re right but you’re splitting hairs.
“Look at the Ken Burns stuff,” Cahan went on, referring to the documentarian’s 18-and-a-half-hour series Baseball. “It was the photographs, the still images, that were most important. As the episodes went on and they started showing more film and video, it got to be less interesting.”
There are ideas that live and breathe. There are ideas that survive in amber, inert mementos of the time when they fired somebody up. When you mention it, Gates can remember Cahan championing the idea of a photographers’ wing, but it had been a while since he’d thought about that himself. “It was one of those things that was on the vine that would require board action, and nothing ever came of it,” he told me. There was turnover in the board, other changes of leadership, and the idea fell through the cracks.
