America's perfect village

Dreams, reality alive in Cooperstown

Triumph and tears, hope and heartache reside just outside walls of Hall of Fame


Originally Published: July 26, 2013
<cite class="source"> By Jim Caple | ESPN.com</cite>

<cite>Robert Caplin for ESPN</cite>Cooperstown has only one downtown traffic light, but the area is typically bustling with activity.
COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. -- You know the final scene of "Field of Dreams'' where a long queue of cars stretches toward the horizon from Ray Kinsella's cornfield? That's what Route 28 leading toward Cooperstown reminds me of on this hot summer afternoon. Car after car and SUV after SUV are pulling off the two-lane highway as the drivers seek parking spaces to join in a celebration of baseball.
The cars have come to Cooperstown from everywhere. Michigan. New Jersey. Illinois. Florida. I count license plates from more than 20 states, plus Ontario, and those are just the cars near my lane of the parking lot. The side and rear windows of many are soaped with the names and numbers of teams and players.
Excited baseball fans spill from their cars and hustle toward the already crowded stands of a ballfield decked with red, white and blue bunting. Festive music plays over the field's loudspeakers. Grinning players march proudly in. Long speeches are delivered, emotional tributes given. Enthusiastic fans applaud wildly. Skydivers bearing flags parachute into the ceremonies. Photographers and camera crews cross the field, recording the festivities.
Oh, and before we go any further, I should point out that this is not the induction ceremony for the Baseball Hall of Fame.
No, this is the weekly opening ceremony for Cooperstown Dreams Park, held each Saturday throughout the summer when a new wave of expectant players aged 12 and under arrives for the baseball camp/tournament. Families have driven and flown across the country to see boys and girls named Timmy and Kaleb and Mira play here, not to attend a ceremony inducting the long-dead and virtually forgotten Hank O'Day, Jacob Ruppert and Deacon White into the Hall of Fame.
This year is the first since 1965 that the Hall of Fame will not induct a living member. And while attendance will be low for that ceremony this Sunday, life goes on in Cooperstown, a village of 1,850 year-round residents and many thousands more summertime tourists.
As I found, during a week I spent in Cooperstown, the people and stories outside the Hall of Fame are much more compelling than those honored on its walls. Some stories will produce a lump in your throat or goosebumps on your arm. Some will make you laugh. Some, especially the one about a shooting, will make you shake your head.
And some, like the autistic baseball hero, will make you want to stand up and cheer.
Forget this year's long-dead inductees. There is life in the village of baseball.
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<cite>Robert Caplin for ESPN</cite>Lou Presutti purchased 156 acres of farmland and opened Dreams Park in 1996. [h=3]Lou Presutti: 'A wonderful game of life'[/h]
Lou Presutti grabs the wheel of his golf cart to take me on a tour around the amazing 80-acre Cooperstown Dreams Park.
Presutti, the 73-year-old founder of Dreams Park, drives past the park's 100-plus barracks for the youth teams that live and play here every week during the summer. Against a wonderful backdrop of wooded hills, we roll past some of the 22 ballfields, the 20 batting cages and the concession stands, all precisely maintained. When Presutti spots the rare piece of litter on the well-tended grass, he stops and picks it up. We pass two delighted parents who wave Presutti over and ask him for an autograph, praising him for Dreams Park and his speech at the opening ceremonies. Everyone calls him "Coach.''
He stops his cart near a team heading toward a ballfield. He calls to a player with long, blond hair and offers him several coveted trading pins, plus a wristband, if he will agree to cut his hair. The player excitedly accepts the offer.
Presutti doesn't much care for long hair on a player, which helps explain why his favorite major league owner was George Steinbrenner. He also is offended by players who wear their caps backwards or askew (He was not a big fan of Ken Griffey Jr.) or wear their jerseys untucked or wear their pants cuffs all the way down to the ankles. If he catches a player wearing his uniform in such a manner, he will suspend him for two games. He says he suspends players 30-40 times a week. He suspended two just during Saturday's opening ceremonies.

The parents must love those two-game suspensions considering they are paying $850 per player for their week at Dreams Park.
"Well, we have rules. And we have to. We have such masses of people here," Presutti says. "And we tell them over and over and over again. We show them. We bring models up on our podium and show them, 'If you look like this, you're going to get a two-game suspension.' One kid standing with his cap on backwards. One kid with his shirt out. Another kid with his [cuffs] down around his ankles, looking like a thug. OK? Then we have a kid with pants up around his knees, his shirt tucked in. He looks like a ballplayer. Maybe he'll feel like a ballplayer. Just think, maybe he'll wind up being a ballplayer. Just maybe. And then he'll have respect for the uniform and have respect for himself."
Presutti is as old school as a crew cut and a worn letterman's jacket.
"We have a thing here at Cooperstown Dreams Park," he says. "The most important thing is to be your own hero. Look in the mirror. That has got to be your hero. You have to be your own hero and you need to dream dreams. And you've got to be willing to pay the price to make those dreams come true. And when they don't come true, you have to instantly begin to dream new dreams."
Dreams Park, Presutti says, was inspired by his paternal grandmother and his late father. His grandmother immigrated to America in 1898 and raised a baseball-passionate family of nine children on her own. "The only things she had in life was her family, God and baseball." He says he got the idea for Dreams Park when he was visiting the Hall of Fame with his father and son one day decades ago, and the elder Presutti said, "Every kid in America should have the chance to play baseball at Cooperstown."
"I needed purpose to build this," Presutti says. "I coached for 34 years, involved with youth baseball at the 12-year-old level, and I needed something else, too. My purpose really was that I love this game so much and love what it will lend you if you allow it to. Because it's just an incredible game of failure, and life is nothing more than failure.
"It's such a wonderful game of life."
Unable to secure a loan from a bank, Presutti instead invested his savings from a career as a successful target marketer into purchasing 156 acres of former farmland about five miles outside Cooperstown. He says he had cold feet just before committing to his project in 1994, telling his wife that if it failed, they could wind up bagging groceries. "Then we'll bag them together," she replied, nudging him forward.
A family-owned-and-run business -- his son, Louis, is the CEO -- Dreams Park opened in 1996 with a four-week season and 30 teams playing each week. The next year there were nearly 300 teams. In 1998, Presutti says, "The flower began to open," and his dream took off.
There now are 104 teams every week throughout the summer, with a dozen players and four or five coaches per team. Presutti says they turn away thousands of teams a year and that teams put in applications years in advance. There are nearly 17,000 players every summer, each paying $850 to cover their three meals a day, housing, two sets of uniforms, laundry, a commemorative ring, a visit to the Hall of Fame and, of course, the games they play. "And it's worth every penny,'' one mother tells me.
The kids I talk to love it, too. Presutti estimates that 190,000 players have competed here, including the children of such stars as Roger Clemens, Greg Maddux and Wayne Gretzky. I'm told Albert Pujols' son is playing here either this week or next. Major league alumni include Mike Trout, Bryce Harper, David Price and Chris Sale and nearly half of this year's first-round picks.
"I went there twice, and it's a pretty good experience," Trout told me later. "Every young kid out there should go and enjoy that time out there, competing with kids from all across the country. I just liked the way they handled it; all the fields are the same and being able to visit the Hall of Fame is pretty cool."
Presutti says Dreams Park is built "to the eyes of a 12-year-old." The outfield fences are a tantalizing 200 feet down the line from home plate, so that many players can feel the pleasure (and cherish the memory) of slamming a home run in Cooperstown. To lessen parental interference, spectators are not allowed to sit behind home plate or next to the dugouts.
"I coached youth ball for 34 years," Presutti explains. "I know what coaches are like. I know what parents are like. I know what kids are like."
Presutti and I have an enjoyable, wide-ranging conversation as we ride around Dreams Park. He has very strong opinions, and I don't agree with all of his views. For one thing, I enjoyed seeing Griffey with his cap on backwards. But I appreciate his demand for excellence, his passion for the game and his desire to grow it.
And I also know this: I would have loved to have played here when I was 12.
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[h=3]The Mayor: 'A consistent financial bind'[/h]
When mayor Jeff Katz invites me to meet him for lunch at Alex & Ika, he tells me the restaurant is near the traffic light. No further directions are necessary. There is only one traffic light in Cooperstown, at the intersection of Chestnut and Main.
In addition to his unpaid position as mayor of what is often referred to as "America's most perfect village,'' Katz also is the local chapter chairman of the Society for American Baseball Research. He is a passionate baseball fan who is writing a book about the 1981 season, the landmark year of the strike, as well as the year of Fernando-mania, the major league debut of Cal Ripken Jr., Maury Wills' disastrous managerial tenure and the World Series when Steinbrenner got in a fight in an elevator.
[+] Enlarge <cite>Robert Caplin for ESPN</cite>Cooperstown Mayor Jeff Katz believes "America's most perfect village" has been "exploited."


He also is dealing with Cooperstown's financial problems.
"We are in a consistent financial bind," Katz says. "We have an aging infrastructure. We have water and sewer pipes that are 100 years old or more that we are replacing. We have historic buildings. We have all this infrastructure that a normal village of 1,800 people doesn't have. What I'm constantly trying to push for is that we need to share in this stuff."
"I don't want to make this a negative story, because it's not. Cooperstown is great. But it is a challenge for us to keep up the magic that we do have."
In order to generate revenue, this year the city began charging for parking along Main Street, $2 per hour. Everyone -- and I mean everyone -- I talk to complains about the parking meters, the same as people do all over the country whenever the government demands more money. Katz understands the resistance but says the city must raise the money to pay the bills.
"I try to fight for our place at the table," Katz says. "I think Cooperstown as a village is exploited. By that, I mean everyone uses the Cooperstown name for their benefit, which is fine. But when it comes to the village, the village pays all the bills."
For instance, Katz says, Cooperstown Dreams Park is not actually in Cooperstown. It's in Hartwick, about five miles from the village. But at least it is far closer to Cooperstown than a competing youth ball camp, Cooperstown All-Star Village, which is in Oneonta, roughly 20 miles away.
This sort of thing is rather common. Many businesses appropriate the Cooperstown name to enhance their product because of its powerful brand. "A lot of people feed off the name," Katz says. That's because, he says, when the Hall of Fame opened in 1939, Cooperstown quickly became synonymous with excellence.
Cooperstown certainly carries more cachet than Canton, Ohio -- the home of the Pro Football Hall of Fame -- does.
"With some people, anytime anything goes wrong, it's, 'Oh yeah, America's perfect village,' " Katz says. "It's a tagline. But one of the things about Cooperstown is we are very much in the real world.''
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<cite>Robert Caplin for ESPN</cite>A major league exhibition game was played at Doubleday Field each summer until 2008.
[h=3]Doubleday Field: 'The sounds of baseball'[/h]
Gage Griffin and Michael Jeffers are sitting in the third-base grandstand at Cooperstown's Doubleday Field, waiting for their game to begin and gazing at the diamond where everyone from Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio to Kirby Puckett and Ken Griffey Jr. played. Now, this historic field is their home for the season. "It's pretty cool being part of that history for the summer," Jeffers says.
Jeffers and Griffin are pitchers for the Cooperstown Hawkeyes, a team in the Perfect Game Collegiate Baseball League, a summer wood bat league. As college players, they are not paid, but they do receive lodging with host families. Griffin and teammate Cody Smith live with a host family on a dairy farm approximately 40 minutes outside of town. They occasionally return from a game and help the family milk the cows and shovel the manure.
"They don't make us work, but we help them out when we get home from a game," Griffin says. "It was all new to me. It's real simple, though. You turn on the machine and you hook it up to the udders and it pretty much does the work for you. But it was pretty weird the first time. It doesn't happen often but whenever we get home and there is daylight left, we're usually out there helping them out. It's a good experience."
Somehow, I do not think this is A-Rod's usual postgame routine.
The myth is that Doubleday Field is where Abner Doubleday invented baseball in Cooperstown. This is not true. There is no evidence to support the belief that Doubleday invented baseball or that it was invented in Cooperstown. And, according to former Hall of Fame librarian, Tom Heitz, this site was probably a parking lot for horses in the 1800s.
Doubleday Field is historic, though. When the Hall of Fame inducted its first class in 1939, Doubleday hosted a game of all-stars that included Hank Greenberg, Charlie Gehringer, Paul Waner, Carl Hubbell and Dizzy Dean. Major league teams played an exhibition game here each subsequent summer, usually on induction weekend. Those games stopped in 2008, but current Hall of Famers and other retired major leaguers play an old-timers game here every Father's Day.
[+] Enlarge <cite>Robert Caplin for ESPN</cite>There are no lights at Doubleday Field, now home to the Cooperstown Hawkeyes of the Perfect Game Collegiate Baseball League.


Oddly, Cooperstown did not have its own team until Tom Hickey and John Raffaeli started the Hawkeyes in 2010. When Hickey asked his son, Michael, what he thought of putting a baseball team in Cooperstown, he replied, "Dad, Cooperstown is a baseball town without a baseball team."
Well, Cooperstown may be a baseball town, but there is a certain segment of the population that does not like baseball.
"It's not a minority; it's a significant number of people who have a total disdain for the baseball mentality," Presutti says. "And those are the people who are not Cooperstown-ians -- it's not them. These are people who moved here from Connecticut, from New York and Manhattan, who did other things in their lives and want peace and quiet in this little pocket of serenity on the end of Lake Otsego and the beginning of the great Susquehanna River."
Indeed, Hickey faced opposition from nearby residents who objected to the noise of baseball if a team moved into Doubleday. Hickey says Ted Peters, a retired and much respected biochemist with Cooperstown's world-class Bassett Medical Center (the town's largest employer), turned the tide by getting up at one meeting and telling the objectors, "Why on earth would you buy a house adjacent to Doubleday Field, if you did not want to hear the sounds of baseball?"
The team received approval but faces considerable challenges. For one, Doubleday Field is showing its considerable age. The current stadium with the brick exterior was built in 1939. There are no concession stands in the stadium (the Hawkeyes sell from a tent outside), and there are limited restrooms. The ballpark is just a block off Main Street but is hidden enough by surrounding buildings that many tourists don't realize it's even there. And most significantly, there are no lights.
The Dreams Park fields have lights, but Doubleday does not. So games must start by 5 p.m., an inconvenient time that discourages attendance.
Peters, enjoying a game from his seat behind home plate, looks around at a crowd of just over 100. "There should be a lot more people out here than this. Sometimes it's just a handful."
The crowd is roughly the same size a few days later. One of the fans is Laura Moellering, who tells me that her mother, Rita (Slats) Meyer, played in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League from 1946-49. Meyer once pitched a no-hitter -- and lost 1-0. After she retired from the game, she married and raised a family. "I played backyard ball with my mom all my life,'' Moellering says.
When Penny Marshall made "A League of Their Own" in 1991, Moellering says she and her mother traveled to Cooperstown for the filming of the final scene in which the aging veterans are reunited and honored at the Hall of Fame. As so many visitors do, Laura fell in love with Cooperstown and then moved here.
"Mom was concerned about how Penny Marshall would make it into a comedy when there wasn't anything funny about it," Moellering says. "And with Madonna in it."
Her mother never got a chance to see "A League of Their Own." Meyer died at age 65, just two weeks before the movie's release. Moellering says she can see her mother in the final scenes of the movie, which she has watched many times. "I'm just now making it through the whole movie without crying."
A ballpark holds so much life, so many stories, even when the crowds are small. And had I gone to see the Hawkeyes play the day of the Dreams Park opening ceremonies, I would have found another one. I'm told Wesley Lippitt sat in the stands with his father that game.
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nice article - -thanks

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</center> [h=3]Hall induction: 'A level of intense debate'[/h]
My week in Cooperstown is ending. The workers at Dreams Park are cleaning up after the 104 teams have departed. They are preparing for another 104 that will arrive tomorrow. Collectors are searching the Main Street shops for a deal. Customers are lined up for pizza at Sal's, where I have enjoyed many a slice. People are drinking beer out at Ommegang.
And I am in the Hall of Fame's plaque gallery, gazing at the bronze reliefs of some of baseball's greatest players. Hank O'Day and Deacon White, who no living human saw play, soon will join the Hall of Famers on the wall, as will Ruppert, an owner who helped perpetuate baseball's color barrier and once gave Babe Ruth a paycut. Meanwhile, all-time home run king Barry Bonds and seven-time Cy Young winner Roger Clemens will not.
This angers me. I am a BBWAA member and I voted for both Bonds and Clemens. I agree with Katz that it is hypocritical for the BBWAA to vote in known cheats such as spitballer Gaylord Perry, as well as amphetamine users, while denying Bonds and Clemens a place in the Hall under the belief that those two took performance-enhancing drugs that weren't even officially banned for the vast majority of their careers.
Then again, Katz makes another point: The extreme and varying standards for baseball's Hall of Fame "lead to a level of intense debate that no other sport has." These standards aren't always fair or right, but they definitely make Cooperstown special. As Katz told me at lunch, Cooperstown is synonymous with excellence.
I leave the Hall, get into my rental car and drive west on Route 28 along the shores of Lake Otsego. I am sad to leave but content with the knowledge I will return to Cooperstown one day. Perhaps as early as next year for the induction of Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine. Perhaps in a future summer for the induction of Bonds and Clemens.
And who knows? Perhaps sometime in the distant future for one of those young players I saw competing at Dreams Park or at Doubleday Field. Baseball was not invented in Cooperstown, but the fertile land here continues to grow the game, along with so much else.