[h=1]In Cooperstown, a Baseball Author Is Also the Manager[/h] By RICHARD SANDOMIR<time class="dateline" datetime="2014-07-24">JULY 24, 2014</time>
<figure class="media photo lede layout-large-horizontal" data-media-action="modal" itemprop="associatedMedia" itemscope="" itemid="http://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/07/25/sports/Y-JP-COOPERSTOWN/Y-JP-COOPERSTOWN-master675.jpg" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" role="group"> Photo
<figcaption class="caption" itemprop="caption description"> Mayor Jeff Katz’s second baseball book, “Split Season,” set to be published next spring, explores the 1981 season. Credit Andrew Sullivan for The New York Times </figcaption> </figure>
As the mayor of Cooperstown, N.Y., Jeff Katz is inclined to promote all of the village’s attractions, not just the Baseball Hall of Fame.
This week, after the opening of “An American Tragedy,” an opera by Tobias Picker, at the Glimmerglass Festival, Katz found himself in notable nonbaseball company.
“It was a perfect Cooperstown moment; Tobias rented a house for a party — there were Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Oliver Sacks and Jonathan Miller,” he said, referring to Sacks, a neurologist and writer, and Miller, a legendary theatrical and opera director. “Oliver had written about Picker, who has Tourette’s, and I’m talking to Justice Ginsburg about Cooperstown economic development.”
He added, “It had nothing to do with baseball.”
But baseball is often on his mind, and not just because the Hall of Fame’s induction ceremony Sunday will import tens of thousands of fans to a village with a permanent population of 1,852.
<aside class="marginalia related-coverage-marginalia nocontent robots-nocontent" data-marginalia-type="sprinkled" role="complementary">
“It’s an origin story that’s a myth,” Katz said in a telephone interview Monday. “But we’re such a perfect setting for that myth. Baseball wasn’t invented here. But it should have been.”
Katz’s first book, “The Kansas City A’s and the Wrong Half of the Yankees,” published in 2007, chronicled the predatory relationship in the 1950s between the powerful Yankees and the perennially weak Athletics. The Yankees treated the A’s like minor league flotsam, picking off some of their best players, like Roger Maris, Clete Boyer, Bobby Shantz and Hector Lopez, and usually returning much less in return — or sending good talent west but eventually getting it back, like Enos Slaughter and Ralph Terry.
“Players said revealing things to me,” Katz said. “Gil McDougald wrote me a letter telling me that Casey Stengel once said, ‘Who do you guys want from the A’s?’ That pretty much says it all. And when the A’s got Maris from Cleveland, Ryne Duren told him that several players in the Yankee clubhouse shouted, ‘We got Maris!’ ”
The second book, “Split Season,” which is to be published next spring, explores the 1981 season, when a midseason players strike led to the first- and second-half champions in each division playing each other for the right to go to the League Championship Series. Katz interviewed Marvin Miller, the former leader of the players union, three times before Miller’s death in 2012, and Ray Grebey, the owners’ negotiator, who died last year. He studied Commissioner Bowie Kuhn’s papers at the Hall and used detailed notes taken at ownership strategy sessions by Harry Dalton, a Milwaukee Brewers executive.
“You could see, through Dalton’s play-by-play, that as the owners were publicly saying they weren’t trying to bust the union, they were privately saying they wanted to kill the union,” Katz said.
Katz, who was born in Canarsie, Brooklyn, was trading options in Chicago when in 2003 he surrendered to the “romantic notion” of moving his family to Cooperstown. He was not a writer or a politician when he, his wife, Karen, and their three sons moved to a house, then a bed-and-breakfast, that is five minutes from the Hall.
“I realized,” he said, “the village government needed to be more forward thinking.”
By 2005 he was a village trustee, and by 2012 he was the mayor, an unpaid job that he retained this year when he ran for re-election unopposed.
Along the way, there have been some debates over fracking (although drilling would have taken place outside the village) and stiff opposition to the installation of parking meters to produce revenue for the village. Cooperstown has a budget of about $5.4 million — nearly $400,000 of it from the meters that were eventually installed — but gets only 1 percent of the county sales tax and nothing from the bed taxes its lodging generates.
“Everyone makes more money off Cooperstown than the village of Cooperstown does,” Katz said.
The village is expected to be jammed this weekend with at least 50,000 people because of the stature of the six inductees: the players Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and Frank Thomas, who are likely to draw busloads of fans from Chicago and Atlanta, and the managers Tony La Russa, Joe Torre and Bobby Cox, whose appeal stretches from St. Louis to New York.
Last year, the crowds were the lightest in recent memory because there were no living inductees.
“The idea that Deacon White was going to kill Cooperstown made for a nice headline,” Katz said, referring to one of the inductees, a 19th-century third baseman unknown to many contemporary fans.
The sparse turnout last year was felt strongly at the Hall, where it recorded only 7,560 visitors from Friday to Monday, down from 12,475 in 2012 and far below the 36,993 lured by the 2007 induction of Tony Gwynn and Cal Ripken Jr. The Hall’s annual attendance has fallen every year since 2005, in large part because of the recession, and settled at 253,649 last year. But this weekend should see a spike in visitors that could help the attendance for the year.
“The energy level and bus count lead us to believe this will be a very successful weekend,” said Jeff Idelson, president of the Hall.
For Katz, the weekend will remind him again about the connections between his job, his love of baseball and his books.
He recalled driving Phil Niekro to a local restaurant during an induction weekend and finding Goose Gossage at the bar when they got there. He remembered a meeting in Idelson’s office to discuss Doubleday Field with Brooks Robinson listening from five feet away.
And, he said, he talked to Andre Dawson after a speech in May by President Obama in the plaque gallery at the Hall.
“I had moved to Chicago in 1987, and when the Cubs signed Dawson, I watched as a city and a player fell in love,” Katz said. “So when the speech ended, I talked to him about the ’81 season, which was a big Expo year, and he was very interested. What a bizarre day. I met President Obama. I talked to Andre about Chicago, my book and Cooperstown.”
He added, “I’m very aware when my job merges with baseball in unbelievable ways.”
<figure class="media photo lede layout-large-horizontal" data-media-action="modal" itemprop="associatedMedia" itemscope="" itemid="http://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/07/25/sports/Y-JP-COOPERSTOWN/Y-JP-COOPERSTOWN-master675.jpg" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" role="group"> Photo
<figcaption class="caption" itemprop="caption description"> Mayor Jeff Katz’s second baseball book, “Split Season,” set to be published next spring, explores the 1981 season. Credit Andrew Sullivan for The New York Times </figcaption> </figure>
As the mayor of Cooperstown, N.Y., Jeff Katz is inclined to promote all of the village’s attractions, not just the Baseball Hall of Fame.
This week, after the opening of “An American Tragedy,” an opera by Tobias Picker, at the Glimmerglass Festival, Katz found himself in notable nonbaseball company.
“It was a perfect Cooperstown moment; Tobias rented a house for a party — there were Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Oliver Sacks and Jonathan Miller,” he said, referring to Sacks, a neurologist and writer, and Miller, a legendary theatrical and opera director. “Oliver had written about Picker, who has Tourette’s, and I’m talking to Justice Ginsburg about Cooperstown economic development.”
He added, “It had nothing to do with baseball.”
But baseball is often on his mind, and not just because the Hall of Fame’s induction ceremony Sunday will import tens of thousands of fans to a village with a permanent population of 1,852.
<aside class="marginalia related-coverage-marginalia nocontent robots-nocontent" data-marginalia-type="sprinkled" role="complementary">
“It’s an origin story that’s a myth,” Katz said in a telephone interview Monday. “But we’re such a perfect setting for that myth. Baseball wasn’t invented here. But it should have been.”
Katz’s first book, “The Kansas City A’s and the Wrong Half of the Yankees,” published in 2007, chronicled the predatory relationship in the 1950s between the powerful Yankees and the perennially weak Athletics. The Yankees treated the A’s like minor league flotsam, picking off some of their best players, like Roger Maris, Clete Boyer, Bobby Shantz and Hector Lopez, and usually returning much less in return — or sending good talent west but eventually getting it back, like Enos Slaughter and Ralph Terry.
“Players said revealing things to me,” Katz said. “Gil McDougald wrote me a letter telling me that Casey Stengel once said, ‘Who do you guys want from the A’s?’ That pretty much says it all. And when the A’s got Maris from Cleveland, Ryne Duren told him that several players in the Yankee clubhouse shouted, ‘We got Maris!’ ”
The second book, “Split Season,” which is to be published next spring, explores the 1981 season, when a midseason players strike led to the first- and second-half champions in each division playing each other for the right to go to the League Championship Series. Katz interviewed Marvin Miller, the former leader of the players union, three times before Miller’s death in 2012, and Ray Grebey, the owners’ negotiator, who died last year. He studied Commissioner Bowie Kuhn’s papers at the Hall and used detailed notes taken at ownership strategy sessions by Harry Dalton, a Milwaukee Brewers executive.
“You could see, through Dalton’s play-by-play, that as the owners were publicly saying they weren’t trying to bust the union, they were privately saying they wanted to kill the union,” Katz said.
Katz, who was born in Canarsie, Brooklyn, was trading options in Chicago when in 2003 he surrendered to the “romantic notion” of moving his family to Cooperstown. He was not a writer or a politician when he, his wife, Karen, and their three sons moved to a house, then a bed-and-breakfast, that is five minutes from the Hall.
“I realized,” he said, “the village government needed to be more forward thinking.”
By 2005 he was a village trustee, and by 2012 he was the mayor, an unpaid job that he retained this year when he ran for re-election unopposed.
Along the way, there have been some debates over fracking (although drilling would have taken place outside the village) and stiff opposition to the installation of parking meters to produce revenue for the village. Cooperstown has a budget of about $5.4 million — nearly $400,000 of it from the meters that were eventually installed — but gets only 1 percent of the county sales tax and nothing from the bed taxes its lodging generates.
“Everyone makes more money off Cooperstown than the village of Cooperstown does,” Katz said.
The village is expected to be jammed this weekend with at least 50,000 people because of the stature of the six inductees: the players Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and Frank Thomas, who are likely to draw busloads of fans from Chicago and Atlanta, and the managers Tony La Russa, Joe Torre and Bobby Cox, whose appeal stretches from St. Louis to New York.
Last year, the crowds were the lightest in recent memory because there were no living inductees.
“The idea that Deacon White was going to kill Cooperstown made for a nice headline,” Katz said, referring to one of the inductees, a 19th-century third baseman unknown to many contemporary fans.
The sparse turnout last year was felt strongly at the Hall, where it recorded only 7,560 visitors from Friday to Monday, down from 12,475 in 2012 and far below the 36,993 lured by the 2007 induction of Tony Gwynn and Cal Ripken Jr. The Hall’s annual attendance has fallen every year since 2005, in large part because of the recession, and settled at 253,649 last year. But this weekend should see a spike in visitors that could help the attendance for the year.
“The energy level and bus count lead us to believe this will be a very successful weekend,” said Jeff Idelson, president of the Hall.
For Katz, the weekend will remind him again about the connections between his job, his love of baseball and his books.
He recalled driving Phil Niekro to a local restaurant during an induction weekend and finding Goose Gossage at the bar when they got there. He remembered a meeting in Idelson’s office to discuss Doubleday Field with Brooks Robinson listening from five feet away.
And, he said, he talked to Andre Dawson after a speech in May by President Obama in the plaque gallery at the Hall.
“I had moved to Chicago in 1987, and when the Cubs signed Dawson, I watched as a city and a player fell in love,” Katz said. “So when the speech ended, I talked to him about the ’81 season, which was a big Expo year, and he was very interested. What a bizarre day. I met President Obama. I talked to Andre about Chicago, my book and Cooperstown.”
He added, “I’m very aware when my job merges with baseball in unbelievable ways.”
