Over at The Second Pass, a fantastic website about books that's rightfully starting to get a ton of attention, my friend John reviews Zev Chafets' Cooperstown Confidential, an almost total take down of the National Baseball Hall of Fame. As is his wont, John gets right to the heart of the matter:
Zev Chafets’ Cooperstown Confidential, a slender book that serves as both a revisionist history of the Hall and a polemic in favor of socially liberal admission policies (Pete Rose and steroids users will rejoice if Chafets has any impact on voting patterns), manages to be earnest and playful, though not in the traditional ways described above. Earnest because it spends more time addressing issues like racism and commercialism than whether Bert Blyleven deserves a plaque; and playful because it gleefully spits in the face of anyone who thinks the Hall’s (very thin) Puritanical sheen is anything but a “public relations sham.”I read a very early version of Chafets' excellent and provocative book, and I'm in total agreement with John. Like the College of Cardinals or the U.S. House of Representatives, the Baseball Hall of Fame is made up of equal parts legends, qualified representatives, quacks, criminals and, yes, cheats. That the Hall of Fame continues to hold itself up as a model of constancy, integrity, even infallibility, is nothing more than clever marketing. Everybody's just selling soap. Chafets, a former columnist for New York's "Daily News," is right to call the Hall out on their spotty history of institutional hypocrisy. His book is worth picking up.
