Baseball Hall of Fame
From Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Baseball Hall of Fame is a museum in Cooperstown, New York that shows the history of baseball and some of the most famous baseball players and other people, especially in North America.
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[edit] Opening
The Hall of Fame opened in 1939. It was started by the Clark Foundation. The Hall of Fame was started to help bring visitors to Cooperstown which had been poor for a long time. Some people tell a story that Abner Doubleday invented baseball in Cooperstown, but the story is not true. But the baseball leagues and teams decided that it didn't matter, and helped make the Hall of Fame popular.
The museum has a lot of information on the history of baseball, and a lot of old baseball things, like bats, balls, and uniforms of famous baseball players or important baseball games. It also has a baseball art collection and a library.
Next to the museum is Doubleday Field, where a baseball game is played every year as part of a party about adding new people to the museum's stories.
[edit] Hall of Fame list
When someone is "in the Hall of Fame," it means they have a story of their life in baseball shown in the museum. Every year new people are chosen to be added to the Hall of Fame. These people can be baseball players, baseball team managers, and other people who work with the game of baseball. Awards are also given for baseball sports reporters. In 2005 there are a total of 260 people in the Hall of Fame.
Two groups pick people to add to the Hall of Fame. One group is the Baseball Writers Association of America. This group can pick people who have stopped having a job in pro baseball for five years, and were in baseball for at least 10 years. Each member of the group writes down their 10 top choices, and anyone who is on more than three-fourths of the members' lists is added to the Hall of Fame.
The other group that chooses people to add to the Hall of Fame is called the Veteran's Committee, which is made of people who are in the Hall of Fame themselves. This group can vote for anyone who has stopped working in baseball for 20 years. They vote every two years for baseball players, and every four years for other baseball people.
[edit] Disagreement and problems
Some people do not like how the Veteran's Committee picks people for the Hall of Fame. For a while, it seemed like the Committee liked to only pick people who they had worked with before. This meant some people who might have been good enough for the Hall of Fame were missed, because they never worked with the people on the Committee. Since then, the Veteran's Committee has been changed, but so far this new committee has not picked anyone.
In 1982, some of the museum's collection of baseball items were loaned to the head of the American baseball leagues, and one of his workers sold them for money. Even though the money was paid back, it made the Hall of Fame look bad.
There are some players who are not allowed to work in baseball anymore because they broke some very important rules, but were still very good players. The Hall of Fame does not allow people who were kicked out of baseball to be in its museum. But some people think that some of those players were so good that they should be in the Hall of Fame anyway.
