National Baseball Hall

Pat Brett won't hit any home runs, strike out any batters, or make any diving catches for the La Salle High baseball team. Chances of those things happening ended when Brett passed out during an eighth-grade basketball practice. Five days later, he received a pacemaker to keep his heart, which had been damaged since birth, beating. So the La Salle freshman - 18 months removed from that heart operation - does what he can for the Explorers. He tends the scorebook. He makes sure the scoreboard is up to date.

Those who believe that Barry Bonds is baseball's all-time, single-season power hitter are in for a rude awakening, thanks to Bill Jenkinson. Jenkinson, a consultant for the National Baseball Hall of Fame and an expert on the history of long home runs, has just published a book that aims to prove that Babe Ruth dwarfs Bonds in terms of "pure power. " The book, Recrowning Baseball's Greatest Slugger: The Year Babe Ruth Hit 104 Home Runs, is more than another biography on the storied Yankees slugger.

Dale Petroskey, president of the Baseball Hall of Fame, recently cancelled a 15th-anniversary celebration of the classic baseball film Bull Durham, scheduled at the Hall in late April, because of antiwar comments made by Tim Robbins, a star of the film. Their exchange - and reactions to it - raise issues of free speech, polarization of politics in America, culture war, celebrity, and the private sector. Dear Mr. Robbins: The President of the United States, as this nation's democratically elected leader, is constitutionally bound to make decisions he believes are in the best interests of the American people.

Edith Grace Houghton, 100, a Philadelphia baseball prodigy who began playing professionally at age 10 and who in the 1940s worked for the Phillies as the first female scout in the major leagues, died Saturday, Feb. 2, in Sarasota, Fla. In 1922, as a 10-year-old tomboy growing up in North Philadelphia, Ms. Houghton spent her days playing baseball at 25th and Diamond Streets. She was known as "the Kid" for her skills on the diamond. That year, she tried out for the Philadelphia Bobbies, a new professional women's team, named for the popular "bob" hairstyle of the 1920s.

To a family that counts the days until pitchers and catchers report, nothing says spring like baseball, and nothing calls out spring break like Cooperstown, N.Y. Having three sons and one husband who are serious baseball fans, I knew it was inevitable that I would end up at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, but I was always banking on that being later rather than sooner. I was on a mission to find that "something for everyone" spring-break vacation when my husband looked up over his newspaper and pronounced, "It's time to take the boys to Cooperstown.

Legend has it that 6,000 people came to this Cumberland County city in 1979 when Pete Rose played in a semipro baseball tournament here. A few hundred showed up yesterday when baseball's all-time hits leader took his place alongside Bammin' Bunky Higbee, a 1950s and '60s race-car driver, and Bernice Gera, professional baseball's "first lady umpire. " Rose - whose sports betting led to his being banned from major-league baseball in 1989 and, effectively, from the National Baseball Hall of Fame - was inducted into the South Jersey All Sports Hall of Fame and Museum.

This weekend's National Baseball Hall of Fame induction ceremony will stir a host of vivid memories of boyhood heroes. The annual rite has been a highlight of my summer since I first visited Cooperstown at the age of 12. It was around that time that Dick Perez became the Hall of Fame's official artist. Perez's paintings of the annual inductees quickly became the standard for baseball art. His images also redefined the hobby of card-collecting, and the Phillies reproduced many of them as giveaways that remain treasured keepsakes of my youth.

Yankees outfielder Bernie Williams asked for a record $9 million in salary arbitration. New York countered at $7.5 million, the highest figure ever offered by a team and a raise of $2.2 million. Williams's agent, Scott Boras, said last month that negotiations for a long-term contract would cease once salary arbitration figures were exchanged and the outfielder would then file for free agency after the season. Williams's request topped the $7.65 million Los Angeles catcher Mike Piazza submitted last year.

IMAGINE A 17,000-square-foot museum at the Phillies' new ballpark that traces the history of Philadelphia's pro baseball teams from the late 19th century through the present. Devoted primarily to the Phillies, but including the Athletics and the city's Negro League teams, the museum would exhibit more than 1,000 artifacts, some of which would be on loan from the National Baseball Hall of Fame. The centerpiece of the museum would be an actual Hall of Fame, housing plaques of all the outstanding ballplayers in Philadelphia's history.

The mother of all Hall of Fame ballots arrived in the mail earlier this month and I immediately set aside the manila envelope and continued to ponder how to handle the polarizing players who showed up on the ballot for the first time this year. You know the names. Barry Bonds. Roger Clemens. Sammy Sosa. Superstars who stained the game by using performance-enhancing steroids. After this year's ballot arrived, I started reading columns from some of my fellow members in the Baseball Writers' Association of America.

Edith Grace Houghton, 100, a Philadelphia baseball prodigy who began playing professionally at age 10 and who in the 1940s worked for the Phillies as the first female scout in the major leagues, died Saturday, Feb. 2, in Sarasota, Fla. In 1922, as a 10-year-old tomboy growing up in North Philadelphia, Ms. Houghton spent her days playing baseball at 25th and Diamond Streets. She was known as "the Kid" for her skills on the diamond. That year, she tried out for the Philadelphia Bobbies, a new professional women's team, named for the popular "bob" hairstyle of the 1920s.

The mother of all Hall of Fame ballots arrived in the mail earlier this month and I immediately set aside the manila envelope and continued to ponder how to handle the polarizing players who showed up on the ballot for the first time this year. You know the names. Barry Bonds. Roger Clemens. Sammy Sosa. Superstars who stained the game by using performance-enhancing steroids. After this year's ballot arrived, I started reading columns from some of my fellow members in the Baseball Writers' Association of America.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. - Find an empty seat in the press box next to his in the summer or an empty bar stool at Frenchy's in Clearwater in March and he'll tell you stories. They'll be the most engaging baseball stories you're ever likely to hear and you'll be entertained for hours on end. That's what Paul Hagen is at heart: a storyteller. On Tuesday at the Opryland Hotel, Hagen briefly told the stories about the two times he stood at the podium at Cooperstown at the National Baseball Hall of Fame to introduce honorees.

Three women and a man say they were molested as children by Bill Conlin, a Hall of Fame baseball writer and Philadelphia Daily News columnist. In vivid accounts, the four say Conlin groped and fondled them and touched their genitals in assaults in the 1970s, when they were ages 7 to 12. "This is a tragedy," said Kelley Blanchet, a niece of Conlin's who said he molested her when she was a child. "People have kept his secret. It's not just the victims, it's the victims' families.

Observations, insinuations, ruminations and downright opinions . . . COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. - When Michael Corleone was hiding out in Sicily and he saw a chaste maiden named Appolonia walking through a meadow, one of his bodyguards observed, "You just got hit by the thunderbolt . . . " That is basically what happened to me last weekend in this pastoral village where lakes, one Main Street, a museum and baseball - lots of baseball -...

COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. - Only Pat Gillick can grasp how a man in charge can make all the right moves doing something he loved - that alone is enough reward - and still be given so much by the game he poured himself into. There he stood on Sunday, in front of about 17,500 people, next to Bud Selig and in front of his fellow Class of 2011 National Baseball Hall of Fame members, Roberto Alomar and Bert Blyleven. The former Phillies general manager was alone with his thoughts, left to reminisce as Selig started reading Gillick's plaque, the one immortalizing him forever.

COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. - Only Pat Gillick can grasp how a man in charge can make all the right moves doing something he loved - that alone is enough reward - and still be given so much by the game he poured himself into. There he stood on Sunday, in front of about 17,500 people, next to Bud Selig and in front of his fellow Class of 2011 National Baseball Hall of Fame members, Roberto Alomar and Bert Blyleven. The former Phillies general manager was alone with his thoughts, left to reminisce as Selig started reading Gillick's plaque, the one immortalizing him forever.

COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. - You have time to think while on the road to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. And you will be on the road, because there is no airport in Cooperstown. You think of the game's legends who have regularly visited the small (population 2,200) Upstate New York village. You think of the thousands of fans who jam Cooperstown every summer for the induction of former players and executives. You think, couldn't they have built the Hall near an airport?

This weekend's National Baseball Hall of Fame induction ceremony will stir a host of vivid memories of boyhood heroes. The annual rite has been a highlight of my summer since I first visited Cooperstown at the age of 12. It was around that time that Dick Perez became the Hall of Fame's official artist. Perez's paintings of the annual inductees quickly became the standard for baseball art. His images also redefined the hobby of card-collecting, and the Phillies reproduced many of them as giveaways that remain treasured keepsakes of my youth.

It's too thin, and has a distinctive arc, but it is still immediately recognizable as a baseball bat. It's a tree branch painstakingly carved, the grip fashioned of medical adhesive tape, made in 1942 by a United Press reporter named Glen Stadler. With a ball crafted from a champagne cork, wrapped with two socks and layers of adhesive tape, it was the foundation of a short winter season for 100 American journalists and diplomats interned by the Nazis at Bad Nauheim after the United States entered World War II. For anyone who wonders why baseball is called "America's pastime," there are answers aplenty at "Baseball as America," the current exhibit at the National Constitution Center on Independence Mall.