FALL CLASSIC
Come for the baseball; stay for the village. Cooperstown has the Hall of Fame, of course, but give the town a sporting chance and you’ll win big.
COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. — Nothing I had read about this famed village prepared me for such a Shangri-La.
The place is as lush as your lettuce bin and rests on the lower lip of a Dodger-blue lake graced with kayaks and canoes. Take away its vaunted National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, and you would still have an uncommonly alluring destination.
In winter, Cooperstown is as dormant as baseball itself. Come April, its rolling lawns and surrounding orchards bounce back to life.
Anglers ply Otsego Lake and hikers pick blueberries. There are craft breweries and little creeks on which to fly-fish.
But late September is perhaps its grandest season. With playoffs beckoning, baseball matters more now; the apples are ripe and summer crowds have f led.
Idyllic yet energized by a constant stream of baseball junkies, Cooperstown should be painted in pinstripes. James Fenimore Cooper’s father founded this village in 1786; about 50 years later, Abner Doubleday laid the groundwork for a promising new sport. In 1939, the museum opened. Then, somehow, it’s as though time stopped. Thank the gods, sports and otherwise. “Baseball is ballet without music,” sportscaster Ernie Harwell once said. Cooperstown is one of its grandest stages, with activities — baseball and otherwise — as plentiful as the surrounding sugar maples that are beginning to show their fall colors.