Home to the National Baseball Museum and Hall of Fame, Cooperstown, a restored nineteenth-century frontier town and country village of about 2,300 inhabitants at the close of the twentieth century, is visited annually by up to 400,000 tourists. Baseball has been described as America's national pastime, and it is fair to say that Cooperstown, in central New York State, draws to its village thousands of American tourists in search of their country's national identity.

When the National Baseball Hall of Fame opened in 1939, Americans from coast to coast read about it and heard radio broadcasts of the opening induction ceremonies. Cy Young, Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Grover Alexander, and Walter Johnson were among those inducted as the hall's first members. Every year on the day after the annual inductions, a Major League game is played at nearby Doubleday Field, seating approximately ten thousand, on the spot...