A Hall of Fame for Great Stories

[metirish]

I would love to visit this place.



By JUSTIN PETERS
Published: March 1, 2007

It is not clear how the face of the former Dodgers owner Walter O�Malley came to appear on a flour tortilla in Los Angeles. When on display, it is usually accompanied by a card noting that �the provenance of the tortilla is sketchy.� However, the card continues, �Radio carbon dating indicates that the tortilla is approximately forty years old.�


�It�s an interesting tortilla,� said Terry Cannon, its curator.

Cannon is the president, founder and general instigator of the Baseball Reliquary, a California-based traveling museum and shrine that serves as a puckish alternative to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y.

Based out of Cannon�s home and assorted Southern California storage units, the Reliquary celebrates baseball�s pioneers and free spirits, those individuals whose greatness could never be charted by the Elias Sports Bureau.

�If Borges liked baseball, this is where he�d want to be enshrined,� said Ron Shelton, the director of films like �Bull Durham� and �Cobb.�

As the O�Malley tortilla illustrates, the Reliquary exists in the gap between baseball legend and reality. �You go to the Hall of Fame, you�re surrounded by uniforms and balls and bats and that�s all great, these are great artifacts. But that�s all they are, they�re artifacts,� said Buddy Kilchesty, the Reliquary�s archivist and historian. �What if the imagination had some say in what the artifacts were?�

Cannon puts it this way: �We always say that what�s important isn�t so much the artifact, it�s the story behind it.� Hence the O�Malley tortilla, which the Reliquary uses to teach the history of Chavez Ravine, the site of Dodger Stadium. Or Dock Ellis�s hair curlers, which help tell the story of race relations in baseball�s post-Jackie Robinson era. Or 12 baseballs allegedly signed by Mother Teresa (fandom), or Eddie Gaedel�s jockstrap (midgets) or a piece of skin from Abner Doubleday�s thigh (ossification?).

Cannon is an enthusiastic 53-year-old with an abiding interest in experimental film, jazz, the American Basketball Association, classic cars (he once edited a magazine called Skinned Knuckles), vinyl records and, not least, baseball. He has, at one point or another, led or participated in groups pertaining to most of these interests. �When I get involved in something, I don�t get involved in a cursory way; I throw myself into it,� he admitted, somewhat ruefully.

He founded the Reliquary in 1996.

�Like so many of us, he�s a guy who reveres � and I mean reveres � the game of baseball, and this is his small way of honoring it,� said Peter Golenbock, a Reliquary member and the author of baseball books like �Bums� and �The Forever Boys.�

It is an irreverent sort of reverence. A life-size cardboard cutout of Sparky Anderson stands next to Cannon�s bed. In his living room, there is a large display case with a triptych of Babe Ruth memorabilia � one of the Babe�s half-smoked cigars, purportedly rescued from a Philadelphia brothel in 1924, and the sacristy box with which Ruth was once administered the last rites. (He recovered.) Usually one of Ruth�s half-eaten hot dogs sits to the right of the sacristy box, but it is currently out for repairs.

Strictly speaking, not all of the Reliquary�s treasures are real. But the Barnumesque quality of much of its collections is intended as a commentary on the nature of baseball artifacts and the reverent way they are often presented. �When you present a display in a professional and straight-faced manner without the appearance of irony, people believe what�s there,� Cannon said.

Take the Eddie Grant monument, for example. Grant was the first baseball player to be killed in the First World War. A commemorative plaque was affixed to a stone monument in the center field of the Polo Grounds until it disappeared after the Giants� last game there in 1957. The Reliquary created a replica of the plaque and began displaying it in 2000, as a means of telling Grant�s story.

Perhaps inevitably, most people mistook the replica for the real thing.

�They didn�t believe that anybody would bother to replicate the plaque,� Cannon said.

A group called the Eddie Grant Memorial Association hounded the Reliquary to return the plaque. Vin Scully mentioned it on a Dodgers broadcast. Finally, because nobody would believe otherwise, the Reliquary started saying that the plaque was, in fact, the original.

Reliquary members are still sticking to that story � somewhat.

�As far as I�m concerned, it is real,� Kilchesty said. �We found it in an ex-cop�s apartment in Ho Ho Kus, N.J.�

The Reliquary broadened its scope in 1999, when Cannon founded the Shrine of the Eternals, his answer to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Each year, the Reliquary�s approximately 200 members � membership is open to anybody who pays $25 � elect three candidates from a field of 50 nominees. Nomination criteria are fairly arbitrary � alongside such giants of the game as Satchel Paige and Shoeless Joe Jackson, past nominees have included the notoriously light-hitting Mario Mendoza, the fictional character Henry Wiggen from the book �Bang the Drum Slowly,� and John Meeden, a homeless softball player known as �the hobo Roy Hobbs.�

Newcomers to this year�s field of 50 nominees include Jim Brosnan, a relief pitcher and the author of �The Long Season,� the former Yankee slugger Roger Maris (returning to the ballot after an absence of several years) and the dead ball-era saloonkeeper Nuff Ced McGreevey, perhaps baseball�s first superfan.

Some Reliquary members offered previews of their ballots: Shelton, the film director, plans to vote for the 1950s minor league fireballer Steve Dalkowski; Golenbock will select Maris and Brosnan, but not the one-armed outfielder Pete Gray, whose teammates �to a man, hated his guts,� he noted.

Inductees are honored at a ceremony each July at the Pasadena, Calif., Central Library. Assuming they are not busy with baseball card shows (Cannon�s greatest worry), the honorees are flown to Southern California, presented with their plaques at the ceremony and invited to speak. Twenty-four individuals have been elected so far, ranging from Ellis and Minnie Minoso to the Japanese-American baseball pioneer Kenichi Zenimura and Pam Postema, the minor-league umpire.

Many inductees, while pleased at the recognition, are unsure what to make of the honor.

�It puzzled me a little at first,� said Marvin Miller, the longtime head of the players union, who nonetheless traveled to Pasadena to accept his plaque.

The plaques are multicolored acrylic rectangles; they resemble something that might hang on the wall at a Swedish kindergarten. Bill Lee, well known by his nickname Spaceman, thought his plaque would be a nice addition to his chicken coop. Jimmy Piersall, inducted in 2001, keeps his plaque in his bathroom.

The term Reliquary confuses many inductees, too. �Their friends are like, �I don�t know whether to congratulate you or to bid you farewell,� � Cannon said.

Cannon, who views the Reliquary as a work of conceptual art, is happy to inspire such befuddlement. But those who know him say there is a sobriety of purpose behind the jesting.

�Despite the fact that he likes to have fun, he�s a serious individual and an intelligent one, and he deserves to be taken seriously,� Miller said.

The Reliquary has spearheaded several scholarly initiatives, including extensive exhibits on Mexican-American baseball and the history of baseball scouting.

There has been discussion about finding a permanent home for the Reliquary. Cannon has mixed feelings about this. He enjoys the Reliquary�s itinerant nature, but sees the benefits in settling down.

For one thing, it would give him something to do with the inductee�s plaques, which are housed in cardboard boxes in a cabinet in his study.

�I�d like to have them all in one place and lit from behind, so that when you walk into this room, you just get this wash of color,� he said. He held a plaque up to a desk lamp. �Just a wash of color.�

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/01/sports/baseball/01reliquary.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=sports

http://www.baseballreliquary.org/Default.htm

[soupcan]

]a California-based traveling museum and shrine

Or have it visit you.