National Baseball Hall of Fame

About

The National Baseball Hall of Fame grew out of a 1934 proposal by National League president Ford C. Frick and Scottish immigrant Alexander Cleland, backed by Stephen C. Clark, heir to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune. Its inaugural class of five — Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson, Babe Ruth, and Honus Wagner — was elected in 1936, and the building itself was formally dedicated in Cooperstown, New York, on June 12, 1939. The story that Abner Doubleday invented baseball in Cooperstown in the 1830s was later shown to be untrue, but it played a significant role in the Hall's placement in Cooperstown and its early promotion. The museum holds more than 40,000 three-dimensional artifacts and over 250,000 baseball photographs. Its affiliated A. Bartlett Giamatti Research Center maintains more than three million documents on the history of the game.