AllStar Scavenger Hunt Reveals More Than Bats and Balls NYTimes.com

COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. — Every year, the Plexiglass display cases that encapsulate the careers of new inductees to the baseball Hall of Fame contain telling, singular artifacts.

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Visitors peruse the exhibit boxes of Rickey Henderson, Jim Rice and Joe Gordon, the 2009 inductees to Baseball’s Hall of Fame.

Enlarge This Image Charlie Samuels for The New York Times

Joe Gordon’s children found no bats or uniforms, but they contributed their father’s 1942 M.V.P. pocketwatch and his flight plans from his days as a pilot.

Enlarge This Image Charlie Samuels for The New York Times

Jim Rice’s exhibit includes the 1983 All-Star Game scoresheet that notes his two hits but fails to record the homer that ignited a seven-run inning by the American League.

Inside Rickey Henderson’s, it might be the black and lime-green gloves he wore when he set the career record of 939 stolen bases: one glove looks pristine, but the other, palm outward, is torn open, surely a victim of his headfirst, hands-forward slides.

Jim Rice’s case has bats, jerseys, the glove he used for his entire career in left field for the Red Sox and the uniform pants he was issued when Boston called him up in 1974. But what stands out is the 1983 All-Star Game scoresheet that duly notes Rice’s two hits but fails to record the home run that ignited a seven-run inning by the American League.

Tom Shieber, a senior curator who assembled the Rice display, said the scoresheet was probably an error by the official scorer and was plucked from the hall’s archives to underscore Rice’s 15-year struggle to be elected by the Baseball Writers Association of America.

Joe Gordon, the former Yankees and Indians’ second baseman of the 1930s and 40s, died in 1978. The hall’s vast collection had very little on Gordon, one of the best players of his time but whose renown was far less than that of his teammates like Joe DiMaggio, Phil Rizzuto, Lou Boudreau and Bob Feller.

Gordon’s daughter and son provided nearly everything in the case — including a painted metal sign from the manager’s door at Detroit’s Briggs Stadium: on one side it says “Joe Gordon,” but on other it reads “Jimmy Dykes,” illustrating the bizarre Indians-Tigers swap of skippers in 1960.

“We had no uniforms or bats left,” Judy Gordon said.

Instead, she and her brother, Joe, found their father’s 1942 most valuable player pocketwatch; the ladies’ World Series rings he got for his wife, Dotty; his All-Star Game gifts; and his meticulous records of the private flights he piloted, a reminder that he served in the Army Air Corps.

The cases, which sit under soft lighting near the gallery of inductees’ plaques, are not large. They fit maybe two dozen items; they are not packed like memorabilia up for sale. They are artfully arranged so that each piece can be seen without obstructions.

There is, after all, no reason to crowd the Mizuno shoes Henderson wore to steal his 119th base in 1982 to break Lou Brock’s single-season mark with bland ephemera.

“If it gets too big, you lose focus,” said Erik Strohl, the hall’s senior director of collections and exhibits. “If there are four or five important things in a case of 50 things, the visitor won’t know what’s important.”

Every year, the hall examines its collection to assess what it has and what it needs, then talks to the inductees and their families. The hall does not want everything the inductee has, just some items to fill important gaps.

“Some have entire museums in their homes and some saved almost nothing,” Strohl said. “It depends on their personalities.”

Last year, the hall had little for its Goose Gossage case so he lent three jerseys and his All-Star Game and postseason rings. The hall similarly had little for his co-inductee Dick Williams, so Williams offered up his managerial spikes and fungo bat.

Henderson had a lot, Strohl said, and lent the bat he used for his 3,000th hit, an Oakland A’s jersey from the end of his career and a small bronze trophy the A’s gave him to commemorate his 939th stolen base. Securing the bat for Henderson’s case was critical because the hall had nothing from that moment.

Rice’s loans included the bat he used in 1978 to get his 400th total base, the first time an American Leaguer reached that level since DiMaggio in 1937, and a 1976 road jersey to go with a 1978 home jersey provided by the Red Sox.

The possibility that Rice could have been elected before this year led the hall to look at what it had to celebrate him, but it was not extensive. Even Rice’s contributions did not tell the full story Shieber wanted to relate. He said that he included a 1977 Sporting News cover of Rice and a 1974 Pawtucket Red Sox program.

“We thought it would be neat to use it so we could tell the story of his winning the International League triple crown that year,” he said.

The long-ago death of an inductee, like Gordon, is a special challenge for the hall’s curators. If the inductee was not a pack rat, he might have bequeathed little to his family. If he was a saver, whatever he passed to his family might have become widely dispersed among many friends and relatives, or sold, leaving little for an exhibit.

Ted Spencer, the hall’s former chief curator, said the induction of 17 deceased players and executives of the Negro and pre-Negro leagues in 2006 created a significant problem.

“Not only were they dead, but in some cases, you didn’t know if they had a family; even if they had family, the stuff was used and falling apart,” he said. “We had to pump up the exhibit with visual graphics. There’ll never be a bigger challenge than that.”

Still, he said, the family of Barney Dreyfuss, the former owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates who died in 1932, provided “spectacular stuff” for his exhibit last year.

“It’s a crapshoot,” he added. “It’s what families have, and we’ve found that they’re generous.”

The Gordon children’s contributions lend a different vision of their father than fans get from the exhibits of more contemporary players like Rice and Henderson.

The ball in it is not one he hit, but is from his time as a manager of the San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League. The glove from his family was the last one he wore with the Indians. His wife had it bronzed, and it is now tarnished in pocket. The comic strip-style ad starring Gordon is an exercise in self-deprecation: the boy in it turns down an infielder’s glove for a bike, he says because “I guess I’m all through with baseball.”

“When we saw the record of his flights we said, ‘Awesome,’ ” Shieber said. “It let us tell the story of how he lost two seasons to military service.”