EXCLUSIVE: Baseball Hall of Fame may come to Hoboken

HOBOKEN — Hoboken already has a plaque on 11th Street commemorating the location of the first baseball game to be played under the rules that form the basis of the modern sport. Now a group of primarily Canadian and American baseball enthusiasts want to make the city the permanent home of the World Baseball Hall of Fame (WBHF).
The organization is different from, and hopes to distinguish itself from, the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y., the premier patron of baseball history since the 1930s. The World Baseball Hall of Fame was recently reestablished after being founded in the early 1990s.
While the World Baseball Hall of Fame is unlikely to usurp the fame or status of the institution that is Cooperstown, its president Bruce Prentice said his organization has the opportunity to correct some of the mistakes made by the long-tenured national hall.
First and foremost is placing the WBHF in Hoboken, the actual birthplace of baseball. Cooperstown’s claim to that title is based on the thoroughly-debunked fable that Civil War hero Abner Doubleday first drew a diamond there in 1839.
By contrast, most baseball historians now recognize the June 19, 1846 outing between the New York Knickerbockers and the New York Nine at Elysian Fields on Hoboken as the first competitive game under modern rules. As the plaque commemorating Elysian Fields at the intersection of Eleventh and Washington streets states, “it is generally conceded that until this time the game was not seriously regarded.”
According to the Albany Business Review, the National Baseball Hall of Fame Museum attracted 253,000 visitors in 2013, down from over 400,000 in the mid 1990s.
Prentice said he does not have a particular park or area of Hoboken in mind, preferring only to place it “wherever the best location would be for tourists to visit.”
Prentice said he has reached out to the administration of Mayor Dawn Zimmer to discuss the Hall of Fame and is trying to set up a meeting.
On Wednesday, Zimmer said she was familiar with the idea and certainly open to the possibility of establishing a larger baseball monument than the Elysian Fields plaque.
Hoboken is a densely populated city but is looking to redevelop its formerly industrial areas on the borders of town. Zimmer suggested that a Baseball Hall of Fame monument could be included in a future city redevelopment plan.
True to its name, the World Baseball Hall of Fame will also distinguish itself from the Cooperstown Hall by casting a considerably wider net for inductees.
“It would be an honor and a privilege [for someone] to be selected to the World Baseball Hall of Fame,” said Cito Gaston, a member of the WBHF Board of Advisers and the World Series-winning coach of the Toronto Blue Jays in 1992 and 1993.
For more on this story, see the cover of this weekend’s Hoboken Reporter Pick it up if you visit the Art and Music Fair on Sunday, with musical headliner Peter Wolf! Or read the full story here at hudsonreporter.com starting Sunday; scroll down to “Hoboken news.”