Baseball's reliquary: the oddly possible hybrid of shrine and university

To cash out my claims by examples on display, consider just five categories where the object as both relic and item for instruction forges potential synergy rather than frustrating contradiction:

1. The embodiment of mythology. As a supreme irony, the Cooperstown museum, as argued above, has covered itself in deserved glory but still occupies an utterly inappropriate turf for the weirdest of perfectly reasonable circumstances-as the very antithesis of genius loci. I say this not primarily for the practical reason that this tiny and isolated town in central New York State cannot offer enough hotel rooms within fifty miles to house the crowds of people wishing to attend the annual induction ceremonies for the Hall of Fame, but simply because Cooperstown can stake no legitimate claim as a shrine for baseball. As argued above, baseball experienced no eureka of origin but just grew, evolved, and eventually coagulated from a host of precursors. But humans need origin myths, so when baseball became enshrined as a national pastime, an official commission, established early in the twentieth century, was charged with the task of discovering baseball's origins. For a set of complex reasons, the members of the commission allowed themselves to be persuaded that Abner Doubleday had effectively invented the game in Cooperstown in 1839. No even remotely plausible evidence links Doubleday to baseball (one commentator pungently remarked that the man probably couldn't tell a baseball from a kumquat). But Doubleday was certainly a sufficiently adequate American hero to embody an origin myth, for he had fired the first Union shots of the Civil War, as artillery officer at Fort Sumter, and he later served as one of the generals at Gettysburg.

In any case, myths require relics, so you may see on display the famous Doubleday ball--submitted as corroboration for the founding legend, perhaps discovered in Cooperstown, probably a bit younger than 1839, and surely possessing no plausible tie to Doubleday himself. I have also been told that enough nails from the true cross exist in European cathedral reliquaries to affix a hundred of Spartacus's soldiers to their crosses on the Appian Way. Thank God that the human mind can embrace contradiction by acknowledging reality in the head yet respectfully allowing an imposter to stand for a symbol in the heart. (In a funny and recursive sense, moreover, once frauds achieve sufficient fame, they become legitimate objects of history in their own right!)

2. Relics and icons. If a reliquary really preserved a nail of the true cross, any Christian (I am not one) would bow in reverent awe, and any decent person (as I am) would stand respectfully before such an important item of history and symbol of human cruelty and hope. Well, this exhibition includes many true relics of a secular church that admittedly cannot claim similar importance but that does mean one helluva lot to many quite sane and even reasonably perceptive people. Hey folks, I mean you're really going to see the Babe's bat from 1927 (the year he hit those sixty dingers for an "unbeatable" record), Roger Maris's bat from 1961 when he broke the record, and Mark McGwire's bat from when the record fell again in 1998. And because failure can be as sublime as hope (the raised Lazarus versus that nail of the true cross, although I know that Christian theology does not regard the Crucifixion as a dud), you will also see Michael Jordan's bat from the year he tried baseball, discovered he really couldn't hit a curveball despite being the world's greatest athlete, batted about .225 in a year of minor league play, but stayed the course (and played the full season) with honor.