A Baseball Museum That Is ‘Better than True’

By: Crystal Ge

The website, black since January because of

technical difficulties, bounced back to life in an

early July. And the Shrine’s 2020 class will be

inducted on November 5 in a public ceremony at

the Los Angeles Central Library’s Taper Auditorium

that will conquer with the closing of the six-month

exhibit that next day. The class — the broadcaster

Bob Costas; Rube Foster, known as the Father of

Black Baseball; and Max Patkin, the “Clown Prince

of Baseball” — has been on pause for almost 2

years.

“Academy Awards are always won by movie

stars, everyone else who has their water and makes

them look good — the character actors, are more

interesting than the movie stars,” said Ron Shelton,

who wrote and directed Bull Durham. Shelton

drafted Steve Dalkowski, the inspiration for the

movie’s Nuke LaLoosh character, into the Shrine in

2009. “In a certain way, the Hall of Fame honors the

movie stars, though a lot of them are not honorable

characters. The Reliquary is about everything that’s

not a movie star.” As Cannon noted at the 2018

ceremony, Chester’s fame began to fade when the

Dodgers left Brooklyn for Los Angeles and “while

she may have died in relative obscurity in 1978, in

our community of fans, Hilda is royalty. And

through our annual remembrance, we can be

assured that the final bell has not yet rung for Hilda

Chester.” Nor, as it turns out, has it for the

Reliquary. To Shelton’s thoughts, it was the poet

W.D. Snodgrass who, when speaking, would often

tell his audience that every single time he tells a

story, it’s true.