It’s not Cooperstown. But the people who come upon, or seek out, the baseball cards in a dimly lighted corridor of the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art display behavior similar to the people, mostly men, you see poring over artifacts at the Baseball Hall of Fame nearly 200 miles upstate.
Both spaces are reverie chambers. A faded, colored image unlocks a memory — of a game, a season, a player, a parent or grandparent who loved the sport.
Me, I’m late to baseball. It wasn’t something my family paid any attention to; my father wouldn’t have known an outfielder from a shortstop.