Almost every baseball fan should be familiar with Cooperstown, NY and the Baseball Hall of Fame, at a surface level if nothing less – that it’s the home of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, and for many years was hailed as the birthplace of baseball, a story that has proven to be fictional in recent years.

Longtime sportswriter Bert Sugar, known for his contributions to the worlds of baseball and boxing, has penned Bert Sugar’s Baseball Hall of Fame, a beautiful new book that takes the reader inside the Baseball Hall of Fame and provides a top-level view of the history of the game as seen through the collections of the Hall.

The result is 272 pages of photos, player biographies, and overviews of major developments in the game of baseball on a decade-by-decade basis, which serves as a virtual stroll through the numerous rooms and exhibits in the Hall, and provides an introduction to the history of the game for fans.

While there is no substitution for an in-person visit to Cooperstown and the Baseball Hall of Fame, Sugar does a fairly good job of walking you through the facility and should ultimately leave you with a pretty strong desire to either make your first visit or a return visit. It may also be the impetus to inspire you to read more about a certain player or subject — Sugar touches on women’s professional baseball, the Negro Leagues, rules changes throughout the history of the game, and several other subjects which contain a wealth of information spanning farther and wider that Sugar is able to touch on.

The book is easy to read, although I do have to take issue with some of the page layouts. The first half of the book is a decade-by-decade look at major figures and events during that ten year period,  although there are interruptions and sidebars that are often put right into the middle of a sentence and forces you to entertain two different thoughts and directions. While not a critical issue, it does add an unnecessary pothole on the path that Sugar tries to take the reader down.

Otherwise, a misspelling of Seattle Mariners’ play-by-play broadcaster (and Hall of Famer) Dave Niehaus‘ name – it was spelled Neihaus – was glaring to this Seattle native. Also, an interesting error in the final pages stood out — each Hall of Famer’s plaque is featured so that the reader can get an up-close look at each one, with the exception of Babe Ruth’s, whose is zoomed in so much to the point that you can only see the upper quarter of it. Lastly, a few Hall of Famers – Alejandro Pompez and Cum Posey, who are next to each other in alphabetical order – were listed as being inducted in 1906 – a full 33 years before the Hall even opened. Both were inducted in 2006.

With the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum celebrating it’s 70th birthday on July 12, 2009, this is a timely book that should be a welcome to addition to almost any bookshelf. It’s a great book to thumb through and look at great pictures of the game’s artifacts, and should easily make you want to make your initial – or repeat – pilgrimage to Cooperstown sooner than later.