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they were hoping for. “Can you go back out and come back in,” asked Mark Scheibal, one of the show’s producers. Rose said he got a lot of those sorts of requests throughout the filming: “Take it one more time please, tape one more time please. I went to sleep last night saying ‘tape it one more time please,’ ” Rose groused goodnaturedly during induction weekend. He added that he was encouraged by the prospects for the show’s success because, “We got a pretty funny and pretty interesting life.”
    TJs sits on the northern side of Main Street, across from the Safe At Home memorabilia shop, and about 200 yards down from the Cooperstown post office, outside of which on this Friday morning, festivities were being goosed by the unveiling of a line of four first-class postal stamps depicting, respectively, Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, Larry Doby and Willie Stargell. At about 10 a.m., sheets of these “Baseball All-Stars” stamps were revealed in a brief ceremony. In the parking lot, tables were set up selling all manner of postal-related, baseball-related collectibles. “This is a great day for the post office and a great day for baseball,” said Maureen Marion, a communications manager for the U.S. Postal Service.
    The post office provides an important part of the landscape and the lifeblood in Cooperstown—it’s directly across from the Hall of Fame and a block west of the village offices and unlike many places in town it stays open year-round. Locals linger and swap jokes at the package counter, and the mail itself plays a crucial, connective part for a small and out-of-the-way community set among mountain foothills. Even in the Internet age, there remains an anticipation about the daily letters and parcels arriving into Cooperstown and it is easy to imagine how it was in the early 1800s, when the state road from Albany was still new and the twice- or thrice-weekly arrival of mail was heralded from a mile out by a postman sounding his horn. The townspeople would hear as well the beating hooves of four galloping horses and by the time the postal wagon pulled in, an excited crowd had invariably gathered. Letters were distributed and torn open in a local tavern, where Cooperstown’s first postmaster moonlighted as a barkeep.
    The 2012 stamp ceremony, with all the tourists milling around, was not dissimilar to a stamp ceremony at the initial Hall of Fame induction event in 1939, when the post office unveiled a commemorative stamp honoring what was billed as the 100th anniversary of baseball. The very first of these three-cent stamps, depicting a town scene of boys playing baseball, was sold directly by Postmaster General James Farley to baseball commissioner Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis as a crush of people in town to see Cobb, the Babe, Honus Wagner and the rest looked on. The low brick post-office building remains largely unchanged since then (construction was completed in 1936), and the happy, ongoing union of these social bedrocks—baseball and the U.S. mail—lends to the sense of Cooperstown as a real and quaint American place.
    The town occupies the southern shore of Otsego Lake, a clear, spring-fed glacial remnant that runs eight miles long and never more than about a mile wide. In the good weather you can look down Pioneer Street or off Stagecoach Lane from the center of town and see the water sparkling brilliantly, occasionally cleaved by sailboats. The lake is home to brown trout, walleye and smallmouth bass and serves as the headwaters of the Susquehanna River, which was made navigable in 1779 by James Clinton, a Revolutionary War army general sent to the region by George Washington to beat back both the British and the Iroquois who had sided with them. Clinton had the river mouth dammed and then broke the dam apart so that the lake waters spilled into the channel. That summer, as a weathered brick marker by the shore there recounts, “2000 men and 200 batteaux” sailed southward down the