And a Child Shall Lead Them

Tom "Thumbs" Hoepfner of the Flemington Neshanock shared with me the below email exchange with the Baseball Hall of Fame.  It's clearly a story worthy of a far greater audience and Tom kindly agreed to share it on this blog.  It just goes to show you can't start them too young!

Charlie Hoepfner

To the Baseball Hall of Fame

My 7 year old son Charlie is a baseball fanatic.  He is sad there is no baseball going on.  He is missing playing on his Little League team.  We were planning on taking him to his sixth stadium, Yankee Stadium, this summer.  No Phillies Baseball Camp where he goes and I work.  No trip to Williamsport this year and my 19th century baseball team will not be playing at the Ommegang Brewery this year so no return trip to Cooperstown.

To help offset some of this we recently purchased the 2020 Hall of Fame Almanac which he is obsessed with.  I don't know how many other 7 years old's are having dinner conversations about Earl Averill and Kiki Cuyler.  He has calculated almost every statistical thing he can think of in that book.

Today he said, "Derek Jeter's batting average doesn't make sense."  I asked him to show me and he said he divided the hits by at bats and the numbers didn't match. I tried it too and he was right.  In the book, it lists Jeter as 3,465 for 12,602 which rounded up to .275.  He added the at bats per season and said it should be 11,195.  I asked him what do you think happened and he said, "They probably did plate appearances."  So we looked that up and sure enough he was right.

Does the Hall of Fame have Summer Internships for 7 year olds?

Thanks for taking the time to read and for having the virtual hours and Starting 9 exhibits and keeping baseball alive for those of us missing it so badly.

Tom Hoepfner

Hi Tom!

Thanks for your note!  We apologize for this error but we are so impressed with your son's keen eye!

We will make this correction in the 2021 Almanac.

We hope you and your son can come visit us in Cooperstown soon!  We'd love to show you around our Library.

Sincerely,

Craig Muder
Director of Communications
National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum