No. 638 – Cloudless

Performer: Peter Gabriel

Songwriter: Peter Gabriel

Original Release: Long Walk Home: Music from the Rabbit-Proof Fence

Year: 2002

Definitive Version: None

When it comes to baseball research, a few places stand head and shoulders above the rest. The archives at Cooperstown, of course, is the Gold Standard, followed by the Library of Congress.

The archives of The Sporting News in St. Louis used to be another, but it closed after Baseball America bought The Sporting News. Despite having literally hundreds of thousands of files of unique information, Baseball America seems to have no interest in making any of it available to the public, as The Sporting News had for years, and for all I know, they took a match to all of that stuff years ago.

But another place that deserves mention is the Cleveland Public Library. I learned of the CPL’s excellent collection almost by happenstance. In the fall of 2001, when I began putting together the rudiments of research on a book idea I had, I went to Cleveland for a weekend to hit the Western Reserve Historical Society.

The WHRS is the location of SABR’s official library (SABR, of course, being the Society for American Baseball Research), and it seemed like a good place to visit But I quickly found out that maneuvering about the WHRS was a pain.

The WHRS is a call library. If you’ve been to the New York City Library—aka the World’s Most Overrated library—you know what this is: You can’t touch the books on the library shelves. You have to fill out a sheet that has detailed information about the book you want and a place for your fingerprints. (I’m exaggerating … slightly.) Someone takes the slip and calls up to another person in the stacks who brings down the books. You then can read them in the library, and only when you’re done, you can get more. It’s incredibly inefficient.

So after getting little done at WRHS on a Saturday (during their limited hours), I decided to go over to the CPL, which supposedly had a decent collection of books. Yeah, whatever.

Well imagine my delight when I found that not only did it have a huge collection of obscure books that you could borrow, but its reference stacks had stuff that you could find only in a few places, such as a complete collection of Spalding Guides back to the 1880s, on the shelves! I could walk up and open a boxed that held Spalding Guides from, say, 1914 to 1917, and pore through them to my heart’s content.

And that was just the start. It was incredible the amount of old, rare guides and reference works the library had on the shelves. And the CPL’s hours were twice as long as those at WRHS. Needless to say, that weekend was about the last time I went to the WRHS.

This was an incredible discovery and the thing that necessitated my move to Cleveland in 2003. But during 2002, when I knew I was going to leave but wasn’t financially ready to leave The Dispatch, I went to Cleveland often, at least once every other month. My big vacation that year was a week in Cleveland, going to the library every day and poring through all of the reference books.

I established a pretty good routine. I’d get up early on Saturday and drive to Cleveland so I could be there at about the time when the library opened. I’d park down Superior Street about on 12th where they had free parking on the weekends—Saturday and Sunday—and hike to the library with my trusty clamshell iMac in a book bag.

I’d spend the day there, usually going through the Spalding, Sporting News and Reach Guides, making copies of various pages that I wanted, so I could continue my research at home. When the library closed, I’d head to the Motel 6 at Middleburg Heights, good ol’ mile marker 235, just past Hopkins International Airport along I-71. (In case you were wondering, and I’m sure you weren’t, it was in fact the same area where Scott and I and Scott’s friends crashed during the Pink Floyd weekend in 1994.)

I usually had dinner either across Bagley Road at the Olive Garden (unlimited salad bowl and breaksticks) or at the Damon’s down the street (ribs and trivia). I chose the Motel 6, because it was cheap but more important provided free unlimited local calls, so I could use my dialup connection to be on the Internet at night.

The Motel 6 got to be my home away from home during 2002, and I frequently listened to this album on the drives to and from Cleveland. (This song of course, with words, also showed up on Gabriel's later album from the same year, Up, known there as Sky Blue. I prefer this one.) It was the beginning of the next phase of my great transition.