Baseball fan? You have to visit this museum!!

A few weeks ago, we visited B's Ballpark Museum near Coors Field in Denver. If visiting Fenway Park earlier this summer was a religious experience for me, so was visiting B's.

It goes without saying that Bruce Hellerstein, an author and the curator of the museum, is a man after my own heart. In his small and cozy museum is a literal treasure trove of memories for not only the avid baseball fan and historian (me) but also the more casual fan who goes to the ballpark for fun and realizes this is just more than an afternoon's fun.

Baseball is America's national pastime, and Bruce has captured this and more is a museum that may be Denver's best-kept secret. When my son and I went to a Rockies game on Sunday, we made our way to the B's Ballpark Museum (which at 1940 Blake is a half-block from Coors Field) if only to see Bruce's smiling face. There he was, greeting visitors. It was troubling to me that fans were heading to the nearby ballpark without going into the museum. I told one or two fans to check it out: "It's amazing," I said to a couple that had stopped in front of the building.

Inside fans will find undoubtedly the finest collection of Denver Bears memorabilia that exists. But Bruce, a lover of the game and its past, has also assembled an incredible collection of memorabilia honoring ballparks of the past, like Forbes Field, Tiger Stadium and others. The coup de grace: a room featuring some heart-stopping relics from Brooklyn's Ebbets Field, where the Bums played 60 years ago. There on the wall is a light fixture from the main vestibule of the stadium; on the ceiling an Ebbets Field light. In the corner, a chair that Jackie Robinson and the rest of the Dodgers used at Ebbets.

A few feet away --- one could miss this --- is the sprinkler fixture that Mickey Mantle tripped on in the 1951 World Series against the New York Giants. It features an NY logo and must have been the Cadillac of sprinklers in those days. In another nearby corner is a collection of rare ballpark seats from places like Crosley Field, Sportsman's Park and other long-gone stadiums. Like me, I realized, rather than collecting items of only one team, his theme is baseball's glorious past and its history.

Needless to say, I didn't want to leave and even asked Bruce about volunteering at this wonderful place of magic. You'll hear more about that later. It will be worth a regular trip to Denver if I can just brush up against the past in such a way.