Eugena Pilek, Cooperstown. New York: Touchstone, 2005.

Set in America's Most Perfect Village in 1979, the year Willie Mays was inducted, Cooperstown is about the people who work in and around the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. The main characters include a set of friends who had attended the first induction, with Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb in 1939, the best ballplayer ever to come from the home of baseball, and the Baseball librarian.

Our characters are bound by a secret document, discovered in 1957 by the friend who went on to oversee collections at the Hall of Fame, which the librarian will try unsuccessfully to reveal. This is what comes of not having a trained archivist as curator! While the secret could destroy the village, events only come to a head when a psychiatrist sharing the surname of a famous umpire moves to town. Even as the townfolk come together to fight against a proposed baseball theme park, they are also coming, one by one, for help with the problems their secret has caused. As we might hope, everyone experiences personal growth and the town is not destroyed—even though the theme park wins.