In typical American fashion, Halls of Fame have lost their glory in their translation across the Atlantic from the original shrines established in Europe. Seemingly every high school has one for its graduates, and every profession seems to have its own miniature pantheon. There are Halls of Fame for pornography, social workers in California, and business leaders in Queensland. Yet while the concept has become commonplace, there is still one Hall of Fame in the United States that is endowed with a particular sanctity. Nearly a century after the first class of players was enshrined in Cooperstown, in upstate New York (purportedly where a Civil War general invented the modern game in 1839), the Baseball Hall of Fame still attracts a level of discord that is unparalleled. 

Baseball itself has lost its preeminence as the top sport in the United States to the NFL, whose Hall of Fame has its own unique pageantry with inductees being presented with custom-made blazers. But what the Baseball Hall of Fame lacks in fashionable accoutrements, it makes up in the passions it stirs. While the Hall of Fame for Great Americans in the Bronx is a forgotten relic and casual fans of the NFL or the NBA could not easily distinguish which players have been questionably inducted and which have snubbed, induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame still sparks violent debate.