Talk to Bob Feller about playing pro ball as a 17-year-old kid out of Van Meter, Iowa. Dress up in a vintage baseball uniform to perform “Casey at the Bat” for third graders in Albany, New York. Respond to the Trivial Pursuit writer who wants to know if a U.S. president ever had a career in baseball. Look at a photo album chronicling the women’s game. March in a parade. Read about the 17-year-old girl who struck out both Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in an exhibition game. Visit with a Japanese fan researching the role baseball played in U.S. internment camps during World War II. Find out if a new treasure has arrived in a cardboard box just delivered by the local mailman. Go to a ballgame.

As director of research at the National Baseball Hall of Fame, Tim Wiles, 87BA, 89MA, says he'd grab two books if he had to limit his library of baseball titles. One is Baseball as America, the book he's shown holding here at the Hall of Fame gift shop in Cooperstown, New York.

Sound like fun? Sound like a job description?

Baseball fans around the world might think it’s too good to be true, but for Tim Wiles, 87BA, 89MA, it’s all in a day’s work. Or it could be. As research director of the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, Wiles knows he’s living a dream.

Baseball goes back a few generations in Wiles’s lineage. “I’ve been a baseball fan since before my birth,” he says. Indeed, the love of the game seems to have been passed down in his genes.

It all started with great grandfather Ben Caffyn, who played one month of the 1906 season for the Cleveland Naps. The MLB team (that’s Major League Baseball for everyone who follows the game) was named after its manager, a fellow named Napoleon Lajoie.

“My great grandfather played for 15 years in the minors and that short stint in the majors,” Wiles says. “He played in Des Moines from 1905 to 1906. I never knew him, but he cast a long shadow in our family.”

Wiles recalls that he grew up playing ball in Peoria, Illinois, holding down right field in Little League. Then he lived in Iowa for ten years, getting his degrees at the University of Iowa and working as the humanities reference librarian for four years at the University of Northern Iowa. He notes automatically that both Peoria and Waterloo were in the Class A Midwest League when he lived in those areas.

An enthusiastic ambassador for the Baseball Hall of Fame, Wiles would like to correct the misconception that the Hall is connected to Major League Baseball. It’s not. “We preceded the corporation known as Major League Baseball,” Wiles points out. “We’re a not-for-profit educational organization.”

In fact, in many ways, Wiles prefers minor league competition. “You’re so much closer to the game, and not just on the field. You tend to meet the general managers, the ticket takers. Going to a minor league game is a community event.”

Baseball is America’s game, woven into the warp and woof of our culture. It appears in our literature and our music, forms the skeleton on which many a movie plot is built, connects generations, and gives many youngsters their first lessons in statistics. Imbued with both the glory and the warts of an American psyche, it has reflected racism and greed as well as wholesome hero worship and unselfish sportsmanship.

"Here at the Hall of Fame, we research anything that could connect in any way to baseball—the history of particular games, players, and events; the broad social history of the game, including race, gender, economics,” Wiles explains. “We do research for students ranging from kindergarten through postgraduate work. We also do research for the baseball industry and for the media—for print, nightly news broadcasts, even questions on Jeopardy. There’s a whole baseball research community.”

He mentions the Society for American Baseball Research, explaining that its members are the baseball equivalent of Civil War re-enactors. These people breathe baseball as if it were air. Others contact the Hall because of their interest in family genealogy, hoping to learn more about an ancestor who played the game. “The average baseball fan is the heaviest user of the library,” Wiles adds.

He’s been doing his job as research director in Cooperstown, New York, for more than eight years now.

“ I love baseball and I love research,” Wiles says. “I’m at the perfect intersection of my interests. I’ve got this writing background that I developed at Iowa, so I enjoy getting to write in my job. I write for the exhibit information, for the website, for the publications we produce in conjunction with other organizations. Fact check, edit, proofread: I get to do it all.”

The best thing, Wiles says, is the people he meets. Everyone has a story and every day holds the promise that he will see another memorable one unfold. Sometimes the story is pure magic.

He tells about the day a gentleman in an Elderhostel group touring the Hall of Fame kept peering over the shoulders of a couple of interns copying an old scrapbook. From the way one of the photos showed a player holding his bat, the visitor, Ben Fernandez, recognized a man he’d seen play in his prime more than 60 years earlier. Serendipitously, that player, Mike Kristoff, happened to be in the room with friends and relatives. Although he was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and was no longer securely tethered even to his own early life, Kristoff enjoyed a flood of memories when Fernandez showed him how he’d held his bat. “Pretty soon,” Wiles recalls, “everyone was crying.”

The research director has met every living Hall of Famer, about 60 of them, but, he says, “I really like to meet players who are retired but not in the Hall of Fame. They might spend an hour telling me stories.”

Although the research department is only one-third of the administrative organization of the Baseball Hall of Fame Library, it provides the avenue by which the public accesses and uses collections held there. Each year, the research department staff works with about 20,000 people in person, assisting another 100,000 via e-mail, fax, and regular mail. In total, about 350,000 people annually visit the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

"Our emphasis is on serving the community,” Wiles says. “As students of library science, we were taught that there’s no point in having a library if you’re not going to help people use it. If I had to choose, I’d be a librarian first and a fan of baseball second. But the great thing is, I don’t have to choose.”