Anywhere you find a culture or subculture with passion and vibrancy, you’re pretty much guaranteed to find some place that is the epicenter of that culture. That is the nature of culture: people congregating to share in something important to them. Take religions, for instance. Islam has the Ka’aba, Jews have the Wailing Wall, Mormons have Palmyra, New York. The film culture has Hollywood, theatre culture has Broadway and the West End. And baseball–indeed America in general–we have Cooperstown, home of the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Like many of these places whose history reaches back a hundred or more years, Cooperstown is built on a myth. In 1907 the Mills Commission, formed of ex-US Senators and baseball executives, declared that Abner Doubleday had invented baseball in 1839 in Cooperstown. They declared this despite the only evidence being a single man’s uncorroborated account of the event. But really, they declared it because like all things great and lasting and faith-inspiring, baseball needed a creation myth and a home.

In reality, the origins of baseball are much less romantic. It evolved from old games from Britain like stool ball and cricket and rounders that came over with the colonists and subsequent immigrants. The rules changed slowly over time, until they were finally first codified by the Knickerbocker Club of Manhattan, from which they developed into our modern rules.

Cooperstown. You read it, it means something. It means the Baseball Hall of Fame, Baseball Mecca, the Home of Baseball. You read Canton, Ohio. Some of you think, where? Others go, of course, the Football Hall of Fame. I say Springfield. You think “The Simpsons,” not the home of the Basketball Hall of Fame. The point is, consciously or not, the Mills Commission knew what they were doing when they gave baseball a birthplace.

Cooperstown today is adorable. I took my girlfriend Jen there last week, and after we parked and were about to turn onto the main street, I warned her, “Be ready for an overdose of cuteness.” We turned and were confronted with a street lined with brick houses, impeccably kept trees, old movie theatres–and of course, shop after shop hawking baseball souvenirs. Halfway down to the Hall, Doubleday Stadium looms off to the side, a modernized Field of Dreams with a 19th century feel.

Then the Hall itself. At once grandiose and intimate, it opens with a show that invokes your childhood catches with your father at dark (“Tommy, come in!”) then leads you through the museum where you see Babe Ruth’s bats, Willie May’s glove, Ty Cobb’s spikes. You walk past the Negro Leagues exhibition, the homages to Jackie Robinson, and the slapdash “Women in Baseball Exhibit” (which really wasn’t done that well). Then you come to the hall, the bronze plaques inscribed with each member’s achievements. You come to Babe Ruth, his 70-year-old plaque uniquely shiny from all the visitors rubbing his face for good luck.

Cooperstown is where those who worship baseball can go to feel good about their religion. If you haven’t been there, it’s worth a trip.