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COOPERSTOWN, NY – Babe Ruth and Jeff Idelson share the same itinerary to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Both started at Fenway Park, had good runs at Yankee Stadium, and ended up in Cooperstown. The 44-year old Idelson grew up a short trolley ride from Fenway, and his professional debut to the game began hawking hot dogs in the grandstand when he was still in high school. "I don't think any parent would want to call his child any kind of geek, but I was a baseball geek to the fullest," says the new president of the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, laughing in his new office in Cooperstown. "Back then, I'd do almost anything to be in Fenway Park." When he couldn't sit in the bleachers – and before he was old enough to work – Idelson and his grandfather would park the old Studebaker in the driveway and listen to hall of fame broadcaster Ned Martin put into words the line drives and circus catches of Carl Yastrzemski. "Baseball was the game of our household, even with the Celtics winning all those championships then," he says. "And though education was the most important priority in my family, I spent almost every birthday and opening day in the bleachers with my dad and a couple friends."  Baseball Hall of Fame President Jeff Idelson perched above the Hall of Plaques. In 1986, when Idelson was finishing his last year at Connecticut College – and the Red Sox were beginning the tragic magic of that one-strike-from World-Series-Championship season – he wrote a letter to former big league journeyman Eddie Kasko, who had a position in Boston's front office. Idelson offered to work for free, and volunteered to do anything. Kasko advised him to apply for a meagerly paying job in the Red Sox PR division. "Going to a liberal arts college and majoring in international economic theory, when Kasko referred to PR, I thought he was talking about Puerto Rico," says Idelson, chuckling. "I really did." He got the job. And by the time the Red Sox had choked in seven games, Idelson could not only operate, but also repair a copy machine as well as any Xerox technician. For the next two years, he hung in with baseball, producing and doing some broadcasting for one of the affiliate Red Sox radio stations. Then came one of those road-not-taken moments. He had a side job working in a restaurant near the city, and one of the regulars propositioned him with the manager's position – and very likely a modest partnership piece – at the new eatery he planned to open in Boston. He baited Idelson with triple his current salary. "Will I have to pluck chickens?" Idelson queried. "Being frank, he told me, on occasion, I would. And I passed on his offer." That restaurant was the first in the Boston Market chain. "If not for the chicken plucking, I probably could have owned my own major team by now," he says, again grinning. Idelson stood at a crossroads. For a twenty-something kid from a Boston suburb, jobs in Major League Baseball's front offices in 1988 were rare as no-hitters. But after grinding through a number of interviews, he found himself one of two finalists for a pair of assistant jobs in the Baltimore Orioles and New York Yankees media departments. "Of course, growing up in Boston, I was raised to hate the Yankees," he says, "And the other candidate was quite a bit more experienced, and I was sure he'd choose the Yankees, but he went with Baltimore." Serendipity intervened in the Yankees' front office as it so often does on the field. His boss resigned after Idelson's second month on the job, and at 24, he was promoted to head the media relations department in the most storied and powerful franchise in the game, if not the world.
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