“What would it look like to have something with blinking letters and numbers?” said Ted Spencer, the former chief curator for the Hall of Fame, who updated the board in the 1980s and 1990s. “I still think it would be out of keeping with the look of the building.”

The board was closer to the street when Spencer worked here, and cars would stop in front of it in the morning for a quick check of the scores, including those elusive West Coast results that were too late to make the papers. The board is set farther back now, but it remains a prominent part of the sidewalk presentation for a building that opened in 1939.

Tim Mead, the new Hall of Fame president, posed for a photograph in front of the board last week with a family of Yankees fans; the picture wound up on the front page of the Cooperstown newspaper, The Freeman’s Journal. Mead, 61, lives six blocks from the museum and walks to work. He could not do that as a vice president for the Los Angeles Angels in Anaheim, Calif., where he had worked for 40 years.

“When you come to Cooperstown, you want to come to Cooperstown, you make that effort,” Mead said. “There’s just a genuine purity to it all. If you come to the Hall, you have a chance to live in the past a little bit — and not be told, ‘You’re living in the past.’”