PATERSON, N.J. — Whoopi Goldberg was caught off guard. When she arrived at Friday’s reopening celebration of Hinchliffe Stadium, one of the few remaining sites that regularly hosted Negro Leagues games, she didn’t know that she was expected to speak. But there she was on the list of those slated to address the crowd of several thousand, and, it turned out, she actually had something on the front of her consciousness.
“A lot of women played baseball,” the star actress said. “Black women played baseball. But we never hear about them. We don’t see pictures. So I said when you do this, when you build the museum, make sure you include them. Because people tend to forget that this is an American pastime, not a man’s pastime.”
Goldberg was talking about the still-unfinished two-story structure behind her, just beyond the center field fence and overlooking the Great Falls National Historical Park. Though baseball games will be held at Hinchliffe for the first time since it closed in 1997, thanks to a $105 million project that started in 2021, the Charles J. Muth Museum won’t open until early October at the latest. But when it does, it’ll showcase the stadium’s rich Negro Leagues history and much more.
“We had a sacred stadium that was just fallow for 26 years,…
