Baseball As America

May 30, 2006

Baseball Hall of Fame Extends Successful National Tour of Baseball As America

Ernst & Young to continue as lead national sponsor for the extended exhibition, bringing historic artifacts from Cooperstown to new regions across country

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Cooperstown, NY — May 30, 2006 — The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum announced today that it has extended the national tour of its traveling exhibition Baseball As America, the first major exhibition to examine the relationship between baseball and American culture. Ernst & Young welcomed the opportunity to continue its role as the exhibition’s exclusive national sponsor and will support the extension of the tour organized by the Baseball Hall of Fame. The Minnesota Historical Society in St. Paul will be the first stop on the tour extension in fall 2006 and Great Lakes Science Center in Cleveland will present the exhibition in summer 2007. Additional venues will be announced shortly.

“Baseball As America has been so successful that it was a very easy decision to continue its national tour,” said Hall of Fame Chairman Jane Forbes Clark. “Our goal was to be able to share the Hall of Fame’s wonderful collections with as wide of an audience as possible and with Ernst & Young as the national sponsor, we are more than accomplishing our goal. Ernst & Young, with their commitment to excellence, has been a perfect sponsor and we’re delighted to continue the tour with them.”

Currently on its final stop of the original 10-city tour, Baseball As America is now showing at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, where it opened March 11 and closes on September 6. Through the first nine venues, the exhibition drew 1,852,528 visitors, more than doubling the reach of the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum to audiences across the country visiting Cooperstown.

“The Baseball As America tour has been a ‘hit’ with fans in every city it’s been to, but in baseball you can’t call a hit a homerun until you have touched all the bases, and by adding these extra cities we intend to do just that,” said James S. Turley, Chairman and CEO, Ernst & Young. “The Baseball As America tour has been a homerun for fans and for the people of Ernst & Young, and we’re proud to be part of it,” Turley added.

Baseball As America premiered at the American Museum of Natural History in New York on March 16, 2002, and has subsequently traveled to nine other leading museums, including the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County; Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago; Cincinnati Museum Center; Florida International Museum in St. Petersburg; National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC; Missouri Historical Society in St. Louis; Museum of Fine Arts in Houston; and Oakland Museum of California.

Organized by the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, and culled from its unparalleled collections, this ground-breaking exhibition marks the first time that these Hall of Fame treasures have left their legendary home in Cooperstown, New York. Through the exploration of a broad range of themes, including immigration, nationalism, integration, technology and popular culture, Baseball As America reveals how baseball has served as both a reflection of, and catalyst for the evolution of American society.

Baseball As America is organized in thematic sections to explore the changing roles baseball has played in American culture and history, and to examine its unique position in our national life as a sport that holds the status of an art, a science, and a secular religion. They examine such aspects of The Game as the rituals of fans and players; myth making and the role of heroes; the impact of technology on performance; segregation, integration and baseball’s role as a ladder of mobility for ethnic groups; The Game’s evolution as a business; the physics of the home run and the curve ball; and baseball’s presence throughout popular culture as a subject and metaphor, among many others. Ultimately, Baseball As America reveals how the development of American culture owes so much to a 19th-century game, affecting everything from our language and literature to movies, mass communication, and art.

The exhibition includes approximately 500 of the Museum’s most precious artifacts, dating from baseball’s early roots in the 19th century to today, ranging from uniforms, balls, bats and gloves, to books, recordings, artworks and films, to historic documents, advertising and ephemera. Among the highlights of the exhibition are The Game’s most sacred relic, the Doubleday Ball, from baseball’s mythic first game in 1839; Jackie Robinson’s 1956 Brooklyn Dodgers jersey; a variety of artifacts from the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League; record-setting bats from the Mark McGwire-Sammy Sosa home run chase of 1998, as well as those of Babe Ruth (home run #60 in 1927) and Roger Maris (home run #61 in 1961); FDR’s January 15, 1942 “Green Light” letter calling for the continuation of professional baseball as a way to heighten morale during World War II; Norman Rockwell’s 1949 painting The Three Umpires; the “Wonder Boy” bat from the movie The Natural; a 1908 Thomas Edison recording of “Casey at the Bat”; “Shoeless” Joe Jackson’s shoes; and the most valuable baseball card in the world, the T206 Honus Wagner.

The exhibition is accompanied by a major publication, also entitled Baseball As America, published by the National Geographic Society. The book explores and illuminates the themes of the exhibition and is illustrated with images of objects in the exhibition as well as historical photographs. A unique compendium, featuring 45 newly-commissioned and 30 classic essays, commentaries and literature from a wide spectrum of writers, commentators, scholars and humorists, the book has 320 pages with 200 illustrations, many of them in full-color.

Some of the specially commissioned pieces include authors such as: news anchor Tom Brokaw on baseball’s importance to wartime America; filmmaker Penny Marshall on the making of A League of Their Own; best-selling novelist John Grisham on the significance of baseball to children; architect David Rockwell on designing stadium interiors for fans; chef and cookbook author Molly O’Neill on the primal importance of the hot dog to baseball; and baseball writer Roger Kahn on the Brooklyn Dodgers; among many others. The classic pieces include singer/songwriter Paul Simon on Joe DiMaggio as an icon; Pulitzer Prize-winning humor columnist Dave Barry on the most resonant baseball story of 1960; and writer Roger Angell on the destruction of the Polo Grounds; to note a few. Jules Tygiel, author of Past Time: Baseball As History and a recent biography of Jackie Robinson, has written the introduction to the book and a series of essays on the themes explored throughout.

The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum preserves history, honors excellence and connects generations. An independent, not-for-profit educational institution dedicated to fostering an appreciation of the historical development of baseball and its impact on our culture, the Hall of Fame was established in Cooperstown, New York in 1939 as the definitive repository of The Game’s treasures.

Comprised of the Museum, with over 35,000 artifacts, and the Library and Archive, which houses more than 2.6 million documents, recordings, and photographs, the Hall of Fame exhibits and interprets its vast collections for a global audience. The Hall of Fame also bestows the highest individual honor awarded to players of our national pastime by marking their achievements with a plaque in the Hall of Fame Gallery. For more information on the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, please call 888-HALL-OF-FAME, or visit us on the web at www.baseballhalloffame.org.

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