Baseball As America

I think there are only three things that America will be known for 2,000 years from now when they study this civilization: the Constitution, jazz music and baseball. They're the three most beautifully designed things this culture has ever produced.

— Gerald Early, Scholar

The tour is over. But for the millions of visitors touched by the Hall of Fame’s Baseball As America exhibit, the memories will last a lifetime.

Baseball As America, the Museum’s first traveling exhibition featuring more then 500 items from the collections in Cooperstown, concluded its 15-city national tour at the Museum of Science in Boston on September 1. The items — many of which had never before left Cooperstown — have returned to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum after being viewed by nearly 2.5 million visitors around the country.

“This exhibition was one of the most successful endeavors in Museum history,” said Hall of Fame President Jeff Idelson. “It has been heralded as baseball’s version of King Tut, which originally toured America from 1976 to 1979 and was so successful it made a comeback.”

Sponsored nationally by Ernst & Young, the tour welcomed more than 2.5 million visitors during its six-year run beginning on March 16, 2002, at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Originally intended to make just 10 stops, the exhibit was so popular that the schedule was expanded to include an additional five stops.

This ground-breaking exhibition subsequently appeared at leading museums in Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Oakland, Philadelphia, St. Louis, St. Paul, St. Petersburg, Fla., Washington, DC and Boston.

Baseball As America represented the richness of baseball as the American pastime and celebrated enduring American values: freedom, patriotism, opportunity and ingenuity. It appealed to a broad spectrum of the public — from children just learning to throw a ball to the life-long fan — and, like the game itself, drew people of all ages and across all cultural heritages.

Baseball and America have grown up together. In exploring immigration, industrialization, integration and technology, the exhibition revealed how baseball has served as both a public reflection of, and catalyst for, the evolution of American culture and society.

Ernst & Young: Proud Sponsor of Baseball As America