“Baseball as America”: The Hall of Fame Tours America

A 1908 tribute to the sport.

(Baseball as America)

I grew up with a baseball-obsessed father and a patient mother. Every spring and summer my sisters and I were recruited into a makeshift home team complete with our own little Houston Astro jerseys and miniature Louisville sluggers. We played in the backyard-plastic whiffle balls substituting for baseballs, white folded towels for bases and pitcher’s mound. Mom was our fan, and Dad was our coach, as serious and earnest as if we’d been the Rockford Peaches.

As I got older, my interests diverged from my father’s, and for years I dated men for whom sports was anathema. Marry my father? No way. Until I fell for a guy who loves the game as much as he does. My husband divides his enthusiasm between his childhood Yankees and our local San Francisco Giants. I tag along to games and watch the World Series, consoling him through the heartbreaking losses. It’s official. I’m becoming my mother.

Through all this second-hand exposure, baseball lore has seeped into my bloodstream. Since I’ve never had the chance to go to the Baseball Hall of Fame, in Cooperstown, New York, I was happy to see Cooperstown come to California. The four-year traveling exhibit “Baseball as America” is at the Oakland Museum of California through January 22 and moves to Detroit March 11 through September 5, 2006. This concludes a 10-city tour, marking the first time many of the objects have left their home. If you have a chance to see it, you should.

The blockbuster show not only presents a once-in-a-lifetime collection of baseball memorabilia but also attempts to explain the complex relationship between the national pastime and American culture. Think of it as part love letter to the game and part George Will-style deconstruction of its social implications. Many issues—segregation, contract and labor disputes, the long history of the sport as a moneymaking enterprise—are thoughtfully explored. Current issues like the growing international face of the game, and specifically Latin America’s crucial contribution, get their own companion show.

Wandering the exhibit—set up to look like the inside of a stadium, complete with wire fencing—is like being on the set of Antiques Roadshow. It’s an eBay addict’s dream. Rare and precious objects abound—a 1938 light-bulb-shaped ticket to the first game played at night at Ebbets Field, a pair of Shoeless Joe Jackson’s shoes, an actual turnstile from the Polo Grounds. The mother of all baseball cards, the T206 Honus Wagner, from 1909, is displayed inside a case not unlike the one that houses the Hope Diamond.

Indeed there is an embarrassment of riches. Blink and you might miss the Atlanta Braves jersey worn by Hank Aaron the night he broke Babe Ruth’s home-run record, in 1974. The bat used by Bobby Thomson to hit the “shot heard ’round the world,” on October 3, 1951, sits near ones used by Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire during their famous home-run race in 1998. Barry Bonds and other current icons are accounted for too.

But the memorabilia goes well beyond bats and balls. There’s a battered Underwood typewriter used by the legendary New York Times sportswriter John Kiernan, a pair of trademark glasses worn by the Chicago Cubs announcer Harry Carey, a priceless 1912 scrapbook made by two brothers in Pittsburgh and signed by none other than Honus Wagner. Indeed, fans are as much a part of this exhibition as are players. There’s even a witty display labeled “Shoebox full of baseball cards thrown away by your mother.”

Continuing the pageant of sacred and profane are actual seats and ticket windows from classic stadiums like Comiskey Park, the chicken mascot costume from the San Diego Padres, and, oddly, an ear of dried corn from Dyersville Iowa, where Field of Dreams was filmed. No milestone goes unmarked, no minutia is left out—the first game that charged a fee, the first televised game, the switch from fingerless to full fingered gloves for catchers. In fact some of the displays were lost on me, with my limited knowledge of the game.

Still I was deeply affected by the images of historic games played by players and teams long gone at ballparks that no longer exist. I was surprised to learn of California’s own rich baseball history, its roster of legends like Joe DiMaggio and Lefty O’Doul, who played for the Pacific Coast League before Major League teams were established on the West Coast.

The Bay Area has its own baseball ghosts—the demolished homes of Pacific Coast teams like the San Francisco Seals and the Oakland Oaks, the latter memorialized in the show by the home plate from the last game: “Oaks Baseball Park. Died: September 1955.” Even my childhood stadium, Houston’s Astrodome, is no longer a ballpark. The Yankees will move to a new field in a few years. The Texas League teams my father watched and played for, just a distant memory. This show won’t last long. See it while you can.

For more information on “Baseball as America” visit www.baseballasamerica.org or call the Oakland Museum of California at (510) 238-2200.

—Amy Weaver Dorning is a freelance writer in San Francisco.