Contemporary Collecting by Kevin M. Moist

Author:Kevin M. Moist [Moist, Kevin M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Published: 2013-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

III

Collecting and Identity, Personal and Political

8

From the Attic to the Mallpark: A Collection’s Transition from Private to Public in a New Professional Baseball Stadium

Stephen P. Andon

A number of elements make baseball the American pastime, from its pastoral beginnings that underscore a nationalistic mythos to its perpetually nostalgic appeals that connect generations of fans with baseball icons like Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson. For collectors of sports memorabilia, baseball stands out from other sports because of the game’s relationship with a variety of material objects that are available for acquisition. Consider the overwhelming number of objects needed just to stage a professional game: bats, balls, jerseys, pants, caps, socks, bases, gloves, lineup cards, and score sheets, as well as protective equipment, home plate, the rosin bag, and pitching rubber.

Baseball also celebrates an ancillary materiality presented through a bevy of mass-produced items that have evolved as a result of the rise in consumer culture. Because of baseball’s popularity in America, professional teams quickly realized the commercial potential of producing memorabilia and creating copromotional advertising materials. This approach meant that fans, already purchasers of game tickets, could be further enticed to purchase baseball cards, pennants, posters, programs, magazines, souvenir cups, soda bottles, cereals, pins, buttons, statuettes, bobble-head dolls, stuffed animals, and numerous other items.

These materials have reached prominence as sport collectibles, evidenced by the National Baseball Hall of Fame’s collection of more than 38,000 items as well as by the hundreds of baseball memorabilia shows staged for private collectors across the country, hawking everything from cards to game-used cleats. Outside of these two avenues, one clearly institutional and promotional and the other designed for private collecting, Major League Baseball franchises have developed their own complex relationships with collectibles. Primarily, while the number of mass-produced commodities has continued to expand, teams have now made game-used items, such as jerseys, bats, and even stadium dirt, widely available for purchase. At the same time, teams are also looking to displays of unique collectibles in their stadiums to help foment nostalgia and solidify their team narrative. In recent years, especially as teams move from older stadiums into commercialized “mallparks,” the use of these objects is meant to deliver a historical context to these grand, yet sanitized, stadium spaces. After opening a new stadium in 2009, the New York Yankees exemplified this new trend by dedicating stadium space to displaying a collection of artifacts and memorabilia in a specifically built team museum. The space featured game-used objects, documents, plaques and trophies, and team memorabilia, telling the story of America’s most historic and successful baseball franchise. A year later, when the Minnesota Twins opened its new open-air stadium in downtown Minneapolis, the team was eager to deploy the same technique to help reestablish the outdoor baseball identity of the Twins, a team that had played inside a domed football stadium for decades. Unlike the Yankees, however, the Twins eschewed the idea of a centrally located museum and instead placed thousands of artifacts in displays spread throughout the stadium.

In the

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