“Baseball is about going home … and how hard it is to get there and how driven is our need.”                                             — A. Bartlett Giamatti

No one even slightly familiar with the game of baseball can have failed to notice the signal contributions of Italian Americans to the sport. Just the name DiMaggio is enough to make the case, though the number of Italian names in baseball might surprise many — names like Berra, Rizzuto, Lombardi, Lazzeri, Campanella, Santo, Piazza, Scioscia, Napoli, Lasorda and La Russa, to mention but a few.

From June 22 through November 18, 2012, the Museo Italo Americano will present a documentary exhibit honoring the contributions of Italian Americans to “America’s favorite pastime”. The exhibit will highlight the history of Italian Americans in the sport, and the several areas wherein baseball and Italian Americans were and still are connected: the qualities, such as grace, courage and panache, that helped Italian youth adapt to an essentially English game, and become so adept at it; the degree to which learning baseball became a bridge to Americanization as well as a path to assimilation for many sons of immigrants; the significant numbers of players who made it not just to the majors, but into the game’s pantheon of enduring heroes; and the specific careers, including their sandlot beginnings, of some of those players and managers whose imprint on the game remains strong even today. The exhibit will include vintage photos of some of the great moments in the sport, memorabilia such as the gloves, balls, bats, uniforms and press accounts that accompanied those moments, and a solid sense of the range and extent of the Italian American imprint on the game.

This visually exciting exhibit should appeal to many: those who look back with nostalgia on the greats of former years; those who know little about the game but are interested in the general history of Italian Americans (or any immigrant group) folded within it; and those who will be able to supplement their knowledge of today’s game with the rich history of Italian American ballplayers of the past century. The focus on baseball — the national sport so often associated with American ideals such as fair play, grace under pressure, going “home”— should also provide a unique and easily comprehensible way for visitors to understand more about Italian America and about America itself. In this, it can mirror the dual impact this quintessentially American game had on Italian Americans: their pride in the Italian-named players who had become national heroes reinforced their Italian-ness, at the very same time that playing and following the national sport led them, almost unconsciously and in some cases unwillingly, to Americanize.