The Arizona Baseball Museum in the Lehi neighborhood of Mesa is now open to visitors. Doors to the museum opened officially to the public on Feb. 21.

Located in the old Lehi Auditorium off the corner of North Horne and East Lehi roads next door to the Mesa Historical Museum, the Arizona Baseball Museum houses a vast collection of baseball memorabilia from around the state.

The Mesa Historical Society owns and operates the Arizona Baseball Museum and is the steward of the Mesa Historical Museum.

Arizona Baseball Museum Executive Director Susan Ricci said that the museum has been busy since its opening. Much of the traffic so far has come from spring training fans.

“It seems that people are coming here before they go to the games,” said Ricci.

“From about 10 a.m., when we open, until about 12:30 p.m., we’re really busy. Then people go to the game, and we get another wave of people towards the end of the day.”

Ricci wants to drive home the fact that the museum is open the year around, not only during spring training season.

After paying for your ticket at the Mesa Historical Museum, you’ll walk down the sidewalk a bit until you hear a compilation of famous radio calls from baseball history blasting from speakers above the entrance to the Arizona Baseball Museum.

3 Takeaways:

• The Arizona Baseball Museum opened to the public on Feb. 21 and is open all year.
• Featured exhibits include Baseball in the Arizona Territory, Birth of the Cactus League, Diversity in Baseball—Japanese Internment Baseball and Fan Experiences.
• An exhibit on Native Americans and baseball is planned for next year.

When you enter the museum, you’ll see a vast room with a tall ceiling and featured exhibits such as Birth of the Cactus League, Baseball in the Arizona Territory, a diversity exhibit recognizing Japanese internment baseball, Fan Experiences and more.

“Arizona has a rich baseball history, starting way back in the early frontier days when soldiers were on the military outposts, and for a lack of things to do, they started playing baseball,” said Ricci, who found many old newspaper stories talking about the different games that took place.

“And then these friendly games started happening between small outpost towns. And then that morphed into the Copper League, where a lot of the mining towns started to form baseball teams, and they played each other.”

With the introduction of spring training and the formation of the Cactus League in the 1940s and 1950s, Arizona became a hot spot for the sport. Now, over half of the Major League Baseball teams call Arizona home before the regular season starts.

Memorabilia from teams that play in Mesa, such as the Oakland Athletics and the Chicago Cubs, is heavily on display. So are jerseys and game-used equipment from the Arizona Diamondbacks.

One of the baseball treasures on display is a commemorative home plate from the Diamondbacks and Colorado Rockies spring training inaugural game at Salt River Fields on Feb. 26, 2011.

The exhibit on baseball during Japanese internment is a rotating exhibit focused on diversity, according to Ricci. This exhibit tells an often-overlooked story of the Japanese baseball teams that formed and the games that took place within the internment camps during World War II.

Next year, Ricci plans to have an exhibit dedicated to Native Americans and baseball. She said that she has been in discussions with Kelly Washington, director of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community Cultural Resources Department, about what this exhibit would look like.

In the meantime, Ricci encourages Community members to reach out with their fan experiences.

“We welcome tribal members to contact us and let us know if they have some stories that relate to baseball and the tribal community. We would just love to hear from them!” said Ricci.

You can submit your stories and learn more about the Arizona Baseball Museum at www.mesahistoricalmuseum.com.