ABLE partners on exhibit about Japanese American baseball

Arizona has an incredible history surrounding the game of baseball. One of its little-known chapters will come to life starting June 15 during a limited exhibit at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles.

Arizona Baseball Legacy and Experience is excited to partner on the project, entitled “Baseball’s Bridge to the Pacific: Celebrating the Legacy of Japanese American Baseball.”

Arizona’s role in this story focuses on World War II and the incarceration camps that were built in several desert locations to house American citizens of Japanese ancestry. It was a dark and painful chapter of U.S. history     . 

There was one rallying point for those detained – baseball.

Those incarcerated at the camps, mostly from the West Coast (California, Oregon and Washington)     , carried their love of the sport with them. They built fields, makeshift stands and created leagues that boasted hundreds of athletes. At one point, the Gila River Camp south of Phoenix boasted 32 teams in three divisions.

The exhibit at Dodger Stadium will include stories from these camps, the wooden home plate from Zenimura Field at Gila River, a large diorama recreating one of the fields, a championship banner, jersey and game baseball from that era.

Arizona Baseball Legacy and Experience (ABLE) is one of several organizations working together to create the exhibit. Other partners include the Los Angeles Dodgers, the Nisei Baseball Research Project, the Arizona chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League and the Mesa Historical Museum.

“We’re honored to be working with these groups to tell an important and often forgotten story of American and Arizona baseball,” said Mike Phillips, president of the nonprofit group ABLE. “The remarkable tradition of Japanese American baseball will come to life through this exhibit.”

Baseball’s Bridge to the Pacific has three main educational goals:

● Educate the public about the important and overlooked legacy of Japanese American baseball

● Celebrate the accomplishments of Nikkei (Japanese Americans) in the modern game

● Advocate for a future permanent exhibit to honor all Asian American baseball pioneers in the national pastime

The exhibition consists of historical panels and prewar artifacts that chronicle the earliest records of Japanese playing baseball during the 1870s, in both the U.S. and in Japan. It describes the first Japanese American teams in 1903 and the early tours by these Nikkei teams to Asia starting in 1914 that helped usher in the start of professional baseball in Japan in 1936.

These marginalized, invisible and forgotten American ballplayers could not play and raise the bar in MLB due to the racial prejudice of their times, so they played in leagues of their own against Negro Leagues and Latin American teams.

During WWII, the U.S. government imprisoned their own citizens, yet still Japanese Americans kept the all-American Pastime alive, even from behind barbed wire in 10 major incarceration camps.

Post-war resettlement brought the healing agent of baseball back to the communities and third-generation Nikkei players were finally welcomed to professional baseball.

The exhibit will run through at least the MLB All-Star game at Dodger Stadium on July 19 and may continue at other West Coast venues through the summer. Elements have been on display at the Mesa Historical Museum and are planned to be part of an exhibit at the Arizona Heritage Center Papago Park starting next winter.