Curator Q&A: What Surprised You To Learn While Researching This Exhibition?

Exhibition curator Daniel Piazza answers questions about Baseball: America’s Home Run.

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The most surprising thing I learned in putting this exhibition together was actually right at the beginning of the process. It was the discovery, in a sense, that started me off on this project. It was the, by chance, stumbling across a comic strip in the newspaper, actually. There was a historical comic strip that used to run in the Sunday papers, do historical events in the form of a comic. And one Sunday, there it was, a whole comic about Washington, DC's, one of Washington, DC's earliest ballfields. And in the last panel it became very clear to me that the site, the location of this ballfield was right where the National Postal Museum is located now, right on that, that same intersection in downtown Washington, DC.

I had never, I had worked here for years and never known that history of what was here before our building. And that got me thinking about, you know the history of our building and baseball. But then also, well, what connections could be made to our collection and the sport of baseball that would, that would kind of reinforce that.

So just that chance discovery that the site or the location of our building was an important place in DC's baseball history, then just kind of got me thinking about how else we could highlight that and tell the story of baseball in this spot, which is important to Washington's baseball history.

Baseball: America’s Home Run