American Baseball Museums and the Politics of Meta-Narrative

Baseball museums in the United States have become integrated with larger redevelopment projects and sport venues for those cities and communities that aspire to increase tourism in recent years. Thus, the baseball museum has become a tool to position urban space as a sport tourism destination. In this chapter, the sociological construct of “frame analysis” is adapted to examine American baseball museums in an attempt to understand the universality inherent to their political meta-narrative. Applying frame analysis to three examples of these museums—The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, The Louisville Slugger Museum and Factory, and The Negro Leagues Baseball Museum—yields meta-narratives that can be categorized relative to a museum’s intent to either stake a claim or make a claim relative to baseball heritage. The ways in which these museums engage in place-framing, as well as the challenges and tensions that may arise therefrom, are discussed