The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown is opening a new exhibit in July, called “Yakyu | Baseball: The Transpacific Exchange of the Game.” Its unveiling will go hand-in-hand with Ichiro Suzuki’s history-making induction into the Hall of Fame.
This past weekend, officials held a press conference at the Tokyo Dome to preview the installation. Josh Rawitch, president of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, Masanobu Shoji, president of the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Tokyo, and Bobby Valentine, former player and manager in both MLB and NPB, all spoke.
They brought with them several artifacts that will be included in the exhibition. And just that small selection was enough to excite the baseball geek in me.
It included the first pitch thrown by the Mets’ Mike Hampton during the 2000 opening series against the Cubs, a baseball from Roki Sasaki’s 2022 perfect game, Shohei Ohtani’s Team Japan cap from the 2023 World Baseball classic championship, wrist bands worn by Ichiro Suzuki for hits No. 261and 262 in 2004 as he set the single-season hit record, the jersey Mickey Mantle wore in the 1955 Yankees’ tour of Japan, and a happi coat gifted to Lefty Gomez during the 1934 All-Americans’ tour of Japan.
In addition to the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Tokyo, Cooperstown is partnering with the Fukuzawa Yukichi Memorial Keio History Museum and The Museum of Hanshin Koshien Stadium.