An image of Ulysses Franklin 'Frank' Grant looks down on the Baseball in the Berkshires exhibit. The Hall of Famer was celebrated with a plaque in his hometown of Williamstown in 2006. Right, 2006 sports page from the former North Adams Transcript celebrates Grant's legacy and the connection between the Clark Art Institute and the Baseball Hall of Fame. The event included Williams alum and former Baseball Commissioner Fay Vincent.
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Baseball in the Berkshires roadshow rolls into Williamstown starting Saturday with a summer exhibit exploring the town's impact on America's pastime and vice versa.
Now in its seventh year, Baseball in the Berkshires has established itself as a repository for facts and artifacts that shine a bright light on the region's baseball roots.
Since its beginnings in the barn at Herman Melville's Arrowhead in Pittsfield, the exhibit has called Lanesborough, Lee, Lenox, North Adams, Stockbridge and Dalton home.
This summer, it plans high-profile public displays of baseball imagery in North Adams and Pittsfield along with a summer "residency" at the Williamstown Historical Museum that opens to the public on Saturday morning.
"We have always been involved with local historical societies, ever since our beginnings at Arrowhead," Baseball in the Berkshires Director Larry Moore said this week. "We did something in conjunction with the Sheffield Historical Society. Then we went to Lenox and Lee.
"Of course, that's where I go for a lot of pictures and so forth, to different historical societies. I've known [WHM Executive Director Sarah Currie] for quite a few years. We'd always talked about doing something, and as things opened up, she said, ‘How would you like to do something here?' "
Baseball in the Berkshires had a successful run last summer at the Stationery Factory in Dalton despite the COVID-19 pandemic.
"It wasn't bad," Moore said. "We had a lot of people from out of town. People were looking for something to do."
This summer, Baseball in the Berkshires hopes to reach not only the local North County audience but also those visitors coming to see the Williamstown Theatre Festival, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art or the Clark Art Institute.
Speaking of the latter …
"The Clark is such a great museum, but nobody ever associates it with the [Baseball] Hall of Fame," Moore said. "But they were two brothers, Stephen and Sterling Clark. And they actually got into physical fisticuffs.
"The Clark family were great art collectors with the Fennimore Art Museum in Cooperstown [N.Y.] and the Clark. Stephen was in Cooperstown and started the Baseball Hall of Fame, too."
In 2006, 70 years after the Baseball Hall was founded, Frank Grant, who grew up in Williamstown, was inducted into the Hall of Fame as part of a class of Negro League and pre-Negro League legends of the game.
Needless to say, Grant has a strong presence in the Baseball in the Berkshires exhibit.
Grant is one of six Major Leaguers — and one current MLB umpire, Chris Conroy — from Williamstown featured in the show, which takes up most of the display space in the WHM's main room and spills over into an adjacent hallway.
"[Grant] isn't the major focus," Moore said. "We sort of made all the players the focus, so we draw the newer people in but also, at the same time, people can learn about Frank Grant. You think about the 300-odd in baseball in the Hall of Fame, and here is Frank Grant. He's one of the most famous Black baseball players of that century. People said he was one of the best second basemen they had ever seen, and he had a great bat."
Hall of Famer Sol White, another member of that historic 2006 Cooperstown class, described Grant this way:
"In those days, Frank Grant was the baseball marvel. His playing was a revelation to his fellow teammates, as well as the spectators. In hitting he ranked with the best and his fielding bordered on the impossible. Grant was a born ballplayer."
Grant's exploits earned him a place among the game's immortals and an honored place in the Berkshires as a Pittsfield native who was raised in Williamstown.
But Baseball in the Berkshires is as much about the lesser known stories, ones that Moore continues to collect with every exhibition and every stop on the "roadshow."
"When we opened at Arrowhead and wrote the book, we had 100 minor league players," Moore said. "As of today, there are 186 minor league players we know of from Berkshire County.
"We were talking about Eddie Farr from Great Barrington. You go back in the papers, and it says, 'Old Eddie is playing with Springfield,' and there are three other local players playing there with him. I said, 'I never knew about them.' "
Baseball in the Berkshires "Sliding Baseball Across Williamstown" exhibit will be open Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. starting May 8. Baseball in the Berkshires' sponsors include: The Feigenbaum Foundation, Berkshire Bank Foundation, Pittsfield Cooperative Bank, Mountain One, Nelson E. Furlano CPA, WJ Blueprinting, The Keator Group, Greylock Federal Credit Union, Camp Hart, Lee Bank and Cohen, Kinne, Valicenti and Cook.
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