Baseball players will join organized crime figures at the Gangster Museum of America in Hot Springs.
Museum owner Robert Raines says a century ago the city played a significant role in spring training and believes what is now a gallery will soon become something larger.
“We do want to put together a national museum, so this is just a little snippet of what is to come. There’s a lot of baseball history here, so we’ll start reaching out to some major corporations here later this summer and hopefully within a couple of years we’ll have it all put together,” Raines said.
Many of the gangsters featured in the museum’s other galleries were baseball fans, according to Raines.
The new baseball section will include seats from venues around the country, an old Little Rock Travelers scoreboard, and a life-sized statue of Babe Ruth from Yankee Stadium in New York. Historical markers in Hot Springs commemorate a home run hit by Ruth into a local alligator farm during spring training in 1918.
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