Mesa will be the home of Arizona’s first baseball museum
If baseball is America’s favorite pastime, spring training just might be Arizona’s.
In fact, spring training season is the Mesa Historical Museum’s busiest time of year. The museum website noted a seasonal 50% increase in traffic during the spring, and most of that traffic goes through the Play Ball spring training baseball exhibit, long housed in a small room in the museum’s existing building.
The staff at the Mesa Historical Museum found it harder and harder to justify housing such a popular exhibit in the small 500 square foot room and began to look elsewhere for a larger space.
“I often hear the comment that people wish they could have seen more. We just didn’t have the space to show them more. We have so many photos, memorabilia, artifacts related to Arizona baseball that we want to have everything on display,” Susan Ricci, executive director of the Mesa Historical Museum, said.
The Play Ball Museum will be the first of its kind in Arizona, singularly devoted to Arizona’s rich spring training history.
“Spring training really started in Mesa- it got its beginnings in Mesa- and we really feel this is where the spring training museum should be.” Ricci said.
They began looking at the old Lehi Middle School auditorium as the perfect space for a dedicated baseball spring training museum. At 4000 square feet, it can house the museum’s entire collection of historical baseball artifacts.
An 18-month campaign, kicked off in January of 2024, began the renovation project on the property.
“It was really time for us to launch a capital campaign to renovate the auditorium so the beautiful building can be used the way it was meant to be,” Ricci said.
The Lehi Middle School building
The Lehi Middle School building needed asbestos abatement, complete electrical, a new roof, and both inside and outside renovations, according to museum officials.
The auditorium had been left in disrepair since the early 2000s, when it was deemed unsuitable for public use. Besides the vast space for the exhibit, the history of the Lehi Auditorium was a big part of the appeal for the Mesa Historical Museum. The site is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The 1913 Lehi school has a rich history of its own with its origin as a one-room schoolhouse. After they ran out of room in their one room schoolhouse, they added buildings and an auditorium in 1939.
The auditorium was built as a part of a Depression-era Works Progress Administration. After the school closed in the 1970s, the auditorium continued to serve as a meeting space for community events until its closure in the early 2000s, museum officials added.
The future of the museum in a renovated building
The new museum location will have added elements that the previous location did not have room for, such as an interactive touch exhibit for kids, and storytelling exhibits that cover the wider gamut of the Arizona baseball experience.
It will continue housing the plaques and accolades of famous baseball players who graced the Cactus League, but the added square footage means that there is now the space to have added spotlight on local baseball.
“We want to tell human interest stories. There were Native Americans who played baseball in Arizona, there was the barn-storming that went across Arizona with players like Babe Ruth, and of course the Negro Leagues,” Ricci continued, “these are stories you just don’t hear about.”
The museum will continue telling the story of how spring training came to be and about the founding of the Mesa Hohokam Organization but will also rotate exhibits that highlight different aspects of the baseball experience in Arizona.
Some of the beloved local memorabilia include a cracked bat that Mark Freeman, Mesa councilmember, donated. The bat was his grandfather’s who played for the minor league Yankees until his wife told him he had to stop baseball and continue farming.
Another favorite will be the continued display of Derrick Moore, the Cactus League vendor whose song of “lemonade lemonade like Grandma made” is the stuff of local legend.
“And we know that once we build this museum, we will continue to get more memorabilia and more stories,” Ricci said.
How to visit the Mesa Historical Museum
The Play Ball museum is expected to be up and running for the 2026 spring training season, according to Ricci.
The museum is currently under construction on the grounds of the Mesa Historical Museum, which houses the Lehi Middle School near Horne and McKellips roads.
The rest of the Mesa Historical Museum remains open during the separate renovation of the Lehi Middle School. The museum is located at 2345 N. Horne, Mesa, AZ 85203, and is open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday.
