Baseball Maps Available from Ball State University Libraries

Mapping America’s Pastime:  Baseball Maps Available from Ball State University Libraries

The Ball State University Libraries’ GIS Research and Map Collection (GRMC) on the second floor of Bracken Library includes over 140,000 maps of various destinations and topics.  The Major League Baseball playoffs begin this week, and the GRMC offers baseball fans a glimpse at some baseball-related maps in the Collection. 

The GRMC includes a travel map locating all of the Major League Baseball stadiums.  The Atlas of Sport available in the Atlas Collection features maps on the “American game,” including the map shown above (click to enlarge) depicting the number of high-school boys playing baseball in school leagues, with Iowa leading the nation.

The GRMC also created custom maps related to the history of baseball.  Black Diamonds: Negro League Baseball Teams, 1920-1949, (above) was created in association with the documentary Black Baseball in Indiana, a film created as a Ball State University immersive learning project.  The map shows the location of the Negro League teams in the United States.  Photographs featured on the map are from the book Playing America’s Game by Michael L. Cooper.  The map is available in the Libraries’ Cardinal Scholar digital repository or via interlibrary loan.

Another map, The Girls of Summer: All-American Girls Professional Baseball League Teams, 1943-1954, (above) commemorates the women who played professionally beginning during World War II.  The map features photographs from A Whole New Ballgame: The Story of All-American Girls Professional Baseball League by Sue Macy available from the Educational Technology and Resources Collections.  This map is also available in Cardinal Scholar.

Users can also find maps of historic stadiums in the collection of U.S. Geological Survey topographic maps and Sanborn Fire Insurance maps in the GRMC.  The map above shows the iconic Fenway Park in Boston on a Sanborn Fire Insurance map from 1975.

Maps from the GRMC circulate for two weeks or longer.  Atlases from the Atlas Collection circulate for 28 days or longer.