Art of the game: How softball is bringing New York’s museums together
Staff from New York’s most venerable art museums are hitting home runs in Central Park – and have been since the 1930s.
Central Park’s scenic Heckscher Ballfields are filling up with what look like regular amateur softball players. On closer view, the odd team names on their shirts merit a double-take. What are the Mets doing here at 19.00 playing against Solomon’s Sluggers? Or the Blue Chips against a team sporting portraits of Whitney Houston? This is New York’s Arts and Museums League, which is made up of staff from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, Gagosian and the Whitney Museum of American Art, respectively.
Art-world softball has a long history: the league has been running on and off since the 1940s. It’s a counterpart to the Broadway Show League, which takes place during the day to accommodate actors’ schedules. “We try to make it work,” says Nicholas Rinehart, a Metropolitan Opera administrator who plays for the Pitch Hitters. “A few weeks ago, one chorus member played half a game and then got in an Uber to go get into costume.”
As the reigning champions, the Pitch Hitters’ schedule restraints clearly haven’t held them back since joining the league two years ago. “When we play, our heart is in it,” says Avo Asencio, a retired security guard who picks up shifts in the bag check to remain eligible for the team. It helps that the opera’s stagehands are beefier than the average museum curator.
Institutional identities translate subtly onto the field. Players from Gagosian, one of the world’s leading art galleries, wear personalised jerseys, caps and socks. They play hardball too: in a recent game, a security guard executed a dramatic dive into first base and had to be escorted to hospital with a dislocated shoulder. In contrast, The Highlanders, from the High Line, look slightly scrappier in their grey cotton shirts. “It’s a lot of finding people at their desks and saying, ‘Come on, come play,’” says team captain Jordan Benke, the High Line’s director of art exhibitions. “With new hires, my urge is to test how well they catch.” He has about 100 colleagues from which to draft; the Met has a recruit pool of 2,000.
But whoever bats the best, the real achievement is to level the playing field in a famously highbrow industry. “We have electricians and engineers, chorus members and actors,” says Reinhart. Now, when “Go, Van Gogh!” is chanted from the bleachers, New Yorkers know not to look for a Dutchman. It’s just Moma’s Starry Knights rooting for a home run.
Comment
Team-building exercises don’t have to be consigned to the boardroom. Instead of tedious corporate activities intended to break the ice and encourage workplace collaboration, why not bring staff together to let off some steam the old-fashioned way? It should ensure that no one is left on the sidelines.
