The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum has mounted a landmark exhibition which will tour the country for more than three years with stops in ten cities.

Next week, the Hall of Fame and the American Museum of Natural History in New York City will announce the exhibit, "Baseball as America," which celebrates the country's romance with the sport and looks at the enduring impact of baseball on the American culture. The exhibit will open at the American Museum of Natural History in March 2002.

This will be the first time the Hall of Fame has ever put on a major museum exhibition and rarely have artifacts left Cooperstown in the past.

"We have never before traveled our treasures outside of Cooperstown; we've never taken a major exhibition out to America until now," said Hall of Fame President Dale Petroskey in a speech to the National Press Club this spring. " For the past few years, we've been developing an exhibit titled "Baseball as America," which will show how baseball has always reflected and sometimes even shaped American culture. It's a rich exhibition filled with substance and nuance, and every major museum that we've talked to about it has wanted it.

Hall spokesperson Jeff Arnett said Monday that some of the artifacts will be taken from current displays, and will be replaced by comparable or finer items, but that there will be "no gaping holes" in exhibits in Cooperstown. And in the case of some artifacts, it will be the first time they have been exhibited.

"Part of the focus is to bring to light some unknown pieces that demonstrate how significant baseball is in American history," Arnett said.

Only 40 percent of the Hall of Fame's collection is on display and the exhibition will let some of the remaining items in the collection share the spotlight.

Approximately 500 objects will be featured and will include the "Doubleday Ball" from baseball's mythic "first" game; record-breaking bats used by home run hitters Ruth, Maris, McGwire and Sosa tracking the evolution of the technology of hitting; Jackie Robinson's Brooklyn Dodgers jersey and Shoeless Joe Jackson's shoes.

Arnett said most people who visit the Hall of Fame are from the surrounding four-state region and the traveling exhibition will enable people in other parts of the country who may never come to Cooperstown to have a chance to see some of the treasures from baseball's past.

The exhibit will also include a segment about Cooperstown that explains why the Hall of Fame is located here and at the same time serves to entice people to visit, he said.

Arnett said the exhibit requires 5,000 square feet of display space and few institutions have that large an area they can devote to a traveling show. It is expected the exhibition will go on tour to nine other cities across the country following its opening engagement at the American Museum of Natural History.

So far, plans include stops in Los Angeles, Chicago, Cincinnati, St. Petersburg, Washington D.C., and St. Louis. Additional locations will announced as arrangements are completed. The exhibit is expected to be on tour from March 2002 through April 2005.

Petroskey came to the Hall of Fame more than two years ago from the National Geographic and his former employer will be publishing two books in conjunction with the exhibit.

Arnett described one as more substantial than a normal coffee table book - "a really impressive volume."

It will feature a collection of essays by various authors, including NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw, about baseball's significance to America. The essays will be coupled with photos of the artifacts included in the exhibition and will, he said, recreate the experience of visiting the museum.

The second will be a small book aimed at younger readers, entitled, "America at Bat." According to Arnett, it will be more of a scrapbook of stories and photographs.

And for the first time, the Hall of Fame will team up with a national sponsor.

One of the world's largest professional services firms, Ernst & Young, LLP, will be underwriting the cost of the national tour, company spokesman Ken Kerrigan said Tuesday. They became involved, he said, because the exhibit seemed like "a nice fit."

"We are a firm that shares so many values with baseball - teamwork, leadership and diversity," he said. "It almost seemed the exhibit was designed with the company in mind."

When the opportunity knocked, they felt they couldn't turn it down, said Kerrigan, who added the company has sponsored some smaller museum exhibits in the past, but nothing on this scale.

"America would not be America without baseball. The game is woven into the fabric of this country, and baseball is far more connected to its history and American history than any other sport, by far, and we like to think that we've had a little something to do with that," Petroskey said.