The Baseball Museum Opens

Avon Park’s baseball history has a building of its own. The Baseball Museum is a 1,600-square-foot addition on the south end of the Depot at 3 N Museum Ave, and it opened to the public with a ribbon-cutting on 9 May 2026, a little over a year after ground was broken.

A year in the making

Ground broke on 17 March 2025. The addition was curated and led by Dr. Ron “Doc” Sevigny with Marva Turner, under Society president Nancy Fisk. By the autumn the walls were up, and on 21 November 2025 artist Keith Goodson signed the mural that now covers the museum’s north wall: fifteen feet high and fifty long, a pitcher and a batter in the old uniforms, a team on the field, and portrait medallions of Tom Gordon and Hal McRae, the two major leaguers the town is proudest of. A second mural, twenty-five feet by fifteen, honours the town’s youth athletics and the Lucy Derkman Softball Complex.

The signing drew a crowd to the Depot lawn, and guests were shown around the gallery as it took shape. Those photographs are in Baseball mural signing, November 2025, and the winter’s work inside, from the records wall to the ticket-booth doorway being painted, is in Inside the Baseball Museum, winter 2026.

Opening day

The grand opening on 9 May 2026 drew an estimated six hundred visitors. Hal McRae and his son Brian McRae, Tom “Flash” Gordon, Mayor Garrett Anderson and emcee David Flowers spoke at the Depot entrance before the ribbon was cut; the Red Devils and the softball team lined the porch, and the day carried on inside with autographs at the tables and the Strike Zone pitching game. The album is Baseball Museum grand opening, May 2026.

What is inside

Visitors walk across a full-scale infield laid out on the floor, with bases, a mound, home plate and foul lines. The cases hold the oversized commemorative bat presented to Babe Ruth on his 1928 exhibition visit, inscribed To Babe Ruth, Fans in Avon Park, fifty-two inches long and about fourteen pounds; a Lou Gehrig bat; and a seventy-five-year-old Toledo Mud Hens jersey. The panels tell the story of the St. Louis Cardinals’ spring training camps at Cardinal Field from 1927 to 1929, of the town’s major leaguers, Hal and Brian McRae, Tom Gordon, Dee Strange-Gordon and Nick Gordon, and of the Avon Park Black Tigers, the town team of the 1940s and 1950s. There is stadium seating, video screens, and an interactive pitching gallery.

Admission is free, and the wing keeps the Depot’s hours. The full record, with its sources, is the archive’s entry on the Avon Park Depot & Baseball Museum.