LITTLE FALLS, NJ — On June 26, from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m., the Yogi Berra Museum & Learning Center, located on the campus of Montclair State University, will host an exhibition preview of “The Great American Pastime: Berra and the Bronx Legends”, an AI-driven art installation that brings Yankee history to life by simulating full baseball games between Yogi’s 1956 team and legendary Yankee line-ups from other eras. The evening is free and open to the public, and will include a talk with the artist, Dan Moore.
“The Great American Pastime: Berra and the Bronx Legends” uses historical game data to generate eight different speculative games. Opposing rosters include Babe Ruth’s 1927 Murderers’ Row, the 1961 Mantle/Maris squad and the Bronx Bombers of today. The piece creates an immersive audio experience that captures the tone, rhythm and drama of classic baseball radio broadcasts, making these impossible matchups feel real. By blending technology, storytelling and hard data, Berra and the Bronx Legends explores how AI can reshape our connection to sports history, memory and the individuals — like Yogi — who define our national pastime.
The installation, powered by compute resources from ML Foundry, revisits the act of listening to a baseball game in the contemporary context of technological innovation. A custom-trained Phi-3.5 Small Language Model simulates each at-bat, generating game data that is turned into play-by-play commentary by a Large Language Model. This text is then converted into audio using a text-to-speech diffusion model, delivering an immersive, lifelike experience.
“We’re always looking for ways to introduce emerging technologies into our exhibitions,” said Eve Schaenen, the Museum’s Executive Director. “Dan Moore’s piece leverages the most cutting edge tech to tackle the kind of question baseball fans have asked for generations: Who would win if famous teams from different eras played against each other? We’re thrilled to have this exciting installation in the Museum during Yogi’s centennial year.”
About the artist
Dan Moore is an artist and technologist from New York who uses artificial intelligence and simulation to tell stories about memory, culture and how we make sense of the past. His work blends real history with imagined possibilities, creating experiences that feel both familiar and uncanny. Moore holds a master’s degree from Carnegie Mellon University, where he studied design and emerging technology. He is currently a Senior Technical Artist at NVIDIA, and teaches courses on creative coding and artificial intelligence at The New School.
About The Yogi Berra Museum & Learning Center:
The Yogi Berra Museum & Learning Center is a nonprofit sports education organization on the campus of Montclair State University. The Museum’s mission is to preserve and promote the values of perseverance, respect, sportsmanship and excellence through inclusive, culturally diverse, sports-based educational exhibitions and programs.
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