Bay Shore-Brightwaters library to host second annual Baseball Day

Bay Shore-Brightwaters Public Library is using baseball to pull families, history buffs and summer readers into its orbit again, with a second annual Baseball Day set for Saturday, June 20. The event will run from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the field across from the library, 1 South Country Road in Brightwaters, and it is built around a vintage matchup between the Brooklyn Atlantics and the New York Mutuals.

The day is designed to do more than stage a novelty game. The library will hand out baseball cards featuring players from the two clubs, and the Harbormen Chorus, a North Brookhaven barbershop chorus, will provide a musical layer to what is meant to feel like a community outing as much as a historical demonstration. Last year’s Baseball Day drew about 200 fans, according to Gabrielle Manthos-Gomez, the library’s adult reference librarian and archivist and also the historian for the Village of Brightwaters.

That historical angle is central to the draw. The field across from the library was once the site of the Brightwaters Casino, and the village says baseball has been played there for a century. For Bay Shore and Brightwaters, that makes the event part of local memory as much as summer entertainment. The Brooklyn Atlantics and New York Mutuals are also tied to the wider regional baseball scene, with the Atlantics playing home games at Atlantic Park at the Smithtown Historical Society and the Mutuals based at Old Bethpage Village Restoration.

The game itself will use 1864 baseball rules, which means the teams will play with underhand pitching from 45 feet, larger balls, longer bats and no gloves. That format turns the afternoon into a living lesson in how the sport looked before it became the modern game families know today.

The library’s role fits that educational mission. Its adult services department maintains a local history room with materials on Bay Shore and Long Island history, and its digital collections include Bay Shore High School yearbooks from 1924 to the present. The library also offers access to genealogy and newspaper resources, including NYS Historic Newspapers and Brooklyn newspaper databases, and it regularly hosts Bay Shore Historical Society programs.

In Brightwaters, that mix of sports, music and archive work gives the library a way to stay visible in summer while giving residents a low-cost, all-ages place to gather. Baseball Day is shaping up as a reminder that the library is not only a place for books, but also a local institution that can turn shared history into a public event.