Baseball Stars in Bronze

Surrounded by photographs of the newest members of the National Baseball Hall of Fame, Mindy Ellis runs her calloused fingertips across a mound of stiff brown clay that she’s molding into a portrait of a major league star inside her home studio in Bethel Park, Pa.

“Right now, it just looks like a bunch of bumpy clay that a preschooler did. However, to me, I already have a sense of the beginnings of a face,” says Ellis, 53, smoothing small lumps that will become the chin, shoulders and cap of 12-time All-Star infielder Roberto Alomar.

The sculpture, completed earlier this year, since has been cast into a bronze plaque that will be hung this month in the famed gallery in Cooperstown, N.Y. (pop. 1,852).
Mindy Ellis: Baseball Hall of Fame sculptor Pittsburgh artist helps create the bronzed plaques for the Cooperstown, NY. Institution. Play Video
“It takes me about a week to finish each portrait, but the whole process usually takes months. It’s a high-profile job,” Ellis says of her work for Matthews International, the Pittsburgh-based company that produces the plaques.

As the artist who has modeled 60 of the 295 two-dimensional portraits that hang in the Hall of Fame, Ellis shapes sculptures that are among the most widely viewed art in America, albeit the most anonymously created. A baseball fan herself, Ellis says her reward is knowing that the portraits she creates will “live on and on for posterity.”

“It’s an honor to be part of the experience of honoring baseball’s greatest careers,” she says.

A glimpse inside the Baseball Hall of Fame plaque gallery

Ellis sculpted her first Hall of Fame portrait—of Philadelphia Phillies third baseman Mike Schmidt—in 1995. Other players she’s captured in clay include Carlton Fisk (2000), Kirby Puckett (2001), Ozzie Smith (2002), Gary Carter (2003), Wade Boggs (2005), Cal Ripken Jr. (2007), Tony Gwynn (2007) and Rickey Henderson (2009).

She’s also sculpted portraits of former baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn and Effa Manley, the only woman inducted into the Hall of Fame, who from 1936 to 1948 was business manager of the Negro Leagues’ Newark Eagles.