Gerald Early is the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters in the African and African American Studies Department at Washington University in St. Louis. An award-winning essayist and culture critic, Early has published extensively, winning a National Book Critics Circle Award. He has been a consultant on the Ken Burns documentaries Baseball, Jazz, The Tenth Inning, Unforgivable Blackness, The War, The Roosevelts, and Jackie Robinson. In 2013, President Obama appointed Early to a five-year term at the National Council on the Humanities.

The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum is an independent nonprofit educational institution dedicated to fostering an appreciation of the history of baseball and its impact on our culture by collecting, preserving, exhibiting, and interpreting its collections for a global audience as well as honoring those who have made outstanding contributions to our National Pastime. Opening its doors for the first time on June 12, 1939, the Hall of Fame has stood as the definitive repository of the game's treasures and as a symbol of the most profound individual honor bestowed on an athlete.