Baseball’s lost treasures

My brother used to like to go through old junkyards, because he was convinced that if he looked under the seats of an old rusted out junker he’d find a 1952 Mickey Mantle card or something. I used to tell him he was crazy, and maybe he was. But he was adamant that if you looked hard enough through junk, you’d eventually find treasure. I don’t know if he ever will, but you have to admire his optimism.

And maybe it’s warranted optimism. Because a lot of baseball memorabilia, knickknacks, oddities and collectibles have basically vanished. Today at Fox’s JABO, Erik Malinowski writes about several of them that have simply vanished. Things like The homer run ball Bill Mazerowski hit in the 1960s World Series. Joe Jackson’s admission in the Black Sox scandal. Even a giant statue of Babe Ruth:

It is these little moments, the moments that go beyond sheer happenstance and more toward outright serendipity, that make the history of baseball so richly compelling. And when you stop and consider that there is a whole other layer of lost knowledge that doesn’t make it into most of the mainstream books, that’s when you realize that any time you open a dusty trunk and rummage through a backwoods yard sale, there’s always that one-in-a-million chance you’ll stumble upon something greater.

Maybe the Ruth statue wouldn’t fit in a dusty trunk or under the seats of a car in a junkyard, but the idea still holds. Good read.