Mr. Baseball’s Collection …

When I was about 12, Grandpa Scully took me out to the garage of the house he and my grandmother owned in Florida to show me some of the memorabilia of his youth. He showed me old baseball gloves that looked as though they would never be able to close around a ball; catcher’s masks, and all sorts of other baseball-related items. He had been known as “Mr. Baseball” when he lived in Trenton, NJ (they even named a street after him), and baseball was his life. When he got too old to play, he managed teams, including the Trenton State Prison Guard squads.

Some of the best things he pulled out to show me that day were the baseball cards of his youth. He looked both ways as if he was doing something illegal and whispered. “One day these will be yours, Tiger” he said as he pulled out a shoe box filled with old baseball cards with player names that were foreign to my young eyes and ears. They were cool, of course, but at the time all I could think about was how they weren’t Steve Garvey, Davey Lopes or Ron Cey—my favorite players of the day.

I didn’t see those cards again until I was 38-years-old when my father passed away. Sarah and I went by the safe deposit box to see if there were any insurance or house-related documents we might need to help settle the estate. When I opened the box that day, I was floored to see the beautiful works of art there before me. The colors were significantly more vivid than I remembered, and I couldn’t help but picture my grandfather at about the same age as I had been when he showed these cards to me the first time so many years ago.

Recently, we consolidated our safe deposit boxes and took the precious collection home just long enough to scan them. The images on the web are low resolution but I think they do a great job of showing what care my grandfather had taken of them. Of course, it was my father who eventually put them in plastic sheets and hid them away at the bank, but for the first 70 odd years it was my grandpop’s pride and joy.