Guys this is some great stuff. I think there's a profound thread here, how tangible materials are portals back in time to places we can reach in our minds; spaces we inhabit with mixtures of personal, ancestral, and collective memories. Much of this recall in my experience is a fusion between storytelling, myth, and how history is passed down and shifts and changes through time aurally and in how we process time through time.
We, of course, are living in time; these objects and materials live in time with us. The Willie Mays glove, the ball you got with your father as a child -- these things acquire deeper power as time goes on because they become mingled with what was and what will never be again, but still is as embodied through the object itself and the memory you retain of it.
Anything Satchel Paige to me is the peak or height of this kind of thing when it comes to baseball history. Satchel himself represents to me the absolute epitome of how baseball functions as story and storytelling. He is one of those figures who seems to himself rise above baseball and tell us something more profound about our humanity and what it is to be human through baseball; his life and times. I can never get enough of his stories or characterizations and depictions. He himself is as mythic of a figure as it gets; artifacts from his time and era that involve him never cease to grab me.
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