Your "White Whale" .... and will you land it ??

[Topnotchsy]

Originally Posted by Leon

Interesting white whales. Good luck.

Thanks. I tend to go down very long rabbit holes and my collection niches and white whales reflect that.

If you don't mind indulging me, a Whale that I actually did acquire recently is a perfect example. It is at the nexus of my WWII baseball collection and my Integration Collection.

In September 1945, after Germany had surrendered, the troops played a tournament in Europe that culimated with the GI World Series, a 5 game series which was split between Soldier Field in Nurmberg, Germany, and Reims, France.

In that tournament, the OISE team was integrated and included two future Hall of Famers, Leon Day and Willard Brown.

The OISE team won the series, and Day pitched well.

Programs from that series are (not surprisingly) exceedingly rare. I'm not sure if 10 have seen the light of day in the past 20 years. But one consistency about all of them was that they were unscored. And the kicker is that none of the players are listed in the program, so without it being scored, there is no indication of the historical aspect of the Integrated team, no mention of 2 future HOFers etc.

After years of pursuing this item, and acquiring almost ever copy I came across (became a bit of an obsession and I bought 3-4 of them over the years), a copy showed up that was scored from one of the games. Even better, it was scored from Game 2, which Leon Day started and won in Nurmberg.

It's not everyone's cup of tea but for me the combination of the game being played at a stadium previously used for Axis Power rallies (I'm avoiding terms that may get flagged), and was integrated a month before Branch Rickey signed Jackie Robinson.

There's a lot more to the story, but this was definitely a whale for me. I don't believe the Hall of Fame even has a copy of the program, or anything else tied to the series, though they do have a nice article about it online. This may also represent the only documentation of a detailed account of what happened in the game.