Your most prized baseball related possession? This is mine...

[theantiquetiger]

The piece of outfield wall from the old Alex Box Stadium, where they placed the retired number of the retiring coach, Skip Bertman:

[Scott Garner]

It's pretty tough to narrow down a 38 year collection to one single item, but I would like to show you my two favorite pieces. Anyway, here goes:
1) A game used ball to Nolan Ryan's 4th career no-hitter on 6/1/75 at Anaheim. Ryan tied Sandy Koufax's alltime record of 4 no-hitters in this game. What makes this especially cool is the story and provenance behind the ball.

Frank Worth was a roving photographer in Southern California that frequently took photos for the California Angels and Los Angeles Dodgers. After Ryan had successfully no-hit the Baltimore Orioles 1-0, Worth was in the Angels home clubhouse to take some photos to commemorating the event. He suggested taking some photos of Ryan holding up 4 balls with zeros hand drawn on the balls with felt marker. His photo of Ryan holding up the 4 balls and smiling became a rather famous image. I have included a look at the photo to remind you what it looks like. My ball is the one in the upper left.

After the photo shoot Ryan signed this ball with a personalized inscription that reads: "To Frank Best Wishes Nolan Ryan". Worth added "6/1/75" next to huge zero. On a different panel Ryan wrote " Glad you were here for the 4th. Hope you are here for the 5th". Pretty prophetic on Ryan's part that he felt he would throw another one (5th no-hitter). To make this ball even more interesting is the fact that Ryan almost pulled off a Johnny Vander Meer in his very next game on 6/6/75 against the Milwaukee Brewers. HOF great and HR champ (no steroids) Hank Aaron busted up Ryan's no-hit effort in the 6th inning with Ryan settling for a 2-hit 6-0 shutout over the Brew Crew. Worth was also in attendance of this game and he had Hank Aaron sign another side panel and added the notation "6/6/75" afterwords. It's really a great piece of baseball history, and for a die-hard Angels fan I love owning this in my personal collection...

[3and2]

Scott,

What an awesome story. That is a really neat ball. Thanks for sharing.

[Scott Garner]

Here are some photos of my other favorite piece in my collection. This is Nolan Ryan's game used mitt from his 5,000th strikeout on 8/22/89. Mostly everyone that follows baseball knows that fellow HOF'er Rickey Henderson became Ryan's 5,000 K milestone. I believe that Ryan used this mitt for all of the 1989 season, where he led the American League with 301 strikeouts (his sixth and final time he struck out 300 in a season), and also was the winning pitcher in the '89 All-Star game in Anaheim. The mitt exhibits tremendous use and came directly from Nolan Ryan with 100% rock solid provenance. I have included a photo of an iconic photo of Ryan immediately after the 5,000th K, where he his tipping his hat to the crazed Texas croud of 42,800 fans. I am currently working on getting an original photo from the photographer.

[magic1313]

I am not a collector but I do play baseball myself and always love vintage baseball items. I came across these 2 pieces at a garage sale and bought them just because of how cool they looked. Later, I did research and found out that they have some value. Even if they turned out not to be valuable I would have still bought them just because of how cool they look.

[magic1313]

Sorry for the glare on the pics. Didn;t have a secondary light source. THe Frank Baker decal is almost 100% complete. One more pic

[MGHPro]

Those are some killer decals!! Thanks for posting!
Here's mine..

[MGHPro]

Scott
Those are some AMAZING Ryan items!
Matt