I'm not really a memorabilia guy, as a lot of people know, but I was looking over the list of baseball items being sold in the current SCP Internet Auction and couldn't help but notice a small collection from the family of turn-of-the-century Baltimore Orioles star Wee Willie Keeler.
In particular, the lot includes Keeler's diary, with a number of entries about the 1896 Temple Cup Series between the Orioles and Cleveland Spiders, which was the championship series played in the National League before the advent of the World Series.
Seems kind of quaint now, the idea of a player keeping a daily diary during the baseball season. They're too busy Tweeting from the Canadian border or relating their experiences and achievements on their Facebook pages. But in those days, a diary was really the only way for a baseball player to keep a record of his own experiences.
There's a photo on the right of the book, which features Keeler's signature adjacent to the cover page. Pretty interesting little slice of Baltimore history, and it's just one piece of a huge and diverse array of historical memorabilia from baseball's golden age. There are autographed pictures of Babe Ruth and game-used equipment from some of the game's greatest legends, but the Keeler diar kind of jumped out at me because of his significance to this area's baseball lore and because it tells its own story.
I've never bid in an auction like this, but I guess you have call and register (800-350-2273) to get into the site and see everything. Most of this stuff is pretty top shelf -- which means it's probably out of my league -- but I get a lot of auction catalogs and always enjoy looking through them. I know it's not a picture of a giant burger, but I thought a few of you might think it was interesting, too..