If Indiana Jones looked for baseball things, what would he be looking for? I have a few ideas. This is similar to my post in May about the great mysteries of baseball, but is a bit more in-depth.

The Bobby Thomson Ball

Possibly the Holy Grail of Baseball Artifacts, the ball from the 1951 “Shot Heard Round the World” would be potentially worth millions of dollars. However, back then very few people would have thought of that, unlike today, where the ball would have likely been immediately been authenticated and then be handed to either Thomson, the Hall of Fame, or sold at auction.

However, there’s no way of knowing what could have happened to it now. Right? Well, some people have tried. There is a book out there about one man’s search for it, which I should really get out of the library one of these days. But given the fact that there were no big news items about how the ball had been found, I’m guessing the search turned out without the ball in hand.

The Source of Lena Blackburne’s Mud

The mud that is put on baseballs to remove the weird new-ball sheen all comes from a single source somewhere in New Jersey. The source of the mud is a closely guarded secret, hidden through the years.

I, for one, once tried to figure out where it was located, at which point I would reveal the location here on this blog, solving the mystery and bringing me miniscule amounts of fame and even less amount of fortune.

I decided against it, however, for three reasons:

A) I felt that revealing a trade secret held by a single family for generations would be in poor taste.

B) If I somehow was right I might’ve gotten sued, or led to some type of strange tourism that would have messed with the ecology of New Jersey’s creeks and rivers, or something.

C) I wasn’t able to narrow it down very much anyway. Seriously, here’s what I was able to extrapolate from the various news articles and other writings about the source of the Rubbing Mud:

That’s a big area, and I wasn’t able to narrow it down any more than that (although I will admit I drew that circle too big). I quit trying when I realized points A and B.

Babe Ruth’s Piano

Tommy Holmes, a sportswriter in New York from the 1920s to 1950s, once said that he had to stop telling Babe Ruth stories because eventually nobody believed him. Such a man was Babe Ruth.

One of the legends around him is that, during a drunken 1918 party, Ruth somehow had a piano fall into a pond in Sudbury, Massachusetts. For years, some people wondered if perhaps this was the true cause of the Curse of the Bambino (it wasn’t). Still, the piano has never been found, and most doubted it even existed in the first place… but then a piece of piano veneer was found in 2010. So could Babe Ruth’s piano still be in Willis Pond? Maybe.

The Earliest TV Recordings

In the earliest days of television, things usually weren’t saved, instead being taped over. As a result, some of the earliest treasures in television either don’t exist anymore or only exist in incomplete forms. While occasionally a recording is found in a private collection (Game 7 of the 1960 World Series, for example, was found in Bing Crosby’s old wine cellar), most of them are probably lost forever. Early episodes of The Honeymooners and The Tonight Show? Gone. Super Bowl II (and, for a long time, Super Bowl I)? Gone. Art Fleming’s time on Jeopardy? Gone.

But, most importantly for this blog, this includes most of the early World Series that were on television. As mentioned before, some do exist, such as Game 7 of the ’60 series and Don Larsen’s perfect game, but the vast majority of World Series games from the late 40s to the mid-60s are probably gone forever.