Inside the Junk Drawer: Baseball

My family has a collection of baseballs, many of which we acquired as souvenirs from the gift shops of various museums, national parks and tourist attractions. Many of them display colorful photos of the locations they belong to. My favorite, however, is plain white and bears no marking but a single signature. It didn't come from a gift shop, but an actual ballgame — an official MLB approved baseball. Before COVID and college, we would go to exactly one baseball game every year as a family event. For our annual game in 2016, my dad splurged a bit more on tickets than normal. The purchase seemed, at least to my mom, ill-advised. After all, we had never once attended a game where our team, the