COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. • He doesn’t remember the exact street in University City where fortune intersected with baseball and sent him in this direction. It was near Flynn Park Elementary, sometime in the 1970s, and Tom Shieber was walking toward home when he saw a baseball – discarded? misplaced? – abandoned along the road.
The ball was covered in signatures, actual autographs, not the printed scrawls available at every team store. This ball had been held by the men who signed it, and Tom, in elementary at the time, recognized a few of the names.
Stan Musial.