If you thought the George Washington hair cards were strange, take a look at this. This is suppose to be a piece of skin from Abner Doubleday. For many years, historians have debated whether Abner Doubleday or Alexander Cartwright invented the game of baseball. This afternoon I came across this disturbing relic on The Baseball Reliquary. The caption reads:
“This fragment of skin purportedly from the inner left thigh of Abner Doubleday (1819-1893) was discovered in a refrigerator in the basement of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in 1948. There is no record that this artifact was ever exhibited at the Hall of Fame; in fact, most professional curators would consider a relic of this nature far too disturbing for public display. All of which brings up the question of why this artifact would have been preserved in the first place. No one at the Hall of Fame seems to have an answer, although modern-day conspiracy theorists would no doubt offer a host of explanations. We do know that the Hall of Fame is based on a fiction, that Abner Doubleday invented baseball in 1839 in Cooperstown, New York. Could the Hall of Fame at one time have intended to exhibit this artifact in tandem with the renowned “Doubleday baseball” to buttress this deception and anoint the Civil War general as a baseball deity?”
There are only a handful of cut signatures made of Doubleday, and absolutely no memorabilia cards. I bet a few card companies would love to get their hands on this to create the ultimate DNA relic.
Filed under: memorabilia | Tagged: abner, baseball, cooperstown, dna, doubleday, fame, game, hall, memorabilia, of, relic, skin |
“Oh. That’s nasty.”
-Cleveland Brown