Feb. 3, 2012

The NYPL thefts are currently being investigated by the FBI.

It is the best-documented stolen artifact in baseball history, an 1879 contract between player Ezra Sutton and Harry Wright’s Boston Red Stockings that was donated to the New York Public Library in 1921 by the widow of Hall of Famer A. G. Spalding. The contract was the property of baseball pioneer Harry Wright and part of his personal archive that was bequeathed to the National League in 1896 as part of his last will and testament; It was documented by NYPL staff in correspondence to baseball historian Dr. Harold Seymour in the 1950s; It was referenced in newspaper articles published in The Sporting News and the Christian Science Monitor in 1922; It appeared in a public exhibition at the NYPL in 1922; It was documented in the original research notes of Dorothy Seymour Mills, who examined the contract in the NYPL (her notes are now housed at Cornell University); It is even confirmed by the current testimony of Mills today as she recalls holding the very same contract in her hands in the 1950s when it was part of volume two of the Harry Wright Correspondence Scrapbooks once housed in the famous A. G. Spalding Collection.

However, despite all of that documentation, that same contract currently appears on the website of Heritage Auction Galleries in Dallas, Texas, as a lot in its upcoming April baseball auction in consignment from author and songwriter Seth Swirsky who is also selling the infamous ”Buckner Ball” from the 1986 World Series and the original letter that banished “Shoeless” Joe Jackson from Baseball back in 1921.  Heritage says the contract is “currently being reviewed by our catalogers,” and that a  “written description will be available along with high resolution images soon.”

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