Guerrieri: Tracy Martin’s vintage baseball museum
From SABR member Vince Guerrieri at Ohio Magazine on May 3, 2018:
The only hint of what lies inside Tracy Martin’s home at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac in Grove City is the license plate on his truck: “HORNSBY,” as in Rogers Hornsby, whose career .358 batting average is second all time in Major League Baseball. The slugger, who played from 1915 to 1937, also holds the record for single-season batting average at .424.
It’ll come as no surprise that Martin is a baseball fan — a big one — and has been ever since he was a kid growing up in southwest Ohio during the era when Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine reigned supreme. But his interest in the history of the game reaches back much further, to a time when players donned wool uniforms, often didn’t wear gloves and followed a different set of rules than the ones that govern baseball as we know it today.
For the past 25 years, Martin has also played vintage base ball (the game was two separate words back in the 1860s) for the Ohio Village Muffins, who take the field in Columbus each summer. That, in turn, spurred Martin’s interest in collecting authentic memorabilia that tells the story of the game, from its pre-Civil War origins to the present.
Read the full article here: https://www.ohiomagazine.com/ohio-life/article/tracy-martin-s-vintage-baseball-museum
Originally published: May 3, 2018. Last Updated: May 3, 2018.