[201/365] baseball monolith

I nearly didn't click on this link (shared by the Manchester Baseball Club on Facebook!) but I'm so fucking glad I did.

I was hooked at the first quote from the sculptor of this monolith:

“I watched Game 7 of the World Series (a major baseball event in the USA) between the [Atlanta] Braves and [Minnesota] Twins, John Smoltz pitching against Jack Morris, and became fascinated by it. I read books, studied the game, the history, the legends, the ball parks, all the curses and incidents”.

The best game ever! I hope it's one of the MLB archive games I can get with my subscription because I want to make diffrentcolours watch it one day. (His baseball education is coming along swimmingly! And he's the one who found out there's a Manchester Baseball Club at all! We've even seen them play a little.)

The article goes on, each sentence almost more adorable than the last. This guy made the 162-ball tower out of home-run balls abandoned by the local Richmond baseball club.

Cleaning, drying, polishing with bike shoe polish or toothpaste, before finally using a leather preserver, he painstakingly and lovingly restored each one... “I love the feel of a baseball and the colour, and I wanted to show off every single baseball because it took a lot of time and effort to find these balls and bring them back to life”.

Going through several design ideas for the tower, which included building a scale model using ping pong balls and a broomstick, Goldsmith settled on a design made up of multiple modules of 12 baseballs totalling 162 altogether (coincidentally the same number of regular season games played in Major League Baseball).

“it’s simply just a way to display baseballs, giving them a second life, and building something from lost and found objects”.