A friend of mine sent me this link the other day, and it dead on sums up how most old school Sox fans feel about the state of…ugh…”Red Sox Nation”.

I have considered myself a Sox fan since 1986, when at eight years old, I watched Dave Henderson hit a completely improbably home run off of the Angels Donnie Moore in game 5 of the ALCS. When my dad jumped up from his seat and was screaming at the TV, I knew that baseball meant something around here. From then on, I was hooked. I went to games on my birthday every year, collected baseball cards (separating out the Red Sox players for safe keeping), met Mike Boddicker and Jody Reed at a baseball card show, and pretended to be Ellis Burks when playing wiffle ball in the back yard.

Without getting into the whole blog-tired spiel that has been gone over 10,000 times before by other Sox fans, let’s just say that somewhere along the way, things changed. Rallys, Sox Appeal, Pink Hats, Red Sox Nation (the official Red Sox Nation), and furniture store promos have all done something to cheapen the experience of being a fan. It’s getting to the point where I almost want the Red Sox to go 50 and 112 for the next two years, just to purge out all of those dinks that show up to Fenway in the 4th inning, do the wave for 3 innings, and then leave in the 7th to “beat traffic”. Seriously, choke on your Wally dolls and die.

because I’m a Red Sox fan, I’m thrown in this group of assholes known as “Red Sox Nation” and what comes with that association is a bunch of shit I never bought into or deserve for that matter. I’m a Sox fan and sometimes (most times) I’m a complete asshole about it. But I do it in my own unique way that has NOTHING TO DO with membership cards or worrying about meaningless division leads or buying “Ultimate Fan Packs” OR WATCHING A DEBATE ABOUT A FAKE PRESIDENT OF A FAKE ORGANIZATION THAT WAS CREATED TO EXPLOIT MY LOYALTY TO MY FUCKING TEAM! I don’t want any of that and I never signed up for this shit.

So enough with the rally and the extraneous BS…let’s play some baseball.

I finally got around to recording all of the names on two signed baseballs that have been in my family for over fifty years. Both came to me from my dad, via my grandfather, and both of them are extremely cool pieces of memorabilia.

The first, is a beat up (perhaps BP used?) ball, signed by 10 or so of the 1955 Boston Red Sox, including my all-time favorite Red Sox player, Ted Williams.

Probably worth a few hundred dollars based on that signature alone, the ball also is signed by Harry Agganis, which is perhaps an even rarer signature, given that Agganis died suddenly at age 26 after playing less than 2 years in the major leagues.

In addition to the 1955 ball, there is a second ball signed by nearly all of the 1964 team, including signatures from Carl Yastrzemski and Tony Conigliaro (another tragic figure), though both of those signatures are sadly faded to nearly un-readable levels.

There are some more photos of the balls here, which have since returned to a lock box, safe from the light and other potential damaging elements.

And for what it’s worth, looks like my estimate of a few hundred bucks might have been low. Not that it really matters, these are not balls that I ever plan on selling anyways.