“I’m now passing some of my treasures on to younger, more enthusiastic collectors, but until then I’ll remain extremely proud of the vast collection I built with the help of my buddy from the Midwest, and I don’t regret a penny or second I spent getting to the heart of what the great game of baseball means to me.” — Geddy Lee, 72 Stories
Sad words across the baseball world, the season is over.
Fans, however, will continue to connect to the game they love through a number of ways, including books. On deck and holding promise as something very special is a new book by Geddy Lee.
Having published "Geddy Lee's Big Beautiful Book of Bass" (2023), and his memoir, "Geddy Lee: My Effin Life" (2023), word is filtering out about his third book, titled "72 Stories.”
Rush Backstage describes Lee's book as:
At 160 pages, this cloth-bound coffee table book has Geddy Lee telling the stories of some of his favourite items from his extensive baseball memorabilia collection. This limited edition book comes enclosed in a cloth-bound slipcase. Also included with this edition is an exclusive Geddy Lee baseball, custom-made for this project.
Lee’s baseball credentials are rock solid. He was first turned on to the game in the 70s' when he began watching Cubs' afternoon games on TV when Rush was on tour. In the first half of the 80s, Lee began to drop hints about his affection for the game. Inside the band's tour programs he wrote about his equipment, referring to a favorite bass guitar as a “Most Valuable Player.” Frank Thomas of the White Sox seemed to be one of his favorite players.
In 1982, Rush released Signals, their ninth studio album. The liner notes contain the positions the band and crew played during games of softball. Geddy is credited with holding down the pitching duties. Included in the Thank You section is a tip of the hat to Warren Cromartie, the Montreal Expos, and Intellivision Baseball. Cromartie acknowledges his friendship with Lee in his book, “Slugging It Out in Japan.”
In addition to being a fan of the game, Lee also has an interest in baseball history. There is a photo online and in his new book that shows him in one of his rooms, adorned with his baseball photos and memorabilia.
Lee has attended and kept score at countless Blue Jays games, taken in games at other ballparks, sang the Canadian national anthem at the 1993 All-Star Game in Baltimore, thrown out first pitches, gotten to know players, played in fantasy leagues, and provided commentary on The Baseball Network and ESPN. In 2008, in a great act of philanthropy, Lee donated over 400 baseballs signed by Negro League players to the Negro League Museum in Kansas City.
As part of their promotion for the book, Rush dot com has suggested Lee is "the sport of baseball’s de-facto Rock and Roll Ambassador." (Sounds good to me).
They have also published a sneak preview, including photos of three pages of text. I have transcribed them and provide it below.
Have to say I almost didn’t do it because despite playing around with font increase, the text is slightly blurry. But it was just enough.
I also wondered what Geddy and the Rush Backstage folks might think about me putting the words on the web. I feel they would be ok with it, it’s positive publicity, and for the record, I bought his book!
Anyway, enjoy. And any errors, of course, are mine.
(Note: A regular version of 72 Stories will be published in May, 2025).
John F. Kennedy
As a boy raised in Toronto, so close to the US border, I was deeply affected by American television. In many ways we all watched the world unfold through America’s lenses. I clearly remember John F. Kennedy‘s assassination and two days later on Sunday morning in our living room, seeing Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald - live on TV! The events of that time are so burned into my memory that when I came across a Christie’s catalog with the ball you see here with April 10, 1961, written in pink and “Good luck!” in green I flipped out!
To us Canadians, JFK was a hero, larger than life, the ultimate good guy cut down in his youth. It was a naïve perspective, but a child’s one in a more innocent time, when we weren’t really shown the flaws of our leaders the way we are today. (Remember that movie about his torpedo boat, PT 109, showcasing him as a war hero?) So, when I saw that I could actually purchase a ball that he signed after throwing it out at the start of the 1961 Major League season, that was just amazing.
To me, there was nothing more American than a ball that represented the USA’s National Pastime, signed by an actual president. Selfish as it may sound, it was a way of owning a piece of American history — as if you can “own” history! It set me down a road of obsession with first pitch baseballs by Presidents.
The original letter accompanying in that ball (which also has Lyndon Johnson’s autograph) says, “This ball was caught by me (White Sox outfielder) Jim Rivera, on opening day 1961 between the Washington senators and the Chicago White Sox. I had met President John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, then Vice President.”
Decades later I was leafing through another catalog and saw advertised a first pitch ball from opening day 1961, Washington vs. Chicago White Sox, signed by John F. Kennedy, and I was like, That’s impossible. I own that ball!
Then I did some research and discovered that being a true Democrat he threw out not just one ball, but in a sense of fairness an opening pitch to both teams. (In point of fact, the tradition in those days was s a double toss, one for each team.)
Kennedy threw that one out to the Senators. On the receiving end was southpaw pitcher Harold Woodeshick, who trotted the ball back to the newly minted Commander-in-Chief for an autograph and “To Harold Best Wishes!”
Kennedy attended all of the Senators’ opening days between 1961 and 1963. The third ball was not a first pitch, but from Opening Day 1962, thrown to the Senators’ then coach and manager Mickey Vernon. The ball was in the family’s possession until Vernon‘s daughter Gay put it up for sale and I bought it. It’s one of scant few signed by President Kennedy with distinct provenance.
Finally, we have another first pitch ball, this time from April 8th, 1963 (the Senators first game in DC), which Don Leppert caught in a free-for-all. According to the umpire Al Salerno, after the opening ceremonies, President John F. Kennedy threw in the first ball, which Don Leppert caught. I asked Don for the ball and he threw it to me while I was standing in the runway. A short time later, when the President was leaving, he most graciously signed the ball for me.
George Sosnak
The Sports Collectors Digest describes George Sosnak as a man “with a passion for baseball but not the athletic ability to make it fly professionally. He was a soldier, construction crew man, donut maker, recreation park supervisor, and even had a cartoon hour for children on TV, but was forced to give it up as his paintings began to take up more of his time. Despite his lack of athletic skill, he became an umpire, starting in the military in Germany after World War II, and rose through the ranks before settling in with the Pioneer League and later the Three-I League, but his dreams of becoming a Major League umpire never came true.”
This self-taught “accidental artist” started out when he was umpiring a game in 1956, and a fan asked him if he could paint her favorite player on a ball. Sosnak obliged (he apparently always obliged). Every one he’d paint was an homage to baseball players or politicians, bad boys, fans and Presidents in some way connected to baseball, among the forty-odd Sosnak baseballs I own (Cy Young, Bob Feller, Mickey Lolich, Billy Martin, Roberta Clemente, Babe Ruth…) one of my faves features a woman named Dickie Stanky in various golf poses — it was commissioned by her husband, journeyman middle infielder Eddie Stanky, in celebration of her numerous golfing achievements.
Early on, Sosnak’s works were simplistic, with maybe just a team’s logo on it, but then he started completely filling up the panels. Every single detail from the box score of a particular game would go on the ball, as well as paintings of the scene — of the player in question, maybe the fans, even the stadium. In my view they’re superbly detailed, tremendous examples of American folk art, and for the same reason he’s slowly become revered by collectors as feverishly as me.
The story behind the Kennedy ball is that he sent it to the White House, explaining who he was and asking JFK if he would mind signing on the sweet spot so he could paint around the signature. On October 1st, 1962, Kennedy’s personal secretary Evelyn Lincoln returned a letter saying, “Dear Mr. Sosnak, the President was very glad to autograph your baseball. P.S. I’m also returning your dollar bill.” (Sosnak had included it to cover the postage.) Incidentally, the “WINNIE” written in Sosnak’s hand was his soon-to-be wife.
The Gibson ball celebrates him winning the Cy Young Award in 1970. Every centimeter is filled with his career statistics. It’s staggering to hold in your hand. I had the good fortune to meet Bob Gibson at a St. Louis Cardinals anniversary dinner, which was a thrill because he was one of the great pitchers of my youth. He was a fierce competitor with a vicious, intimidating stare on the mound. In 1968, he posted an ERA of 1.12, which is as minuscule as it gets (and in those days, pitchers threw way more innings than they do now). He thirteen shutouts that year, the third longest scoreless streak in Major League history, finishing the season with twenty-eight complete games. That’s just unheard of today.
One unfortunate thing is that Sosnak would occasionally trace over signatures, effectively harming their value — but he did so naively, underscoring the fact that for him the pursuit was never about money. There are stories of his setting up booths at baseball card conventions, where he’d paint anybody any ball for a hundred bucks! Despite all that, auction prices of Sosnaks continue to rise. Most importantly, what you’re left with is the impression of a very sweet man who desperately wanted to connected to baseball — and managed it in a gloriously roundabout way.
Continuation of talking about J.W. Jones
… bringing back players into the Majors (No, they weren’t especially motivated by a sense of racial injustice, but rather to help turn their flagging post-war tickets sales around, tapping into an abundant source of impressive baseball talent, expanding their audience and, as it happened, integrating the sport, simply made good business sense). It was a moving and immensely informative visit for me, but I was dismayed that J.W. and I were pretty much the only visitors there, and as we left that gem of a place, I feared for its future.
That concern lingered with me for months, so I suppose it was meant to be that later that same year, J.W. came across an auction lot containing a quantity of signed baseballs from a range of Negro League players. Individually, the signatures were exceedingly rare, but almost impossible to find in such a large grouping. J.W. suggested that acquiring the lot would be an opportunity to show support for the museum in the form of a donation, which immediately resonated with me.
Looking more closely at the auction catalogue, we found that the collection had been divided into three lots of approximately two hundred signed baseballs each. On the day of the sale, I was en route from Milan to Oslo near the end of the European leg of our tour, and what with the time change, couldn’t get in front of a computer or phones, so I asked J.W. to bid on all three lots.
As I described earlier, we were usually in constant contact during bids, especially when prices were rising stratospherically, but since I was unavailable this time and he didn’t feel comfortable spending my money too freely, he set himself some limits. When I got off the plane, I learned that even without those limits, he’d succeeded in purchasing one of these lots — two hundred and thirteen single-signed baseballs. Pretty darn good, but compared to what I’d have had to pay for that many Major Leaguers, it struck me as shockingly undervalued and I immediately regretted not given him free reign to buy all three lots.
When we received the baseballs and saw what good condition they were in, I asked him and the auction house to see if the other winners might sell their purchases to me. We reached a deal with one, a fellow representing William “Judy” Johnson Memorial Foundation, for two hundred more baseballs, so the donation would now total over four hundred.
In the meantime, J.W. had contacted Raymond Dorwell, the curator of the Negro League Museum, who said he’d be delighted to accept such a gift. On June 6th, 2008, I was invited to a small but heartfelt unveiling ceremony and was very surprised to see my name in the middle of the display, now billed as the Geddy Lee Collection.
I had not intended for the donation to draw any attention to myself, but I reckoned that if it ultimately drew baseball fans from the world of rock and roll and helped keep the museum’s door open, that would be very nice indeed. In the end, I’m proud to have played a part — with full acknowledgement of J.W.’s role — in memorializing the history of the game I love.
I spent close to three decades collecting baseball ephemera with the help of J.W. Jones, so it was a terrible blow to me when he passed away, and it took the heart out of the hobby for me. In fact, I have not bought a single baseball item since. I’m now passing some of my treasures on to younger, more enthusiastic collectors, but until then I’ll remain extremely proud of the vast collection I built with the help of my buddy from the Midwest, and I don’t regret a penny or second I spent getting to the heart of what the great game of baseball means to me.
To come clean, I should tell you that the day after a truck carrying all those precious memories pulled away from my home, my wife Nancy ventured into my office and said, “Wait, I don’t get it… It doesn’t look like they took anything away!”
Busted! I guess she never knew just how much I really had.
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