If these baseballs could talk: Ada man claims largest collection of Tigers autographs

Ada — It was 35 years ago, back in 1988, when Steve Nagengast found himself plopped in front of the TV watching the Home Shopping Network, and legendary New York Yankees slugger Mickey Mantle was hawking autographed baseballs for 50 bucks.

Intrigued, Nagengast picked up the phone and bought one, fancying it a modest investment.

Of course, he screwed up that investment, getting Mr. Tiger, Al Kaline, to sign the same ball, as well as Los Angeles Dodgers legend Maury Wills, who began his playing career in the Tigers’ organization. Kaline’s signature gave the ball another Hall of Famer, but in the collectibles world, a standalone Mantle is much more valuable.

“I realized, oh (bleep), that was a big mistake,” Nagengast said, with a laugh. “So, I learned from that.

“But then, you know, I kind of got interested in this.”

What this has become, since that little old impulse purchase back in 1988, is a museum-quality shrine, dedicated largely to the team he rooted for while he was growing up in Metro Detroit. Nagengast believes this to be the largest private collection of Tigers’ autographed baseballs in the universe. He counts more than 1,100 autographed Tigers’ baseballs — he’s got lots of doubles, but doubles don’t count — most of them single-signed, including almost all the players from the Tigers’ four World Series championships: 1935, 1945, 1968 and 1984.

The collection takes up practically the entire lower level of Steve and wife Mary’s home here, east of Grand Rapids. Mary calls it the living room — the living-history room might be a better description.

The balls are spread out over two rooms, with four jewelry cabinets — sun-protected with dark sheets when nobody’s visiting — in the main room, and three more back in Steve’s office. They actually moved into the house shortly before COVID-19, prioritizing a space for his baseballs almost more than the usual hits of house-hunting, like bedrooms and bathrooms. (In their old house, they actually had to build an addition because the collection grew so much.) Here in the Ada shrine, there’s every notable Tiger you can imagine, from Ty Cobb to Al Kaline (more on him later), from Hank Greenberg to Miguel Cabrera, from Hal Newhouser to Justin Verlander, and a whole lot of not-so-notable ones, too. Some of those actually make the best stories.

“That’s the coolest part of Steve’s collection, and what he wants it to be, wherever it ends up being,” said Mike Maiman, a friend and fellow baseball memorabilia collector from Beverly Hills, Mich.

“He wants the stories around these balls to be told.”

That, in large part, is why this story is being told.

Nagengast’s collection has been a passion project carried out almost entirely in private — shared with just family and friends — for so long, for fear, Mary’s fear really, that any publicity could make their house a target of thieves. But, Steve is now 71 and Mary is 69, and they’re starting to think about the collection’s future, after they’re gone, or if they can find the right home sooner, before they’re gone.

Nagengast eventually wants his collection — as a whole, not piecemealed off — to be available for the public to view, whether that’s in Detroit, where the Ilitch family curator has taken a meeting and is interested, with the Tigers planning to add more historical touches to Comerica Park in the coming years, or in Grand Rapids, where the West Michigan Whitecaps have expressed interest as part of their looming ballpark upgrades.

Or maybe the baseballs will end up on display at a public library somewhere, like the Ernie Harwell collection at the Detroit Public Library — though, for the record, they’ve said they don’t have the space. That’s fair. Even the Baseball Hall of Fame can only display a fraction of the memorabilia it’s collected over the years.

Steve and Mary Nagengast have two daughters and four grandkids, though none of them is overly passionate about the Tigers. And, really, passing a collection like this down to family members often creates more headaches than it’s worth. There’s the transporting issue, the space issue, the preservation issue, the tax issue, and then, of course, the insurance issue. Nagengast’s collection is insured for as much as $400,000 — at first thought, you’d think it’d be worth more, but remember, there are a lot more Walt Terrells and Ryan Raburns than Cobbs and Greenbergs — though he’s not looking to sell it. It’s never been about the money. It’s been about the memories.

“My health is good,” Nagengast said. “It’s not like I’m in a rush. But, if the right opportunity came along, and it was special, I’d consider moving it sooner than later.

“You know, it’d rip my heart up if nobody wants it, fine. I’ll sell it, I’m sure.

“But, I’m picky about how I want it presented.”

The first autographed baseball was easy. Nagengast just pulled out his credit card and dialed the phone.

The foundation of the eventual collection was a bit more complicated, and a lot of trial and error. Before the days of eBay and online auctions, Nagengast would actually mail players from yesteryear — hundreds and hundreds of them. He’d send a polite letter and a baseball, along with a return box for the baseball, with postage, of course. He found mixed results with that process, figuring maybe only two-thirds of old ballplayers sent back the autograph.

Figuring he was wasting too much money on baseballs that were never returned, plus the shipping, he changed up his process, instead first sending postcards to old ballplayers asking if they’d sign if he sent them a ball. Then, when he got back a “yes” card, he’d then send out the baseball, with the shipping box. Nagengast would also throw in a $5 or $10 bill, telling the player that his next coffee or draft beer was on him.

“Didn’t one come back, like, years later?” Mary asked.

“Yes! Who was that one? I can’t remember,” Steve said. “But, one was like two years later.”

Nagengast picked up his fair share of autographs in person, like when the Tigers would visit Grand Rapids as part of their winter publicity tour. He got Denny McLain when he was in town, and Jim Northrup, too, among others. He picked up several during his many trips to Tigers Fantasy Camp, in Lakeland, Fla., over the years.

He’s also gotten help on the east side of the state, in longtime friend Greg English — the two became fast friends as freshmen at Birmingham Brother Rice High School, sharing a bond over coming from public school, and eventually went to Marquette University in Milwaukee together — who has been Nagengast’s autograph hound in Metro Detroit. English, a collector himself, is a regular at sports shows in Troy, Taylor and Redford.

Later this month, Joe Siddall, a catcher on the 1998 Tigers, is coming to a card show in Troy. Nagengast doesn’t have Siddall’s autograph — who does? — so English will score it for him.

“He’s got all the famous guys, but it’s the obscure guys that I find for him,” said English, 71, of Livonia.

“There are some players still out there.”

For instance, Eric King (pitcher, 1986-88) or Stan Papi (infielder, 1980-81), just in case either of them one day stumbles upon The Detroit News.

Nagengast’s collection includes Tigers players — and managers, broadcasters, owners and executives — from the early 1900s through a few years ago. He’s stopped collecting the current crop of baseball players, mostly because he thinks the legibility of autographs has gone down dramatically. He likes a clean, pretty signature — think Kaline — and, at the very least, believes you should be able to know what player signed the baseball. The last handful of decades has been easy. Most of those players are still alive. It’s the 1950s and before that’s been a challenge.

For those, Nagengast has turned to auctions — either eBay, or more sophisticated, like Heritage.

He continues to browse the internet every day.

“He tries every morning,” said Mary, who met Steve back when they were working at IBM together in South Bend, Ind. Steve is retired from an accounting consulting firm. “I know where to find him, in his office, always.

“I have Alexa hooked up as an intercom now, so I don’t have to walk down.”

The baseballs are Steve’s passion, though there is one that Mary loves most — one of dozens of outliers from the Tigers collection — a ball signed by the Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, who was the president of Notre Dame when the university first admitted women in 1972. Mary graduated from Notre Dame in 1976 as a member of that first class.

Otherwise, she’s mostly the steady hand behind Steve’s sometimes-frantic wheelin’ and dealin’. She made him start a detailed spreadsheet, for insurance purposes, and keeps on him to keep it updated. Steve also has several binders of his certificates of authenticity.

For the most-valuable baseballs, anything over $100, he’ll spend for the extra layer of authentication, through PSA, JSA or Beckett. Once, an autographed baseball by Stan Coveleski — a pitcher in the early 1900s from South Bend; not a Tiger, but sentimental for Steve and Mary because of the hometown — couldn’t be authenticated after he picked it up from a Cleveland show. Sometimes, one outlet will authenticate an item, while another won’t. You want a consensus. Nagengast is more careful these days. He once went to buy a Sam Crawford baseball, but he wanted two companies to authenticate before he purchased it. One did, one didn’t, so he passed.

“Yeah, I’ve been burned,” Nagengast said. “Not many times, but maybe I’ve been burned four or five times.”

Nagengast’s displays are broken down into several categories, each labeled for easy browsing. There’s a display for each of the World Series teams, All-Stars, notable achievements, “Bad Boys and Quirky Players,” Hall of Famers (he has duplicates of many autographs, so they can fit in different displays), future Hall of Famers (he’s a bit too optimistic on Bill Freehan, not optimistic enough on Gary Sheffield), 1900-49 players, and a display for each decade from the 1950s through the 2010s.

He also has displays for some notable individual moments, like a signed picture of Eddie Cicotte, a member of the 1905 Tigers who was part of the 1919 Black Sox scandal (and is buried in Livonia), as well as a signed document by Wally Pipp, the Yankees’ first baseman best known for missing a day only to watch some guy named Lou Gehrig play the next 2,130 (he’s buried in Grand Rapids). There’s also a display for the autograph of Johnny Nuen, who turned an unassisted triple play in 1927.

One of his favorite displays — besides the adorable shelf dedicated to grandson Harry; each of the four grandkids signs a ball for Steve every year on their birthday to be part of the collection, while his two kids’ go-to birthday and holiday present for him for years has been MLB-official baseballs (retail price for a dozen: $238.95) — features the autograph of Eddie Gaedel, who, famously, at just 60 pounds and 3-foot-7, was the smallest player ever to appear in a Major League Baseball game.

He got to bat in the second game of a doubleheader for the St. Louis Browns, against the Tigers, on Aug. 19, 1951, and, no surprise, walked on four straight pitches. Gaedel appeared in the game at age 26 and died young at 36, when he was beaten after a night of bowling, making his autograph a Holy Grail-type score. The display also features several autographs of Tigers who appeared in the game (including George Kell), as well as a signed ball by Bill DeWitt Jr., currently chairman of the St. Louis Cardinals, who was a bat boy for the Browns. He loaned his jersey to Gaedel, who wore the number “one-eighth.”

“There’s only 10 out in the world,” said Nagengast of Eddie Gaedel’s autograph, which is on paper.

Ninety-nine percent, at least, of Nagengast’s autograph and memorabilia collection is baseballs. He has one bat, signed by Hall of Famer Eddie Matthews. He purchased Kaline’s 1967 Gold Glove trophy in the Kaline estate auction, at $11,200 his most expensive memorabilia buy. There’s a framed autograph picture display of Jim Leyland, from the day Nagengast got to manage a spring-training game in Lakeland (the Tigers lost) after winning a charity auction. He’s got papers (like Gaedel), notecards and baseball cards of some players for whom he can’t get a ball, mostly because they died young, like Bob Christian and Joe Sparma.

It’s easy to gravitate toward the big-named autographs, like Cobb (a ball signed just weeks before his death in 1961), or Greenberg, or Kaline — a man who became quite friendly with Steve over the years, from their time together at fantasy camp, which is why Mr. Tiger’s autograph is seemingly everywhere you turn in Steve’s collection. There’s also a Babe Ruth baseball, the Bambino’s signature on the sweet spot of a 1933 Tigers’ team ball. The story goes, back in the 1930s, both teams would eat meals together, and an autograph collector was catching the Tigers’ players at a local hotel when one told the scavenger hunter that Ruth was upstairs.

Nagengast picked that ball up from a collector in Flint. His first offer was $4,000, which so insulted the seller that he hung up. Nagengast tried to call back and up the bid, but the guy ghosted him — before ghosting was a thing.

So Nagengast turned to Maiman, 74, who called the collector and brokered the deal for around $7,000.

“Steve likes to lowball on his bids,” Maiman said, with a laugh. “This particular one took insult and told him he wasn’t going to sell him the ball. I was commissioned to pretend to be a new guy and bought the ball.”

(That deal went a lot better than Maiman’s own Babe Ruth purchase. He once bought a Babe Ruth autograph from a store at Somerset, only for it to turn up fake when he went to get it authenticated.)

But, for all the big names — including every player who went into the Baseball Hall of Fame as a Tiger: Cobb, Crawford, Gehringer, Greenberg, Harry Heilman, Kaline, Kell, Jack Morris, Hal Newhouser and Alan Trammell — there’s one autograph that stands out the most to Nagengast, because of the story it tells. The autograph is from a man named Al Travers, whose major-league resume includes exactly one game, and a 15.75 ERA.

Cobb had famously been suspended for beating up a fan, and his Tigers teammates decided to strike over the decision. That led to a wild game on May 18, 1912, between the Tigers and A’s in Philadelphia, where Detroit was staffed by replacement players. One was Travers, who pitched eight innings and allowed 24 runs on 26 hits. He struck out one!

The story goes, then-Tigers manager Hughie Jennings — one autograph, by the way, that eludes Nagengast; he found one at auction and went up to $24,000, but wouldn’t go to $27,000, which is where it ultimately sold — found Travers, then 20, on a street corner and signed him for the day. After his playing “career,” Travers became a priest.

Nagengast bought the ball from Alan Schwarz, an investigative journalist and Pulitzer Prize finalist who was among the first to shine a light on the NFL’s concussion problem.

“True story,” Nagengast said. “I’m on the phone with him, negotiating it. We work out the deal. I come downstairs and literally within five minutes — Mary, you were watching TV — I flipped to a documentary where they were talking about CTE, the brain injury. And all of a sudden, they’re interviewing Alan Schwarz.”

Ah, just another story from a collection full of good stories.

“His baseballs,” said English, “you talk about a labor of love. … He’s got guys I’ve never heard of.”

“He could go another 300 players if he was just looking for quantity,” said Maiman, who also counseled Nagengast through the competitive Kaline auction. “It’s the quality of his collection that makes it so unique.”

Aside from the Tigers balls, the collection also includes a bevy of other Baseball Hall of Famers, like Pete Rose (who doesn’t have a Pete Rose ball? Steve has two), Bob Feller, Ernie Banks, Willie Mays, Nolan Ryan and others. There’s a special separate display case for Ichiro Suzuki. There are presidents, including Gerald Ford, George Bush and Jimmy Carter. And there’s a Notre Dame collection, including Lou Holtz, Brian Kelly and Ara Parseghian, who coached the “Game of the Century” against Michigan State.

And, of course, there’s the Mantle baseball — or, more accurately and unfortunately, the Mantle-Kaline-Wills baseball — which started it all.

Who would’ve thought?

“I never anticipated,” said Mary, “the whole thing being part of a museum.”

That just might be where the collection is headed next, stories and all.

Oh, if these baseballs could talk.

tpaul@detroitnews.com

Twitter: @tonypaul1984