72 Stories From the Collection of Geddy Lee by Geddy Lee Bat Flip Signed Edition: December 1st, 2024 Regular Edition: June 24th, 2025

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Geddy Lee, the beloved, iconic Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, Rush bassist, and New York Times bestselling author of My Effin’ Life, shares the stories behind some of the special pieces in his lovingly curated and extensive baseball collection.

One of the greatest bass players of all time, Geddy Lee is also a self-proclaimed baseball geek who assembled a noted collection of baseballs signed by some of the game’s greatest players—selections from which he recently auctioned at Christie’s. In 72 Stories, Geddy shares his love of the game and the stories behind some of his favorite baseballs and other items from his vast collection.

“Baseball was in my bones long before music started to seriously divert my attention,” Geddy writes. He later sang the national anthem at the 1993 All-Star Game in Baltimore, cheers for the Toronto Blue Jays from his seat behind home plate and attends MLB games across Canada and the US. That lifelong love of the game comes through in 72 Stories. Told with the same charming candor that infused both of his memoir, My Effin’ Life, and Geddy Lee’s Big Beautiful Book of Bass, the stories told here relate to the legends of baseball—Satchel Paige, Joe Dimaggio, Shohei Ohtani among them—and to other famous figures who signed balls, such as the Beatles (during their final concert at Shea Stadium), Neil Armstrong, and John F. Kennedy.

A lively personal tour through cultural and sports history, illustrated with more than 180 color photographs, 72 Stories is a delightful and loving tribute to the game.

BASEBALL WAS IN my bones long before music started to seriously divert my attention. As a kid in the Sixties, I collected bubble gum cards with my school buddies, watched the New York Yankees beamed across the border from Buffalo TV stations, and took the streetcar downtown to watch the Maple Leafs, Toronto’s Triple-A International League team — my first excursions independent of my parents. Then, after a decade-long sojourn during which I put everything I had into a fledgling band called Rush, I rediscovered my childhood passion while on the road, at the dawn of cable television when the only things on during the day were soaps, quiz shows, infomercials and — courtesy of the two superstations, WGN Chicago and TBS Atlanta — baseball! And by.the end of the Seventies I had the fever again. Two years after the Blue Jays were founded, I had my own season tickets, and if I was abroad on tour during the season, I’d do just about anything to keep on top of the game.

I remember being on tour in the U.K. in 1981, playing at the Bingley Hall in Birmingham and staying nearby in some crappy hotel. It was the night before our first show and I was hurtin’ something bad to be missing Game 6 of the World Series. Jetlagged and in desperation, I twiddled and twiddled the radio that was built into the wall, and finally heard, crackling through the air, Vin Scully’s voice. Huzzah! I had found the Armed Forces Network broadcasting live from Los Angeles. I lay in bed in the dark, transported through the wee hours, listening in vivid detail to the event happening thousands of miles away: Pedro Guerrero stepping up to the plate and hitting a three-run shot to win it for the Dodgers — a one-man show that capped a 9-2 victory and gave them their first championship title in six years. Scully was the greatest baseball broadcaster of all time, don’t you think? His eloquence, he having cut his teeth in the radio era, is a lost art. He had a poetic, even philosophical way of describing every nuance of the action, even without the back and forth of a colour commentator beside him sometimes. Man, could he orate! He put you right there, like you had your own seat behind home plate.

Through the Eighties, then, I was absolutely mad for the game, devoting much of my spare time to learning the nuances of the gameplay and who the current players were, devouring reference books, biographies and novels about the sport, especially after broadcasters had made references to historical moments, players and plays that went over my head. But in 1988 or thereabouts, with a day off before our show at Kemper Arena in Kansas City, I was taking a walk around the Crowne Plaza adjacent to our hotel, when I came upon a shop called The Legacy. In the window and festooning the walls within were framed photographs, mostly Americana, of famous Presidents and the like, every frame mounted with an engraved plate and a cutout of the featured individual’s autograph. I went inside and rummaged through the raft of ephemera for sale.

“Hobby” is an odd word to use when you consider just how seriously we take autograph hunting, but that is what it’s called. I was definitely always a hobbyist in the obsessional sense; once I’d get started, there’d be no finish. I had a friend who worked for the Blue Jays, who at the end of each season used to present my brother and me with a gift of baseballs signed by current American League and All-Star teams (a cool and thoughtful thing for him to do), but that was the totality of my collection then, and the idea of expanding it had never occurred to me, but in The Legacy that day, I suddenly found myself captivated by the older photos of stars from the game’s long and colourful past. It was like a door on another world, another time, had been left ajar, and I couldn’t resist sticking my head inside. I felt compelled to buy something, but most of the prices were daunting.

Since I had no experience in this area, I cautiously settled on a couple of inexpensive signed photographs, each of which had stories that drew mein....

The first commemorated Bobby Thomson’s “Shot Heard ‘Round the World” of 1951, the legendary ninth inning home run that won the pennant for the New York Giants and broke the hearts of long-suffering Dodger fans. It was a story I knew well, having read Roger Kahn’s The Boys of Summer, the marvelous memoir of his youth and love-letter to “dem bums.” The photo was signed by Thomson himself, an image I’d see many times in subsequent years, but sometimes also signed by that game’s losing pitcher, Ralph Branca. Ouch, you had to feel for the guy! Holding the photo in my hands, I recalled an interview recorded right after his crushing defeat in which he spoke of inwardly pleading with the ball to fall into his left fielder’s glove — but alas, it was not to be. Years after that game it was revealed that the Giants had set up a telescope and buzzer system signaling to Thomson what pitch was coming. Apparently, Branca knew about this for years, but while he stopped speaking to Thomson, he never said a word in public — a show of fine character that he was able to swallow such a bitter pill so graciously.

The other photo I purchased that day was of Satchel Paige, the charismatic and dominant pitching star of the Negro Leagues who finally made the Majors in 1948, at the ripe old age of forty-two (joining the Cleveland Indians), making him not just the American League’s first-ever Black pitcher but also the oldest rookie to debut in the majors — a milestone that still stands. On top of his sheer talent, what always impressed me was his supercool personality in America’s terrible era of segregation. As much as stories of Jackie Robinson’s courage told of one man breaking the color barrier in 1947, Paige’s illuminated how Black players actually lived, at times even thrived, in the barnstorming years before Robinson’s momentous accomplishment.

I’m embarrassed to say that as a naive, white, Jewish, Canadian nebbish, I’d been woefully ignorant of the Negro Leagues. Having spent an inordinate amount of time in front of a TV set in the Fifties and Sixties, my awareness of racial strife in America was mostly framed by what I saw on the Big Three American television networks, NBC, CBS and ABC. I watched newscasts covering conflicts in the Deep South, the Selma to Montgomery March, the oratory of Martin Luther King, the race riots in Harlem, Philadelphia and Detroit, and I’d seen the Hollywood version of being Black in America acted out in Gone with the Wind, To Kill a Mockingbird and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, but while to my young brain that world puzzled and saddened me, it all seemed to be happening far from the melting pot of my more humdrum Toronto suburb. The antisemitism I would experience first-hand, and what little I knew of the way Canada treated First Nations People and its many waves of immigrants, seemed (in its deceptively nice, polite way) less noisy and violent.

The more I came to learn about baseball’s history and the more I understood how forbidding the colour barrier had been, the more I learned about the institutional depth of racism in all of North America. So, like Jackie Robinson, Satchel Paige represented a whole lot of things to me, but mostly he was the consummate survivor (a word that reverberated powerfully in my household), a man who pitched in two very different worlds and kept pitching until he was an astounding fifty-nine years of age! He was longevity itself, so much my kind of hero that for years I kept his Six Rules for a Happy Life taped to my dressing room case on the road with Rush, and which is featured in full later in this book. (I have to admit that in the course of my own life I’ve not adhered to any one of his nuggets of wisdom — for example, “Avoid fried meats, which angry up the blood” and “Go very light on vices such as carrying on in society”; quite the opposite, in fact, but I still recommend them to you without hesitation!)

So, I left the store that day with not just a humble bag of swag, but something more profound: a lightning bolt had struck me, galvanizing me to delve even deeper into the game that I already loved but was still only into knee-deep. I began to understand that through these signed artifacts which had passed through the actual hands of some great and talented people, I could see more clearly into the game’s vaunted past; each item was a window onto history and a piece of time itself. I was discovering how American history and its National Pastime, from the late 1800s to the present, were inextricably intertwined. I then got it into my head to acquire, if I could, a few significant baseballs signed by legends of the game — Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Cobb, Cy Young, Paige et al. — but I didn’t have a clue how to begin. So I phoned The Legacy’s owner, J:W. Jones, as kinda gentleman as you'd want to meet. A longtime hobbyist and collector of signatures himself, he’d been the head of Human Resources for a large corporation for many years, but decided in 1989 to leave that lucrative position and follow his passion (and have more fun) and purchased the store from its founders.

I didn’t know it, but the first question that popped out of my mouth was one that every rookie baseball collector asks: “How much would a ball signed by Babe Ruth cost?” The Babe’s stature as the Home Run King made him the game’s most timeless icon and the ideal starting point for any collection. JW. chuckled and embarked on a lesson in what determines the value of any given single-signed baseball: the condition of the ball, the clarity and authenticity of the autograph, and most importantly, its provenance. There’s also, of course, the matter of rarity. The Bambino was a gregarious chap who loved to hit home runs, eat hot dogs and sign autographs for fans — in direct contrast with his teammate, Lou Gehrig, a relatively aloof character who did his talking on the field and did not like to sign. Hence, while Ruth might arguably be the more universally famous of the two, a Gehrig signature is more expensive because it’s harder to find. Nonetheless, J.W. said he could probably find me a good “Ruth” for around eight to ten thousand dollars, and I bit. (Eventually, of course, I had to have a Gehrig too.)

To steal a phrase from Casablanca, this was the beginning of a beautiful friendship — a decades-long trawl of the history of baseball, propelled by the whims and unevenness of my knowledge of the game — and J.W. would remain my mentor for thirty years. He was a fount of invaluable information, guiding me around the world of auction houses and collectors and drawing my attention to the more obscure but colourful players of the game whose objects would become part of my collection. Those game-used baseballs brought me closer to the athletes, transporting me right onto the field during their moments of triumph and failure. I fell in love with the idea that baseballs could tell a story,? not of the players alone but the actual moments in the games that distinguished them. Evocative stuff!

THE SPORTS MEMORABILIA craze that swept the U.S. in the 1980s boosted the value of many baseball artefacts. A lot of players, particularly those retired, would go to conventions and sign things for cash, just like Star Trek illuminati attending the Comicons. Mickey Mantle, who had become penurious in his later years, was able to restore his former lifestyle by selling off many items that had suddenly become extra valuable; George Sosnak, whose folk art baseballs are featured in this book, would set up a booth and paint you a ball for fifty or a hundred bucks, a helluva bargain, given that they now go for five, six, seven, eight thousand; but the craze also muddied matters. Pete Rose, for instance, will set up a booth and put just about anything on a baseball, like “I’m sorry for the economic downturn of 2008”; I have one that says, “I’m sorry I bet on baseball” and another, “I’m sorry I shot JFK.” That’s pretty funny, and for a while I collected them, but then I stopped because I realized that what he’s doing in taking the blame for all these catastrophic events in world history is trying to make light of his own crime — as if to say, “I did everything. And I did nothing.”

I was having a blast, speaking to J.W. once a week as I travelled all over the world with the band. Because I’d get too excited and would overbid like mad, it was good to rely on someone with some sense and a bit of a remove, but me being me, if I were in the middle of the night in England, say, or after a show in Italy, I’d still call or send panicked emails saying, “Where are we at? Am I the high bidder? Bid more!” And if a bidding war was going on all night and the time zone I was in favoured me, I’d say, “Just give me your login info and go to sleep.” Dangerous! Being able to bid online, and being able to afford do it myself, raised the temperature — and, I dare say, the price. It wasn’t unlike gambling, especially in the days when authentication was not as rigorous as it is today, and I fell victim more than a couple of times. (Sellers, of course, count on that. I’ve seen the same with wristwatch auctions at Phillips in Geneva, with insane bids rising just because two gazillionaires have decided they both need to have the same thing; it happened recently with a record price on an Omega Speedmaster... that turned out to be a fake.)

But no collector worth his salt has ever built a collection without buying at least one fake (and if they tell you any different, they’re lying). Back in the day there were very few authentication houses; it was mainly a field of self-styled experts who’d verify a specific type of signature for you. Determining, say, whether that Babe Ruth ball you just bought had been signed by the man himself or was a “secretarial” signature, required an experienced eye for the nuances of his autograph — while if you wanted a ball signed by The Beatles you’d go to the “Beatles guy.” These days, every item you find at an auction house comes with full certification from an accepted authenticator, so it’s doubly authenticated, but mistakes can still be made. As a wise collector once said, “Who’s authenticating the authenticator?”

I’ve been on both sides of the baseball, so to speak — the collector as well as the signer of autographs that people collect — which has given me some interesting insights: my scrawl has evolved over the years, sometimes going through changes in the course of a couple of hours. On tour to promote my Big Beautiful Book of Bass, I’d do signings and by the five-hundredth find my hand cramping;as a result, there were sure to be small but noticeable differences from the first to the last, starting out as “Geddy Lee” but ending up more like “Jerry Lewis.” Thus, while they’re all me and perfectly authentic, the proof of provenance becomes as important as the autograph itself.

ANYHOW, SO BEGAN a steady, regular scouring of catalogues from auction houses both big and small, opening dialogues with private sellers, as my collection grew and grew. Collectormania is such that at first you’re almost too excited, snapping up things all over the map: single-signed baseballs, team baseballs, photographs, books, pins, pennants, uniforms, trophies, watches, toys, games... Watch out! There’s a fine line between collecting and hoarding. Eventually you learn that the very best collections are more focused, so I tried to streamline, concentrating on single-signed baseballs of Hall of Fame players, and er...a few other things I fell in love with that I felt would surely enhance the overall collection because, quite frankly ... getting carried away is too much fun! For example, after I read The Catcher was a Spy, the fascinating story of Moe Berg’s work with the Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner to the CIA), I not only acquired several balls but also notepaper on which he’d scribbled scientific equations during the war, and tried to buy the film rights to his life story — only to find that George Clooney’s company had beat me to it. (That movie was eventually made with Paul Rudd starring as Berg and pulling off a pretty good likeness, but in my view didn’t do justice to the man’s eccentric life.)

Still awake? Okay, good, because if you know me, I can and will go on for hours about this stuff. (Hmm... maybe I should write a book?) But I’m sharing all of this partly to illustrate how difficult it actually was for me to build a disciplined collection. I’m too easily distracted — or too interested, depending on your point of view — and enjoy being pulled in different directions by a great story ora fascinating individual. By the early Nineties I was most definitely in heat, as JW. and I continued to beat the bushes for the coolest items, concentrating on single-signed baseballs from Hall of Famers — although I couldn’t resist certain others along the way; game-used balls were of great interest to me, but as you will see in this book, I also bought balls signed by Frank Sinatra, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Neil Armstrong and Fidel Castro, as well as Muhammad Ali, Wayne Gretzky, Leroy Neiman (who drew those black-stockinged Femlins in Playboy), the Dalai Lama, Tony Blair, and one signed “Jesus Christ” but whose provenance requires a, uh, leap of faith. Then baseballs signed by U.S. Presidents became a collection unto themselves, which I suppose is weird because I’m a Canadian and (as of yet) there’s not a single Canadian Prime Minister amongst them. For me, the creme de la creme of Presidential baseballs, some featured in this book, are ones thrown out as the first pitch on Opening Day, atradition started by William Howard Taft in 1910. (I don’t have a Taft baseball, but I do have a signed photo of him tossing the horsehide sphere!)

Such is my weakness for game-used items that a nice part of my collection consists of balls from no-hitters, rare home run balls or game balls marking significant milestones that players have achieved (reaching 1,000 or 2,000 hits, winning 30 games, etc.). For the most part, these are the actual balls that were in play and, as such, were part of an historic moment. I don’t generally collect bats, meanwhile, mainly because they’re a bit unwieldy and awkward to display, but Ido have some that also played a part in baseball history — as I tell in the Mickey Mantle chapter.

Whatever you choose to collect, it has to come from a place of passion. For me, at least, it cannot only be a financial investment. Moreover, while it’s true that collectibles rarely go down in value, you can never be sure that you’ll make money on a piece. Which is why I say buy what you love, not what you think you should own. That being said, there is a particular conceit to collecting — the foolish and in some ways greedy belief that you really can own a piece of the past by squirreling it away in your own private treasure trove. The desire to want it all to yourself is something that any honest collector must fess up to — to themselves, at least. I’ll admit that over the years it’s crossed my mind more than once, yet I carry on regardless, powerless to rein in my obsessive nature. But in the end what makes me happiest is the love of the chase combined with the filling in of gaps in my knowledge; in some ways, that means more to me than the things themselves.

I used to wonder why some longtime collectors were willing to ever sell off or trade good pieces, but Ilearned that building a proper collection is a full-time endeavor that requires constant feeding. If youre not prepared to keep adding, the collection risks feeling stale, at which point it may be time to think about letting it go to someone more passionate (and, if possible, turn a profit for all your trouble). Let’s face it, you never truly own these things anyway; you're merely paying for the privilege of minding them for as long as you can before handing them on to the next caretaker.

I DON’T RECALL WATCHING Roberto Clemente when I was a kid. I was too young and American League-centric to grasp his greatness; I only later discovered that he was one of the finest Puerto Rican players of the Sixties and early Seventies, a marvellous outfielder and terrific hitter (a member of the 3,000 hit club, leading the National League in batting average in 1961, 1964, 1965 and 1967), a great all-rounder and perennial All-Star, and a humanitarian whose commitment to charitable causes would lead to his untimely demise.

He got his 3,000th hit on September 30th, 1972 — thus becoming the first Latin-born player ever to enter that elite club — after which he rested for the playoffs. The Pirates looked like they were on their way back to the World Series, but failed to make it, so he returned to Puerto Rico where he managed the team that went to the amateur Baseball World Series in Nicaragua. He’d made numerous friends there and developed a particular fondness for the country, so when on December 23rd Nicaragua’s capital Managua suffered a massive earthquake, he threw himself into arranging emergency relief flights, working through Christmas to raise money for medicine and food. When he learned that aid packages had been diverted by corrupt officials of the Somoza government, he decided to accompany the fourth relief flight, hoping his presence would ensure aid would get to the survivors. His wife Vera begged him not to board the airplane, which had a history of mechanical problems, but he said, “When your time comes, it comes; if you are going to die, you will die. And babies are dying. They need these supplies.” The Douglas DC-7 cargo plane crashed into the ocean. He, the pilot and three other men died in the water just a mile off Puerto Rico’s coast.

In 1971 the Commissioner’s Award had already been established to recognise players who “best exemplify the game of baseball, sportsmanship, community involvement and the individual’s contribution to his team”; in ’73 (the same year the Pirates retired his number 21), it was renamed the Roberto Clemente Award. He’d long dreamed of making Puerto Rico not just a sports city for young people, but a place where they could learn other life skills. Since then, a number of schools have indeed been named after him, but not just in his hometown — in Chicago and Allentown, Pennsylvania too. In 2012, the Puerto Rico Professional Baseball League was renamed “Liga de Béisbol Profesional Roberto Clemente.”

Normally a player cannot be inducted into the Hall of Fame until five years after he’s stopped playing, but a special election was held for him, and in the summer of 1973 he became the first player from Latin America to be inducted into the Hall of Fame. And of course, Major League Baseball has celebrated a Roberto Clemente Day since 2022. It’s one thing to admire the great players of the game, another to single out those who’ve done honour to their uniforms by being model citizens; when you consider how many children love the game, that’s an ideal well worth pointing out. When I take my grandson to the ballgame on Roberto Clemente Day, it’s an opportunity to retell this hero’s story.

As a boy himself, Roberto liked to squeeze rubber balls to strengthen his hands. He used to say that hurling the javelin in high school (where he performed so well, he was considered good enough to represent Puerto Rico in the Olympics) was only part of the reason he developed such a strong throwing arm; “You know,” he said, “my mother has the same kind of arm, even today at 74. She could throw a ball from second base to home plate with something on it! I got my arm from my mom.”

A magnificent player. A magnificent person.

BY THE TIME I became a baseball nut the Expos were already a great team, one that galvanized the entire Canadian population — or at least all the country’s sports fans, as time and again they pursued the pennant. At the end of their 13 season, on October 19, 1981, when they played the Dodgers for the right to go to the World Series. Rush was in rehearsals and my Expo fever couldn’t have been higher. But in those days there was no laptops, so how was I going to go to my duty as both a musician and a fan at the same time?

I ripped the TV set out of my living room wall unit (remember how ginormous TVs were back in the Eighties?) and piled it into my car, drove to rehearsal and set it up in the warehouse beside me at stage left. You can imagine the tension: the Expos with larger-than-life characters like Andre “The Hawk” Dawson and Warren “Cro” Cromartie, are leading 1-0 in the ninthinning. I’m trying to concentrate on “The Spirit of Radio” but see that coming into pitch the ninth is Steve Rogers, so I’m, like, “Hmm. Rogers is a great starter but he isn’t a closer? Then up to bat comes pinch hitter Rick Monday, and I begin to fret. “Wait a second, Rick Monday and the game is being played on a Monday?? I don’t like this at all. What were the gods of baseball thinking?” The room goes ss silent but for the buzzing of the amplifiers as commentator Dave Van Horne exclaims, “Now in the stretch, here’s the 3-1 pitch, and it’s one long fly ball to centerfield. Dawson going back onto the warning track...Dawson at the wall... That ball is a home run!”

And just like that, Monday’s two-run home run gave the Dodgers a lead that took all the air out of the Expos,who went down meekly in the bottom of the ninth. And I turned the TV off in agony; my first experience of the heartbreak of baseball. To all Expo fans that day would be forever known as “Blue Monday” ... Sigh.

The Expos had an incredibly strong team in 1994 too, with Larry Walker, Moises Alou, Marquis Grissom, Rondell White, John Wetteland and Pedro Martinez, and we all believed that finally this would be the year. And wouldn’t you know, along came the infamous baseball strike of 1994 that put an abrupt end to the season. Some fantasy leagues got computers to simulate the rest of the season, and on many of those the Expos won, but in real life, you just wanted to cry. Shoulda-coulda-woulda.

Anyway, back during the recording of Signals, I became pals with “Cro” who introduced me to a few of his fellow Expos players, including the Hawk, both friends from Florida but very different people — Dawson quiet, Cromartie always talking and joking and the guy in the clubhouse giving everyone a nickname. (He called me “Unc” because, I hope, he saw me as a “wise” Jewish uncle.) Dawson was one of my first baseball heroes from that time I’d rediscovered the game as an adult. Years later, in 2016, I ran into him at a Marlins game, where he was a part-time coach, which felt like seeing an old friend, and I was delighted that he greeted me so kindly and posed for this photo together. Sometimes your heroes don’t disappoint.

The other balls here are signed by two incredible Expo right-fielders and HOFers: My pal Larry Walker and Vlad “The Impaler” Guerrero, Sr.. And of course the helmet is signed, “To my man, the last Expo” by Cro, who knew what a die-hard fan I’d been.

SEAVER WAS A wee bit before my obsession with the game. I can’t say I was ever a hugely knowledgeable fan of his, but I always knew that he was incredibly well respected — reminiscent in some ways of Christy Mathewson, who was also a well-liked, well-rounded, clean cut all-American dude, and an outstanding righthanded strikeout pitcher. One of his nicknames was “The Franchise,” i.e., the team’s most valuable player, without whom there’d be no franchise. That’s high praise indeed.

In 1967, after the Braves’ owner Bill Bartholomay had tried to sign Seaver but lost him on a technicality, and then his team lost 0-4 against the Mets, he said, “I get sick every time I watch him pitch.” Playing for the “Miracle Mets,” Seaver was also called “Tom Terrific,” becoming the first Met in history to win Rookie of the Year Award. In 1992 he was elected to the Hall of Fame by 98.84% of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America vote. Now, that’s really high. It shows the level of admiration and respect that he commanded. As the SABR website puts it, “No member of the team was as intricately associated with their meteoric rise from the cellar dwellers to world champions.”

One of Seaver’s most striking characteristics was the way he was never satisfied. In Atlanta on May 21", 1968, for instance, when he shut out the Braves, he improved his record to 6-2 and the Mets evened theirs at 18-18, to him it was no milestone. SABR again (Maxwell Kates writing): “He defined the .500 mark as ‘neither here nor there’ and said that his teammates’ embrace of mediocrity ‘isn’t going to get us very close to a pennant.” That’s the kind of role he played on that team — a leader, a motivator, crucial for the Mets to win. Ralph Kiner, the well-respected broadcaster (and big home run hitter before that), wrote in his memoir Baseball Forever, “Tom Seaver was the driving force behind the players, always pushing the team to be better than they were, never letting them settle.”

By June 16", 1978, the date on this ball, Seaver was already a sort of god of the game. He’d won three Cy Young Awards, five strikeout titles and a World Series championship. In this game, blanking the St. Louis Cardinals 4-0 (with only three Cardinal batters reaching base, all on walks), he got his first and only no-hitter. It was the 211" win of his career, but he wasn’t done by any stretch, as he’d go on to clinch a hundred more.

“This is to verify,” he wrote in the letter that accompanies the ball, “that this was an actual game-used ball used in my no-hitter.” That’s the sort of succinctness that typified him, as is the way he marked the ball: the date and a zero, that’s it. There’s a kind of eloquence to the way that zero represents, if not exactly the rectangular strike zone, the bullseye of a pitcher’s focus. It’s a great-looking ball, a historic ball, representative of an incredible career.

HERE’S A PICTURE of Alex, Neil and me, taken during soundcheck on our last tour — maybe even our last gig. We didn’t want to admit that it might be the last. Well, as far as Neil was concerned, it was; he badly wanted to retire, to spend more time at home with his wife and young daughter, but Alex and I were hoping against hope that that wouldn’t be the case.

As part of our daily backstage ritual, our road manager Donovan Lundstrom would lay out on atable a selection of the numerous letters that venues had received from fans and arena personnel asking for autographs. After he’d eliminated the ones he considered most likely to have come from scalpers eager to put them on eBay (he had a great nose for smelling out the touts!), I’d slip in some baseballs to give to my really close pals as a little farewell memento.

I’d always liked the way certain players would append their signatures on balls with “Hall of Fame 1956” or “HoF 2001,” so I decided to sign mine “Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 2003,” and asked Alex and Neil if they’d sign them too. They did, but just for a short while, until finally Neil looked up at Donovan and said, “I think Deke has plenty now.” Fair enough, Peke!

So that’s how this ball came to be. And unfortunately, 2015 did end up being our very last tour.

end excerpt...

I’d like to thank the following good folks for helping with this super fun endeavor. I could have danced all night!

And lastly, to my wonderful children for not complaining while watching Dad spend their inheritance on baseballs.

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Copyright © 2023 by Geddy Lee

Photographs copyright © 2023 by Geddy Lee
Photo of George Sosnak on page 130 is courtesy of David Angelo

Designed by Paul Kepple and Alex Bruce at Headcase Design

www.headcasedesign.com

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72 Stories: From the Collection of Geddy Lee

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