Imagine having a valuable hidden treasure down in your basement up or in your attic that was just sitting there for years and turned out to actually be worth millions or have stunning historical value.
We’ve all dreamed of this one time or another, especially if we’ve watched shows like Antiques Roadhouse.
Well, that was the case for Sue McEntee and she almost gave her treasure away for $1 a tag sale. McEntee of Des Moines, Iowa had no idea that she was in possession of a bat that belonged to a groundbreaking baseball legend.
According to KCCI, she had the bat for years. Her kids grew up playing with it in their backyard and it ended up underneath a table on the floor of her driveway ready to be sold for a buck.
Thankfully, a kind tag sale goer discovered what she had and let her know.
“I go, in the summer, anywhere to 2 and 5,000 garage sales,” said Bruce Scapecchi. “I saw a bunch of baseball bats under the table, mostly metal.”
Instead of paying the $1 and walking off with his new prize possession, Scapecchi walked over to McEntee and told her what he thought she had.
“He picked this particular one up and he looked at me and said, ‘Do you know what this is?’ and I said, ‘Well yeah, it’s a bat,’ and he pulled me off to the side and said, ‘I think you might have something here.”
Scapecchi explained that he thought that the unique grip on the bat was that of legendary Brooklyn Dodger Jack Roosevelt Robinson, better known as Jackie Robinson.
Robinson was the first African American to play in Major League Baseball (MLB) in the modern era and brought about the end of racial segregation in professional baseball, according to Wikipedia.
Prior to this, African Americans were forced to play in the Negro Leagues.
Robinson was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962, received the inaugural MLB Rookie of the Year Award in 1947, was the All-Star for six consecutive seasons, and won the National League Most Valuable Player Award in 1949.
“He said, when he looked at it, he said ‘It’s hard for me to tell but there’s one true way, I want you to go inside and get a pencil.’ I went in the house and I got a pencil and I came back out,” McEntee said. “There’s an area on the bat where he rubbed a lead pencil. And if you’re out in the sun you can see the name ‘Jackie Robinson’ and I was like ‘Holy cow!'”
Sure enough, the bat had Jackie Robinson’s signature on it.
“So, it went from being on the ground under a table and being sold for $1 to in the house pretty quickly,” McEntee said.
And it made perfect sense, she got the bat from her uncle who played for the Brooklyn Dodgers alongside Robinson.
“My uncle Joe Hatten played for the Brooklyn Dodgers. He was a left-handed pitcher and they called him Lefty Joe and he and Jackie played baseball together in the 40s,” McEntee explained.
This completely blew Scapecchi’s mind.
“She said ‘And yes he was one of the few players that would room with Jackie’ and I just thought that was incredible,” he said.
So not only was the bat owned by a famous baseball player but a beautiful testament to the end of racial segregation in baseball and her uncle standing against discrimination.
Find out what McEntee decided to with this piece of history in the video below.
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