Or, as the newspaper’s merchandising branch describes it, “hallowed ground.”
What makes it “hallowed,” apparently, is that it may actually have been stepped upon, slid upon or spat upon by a Major League baseball player.
Operating under under the theory that sports fans will buy absolutely anything, someone was commissioned to visit all 30 Major League baseball parks and dig up dirt from each infield. The dirt then was carefully, perhaps reverently, siphoned into 30 tiny capsules, placed in an “exquisite, handcrafted box” and made available at nytstore.com.
For $249.
But wait, there’s more.
In addition to 30 capsules of dirt, the box also contains a drawer to store old tickets. And on the inside of the lid there’s a map showing the locations of all 30 stadia for geographically challenged fans who never can remember if the Miami baseball stadium is further south than Detroit’s.
I don’t know why things like that still amaze me; the lunacy of sports fans is well-documented. A toothpick that once found it’s way between the bicuspids of pitcher Tom Seaver once sold for $440. A wad of gum personally chewed by someone named Luis Gonzalez was scraped up from wherever he deposited it and sold for $10,000.
And, at $249, baseball stadium dirt is, well, dirt-cheap.
A copy of the original set of rules devised by basketball creator James Naismith brought $4.3 million at auction. A Honus Wagner baseball card changed hands several times, most recently for $2.8 million.
Sports memorabilia is a multibillion dollar industry, although not always an authentic one.
Last month a Florida vendor pleaded guilty to selling hundreds of jerseys supposedly worn in games by professional stars. He had peddled them to trading card companies to be cut into tiny pieces and included in their packets of cards. The jerseys, investigators discovered, never made it into games and probably came off the shelves of the nearest sporting goods store.
Which is not meant to suggest that The New York Times product isn’t the real deal. The box of dirts comes with a certificate of authenticity and testimonials from satisfied customers such as “Linda from Garland, Texas,” who bought one for her boss and wrote: “He absolutely loves it and claims it is one of the top three gifts he ever has received.”
She doesn’t mention what the other two were. Maybe one of them was the Nolan Ryan jockstrap that sold for $25,000.
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