About a year ago, I found myself in a nearby antique shop which had a ton of baseball memorabilia. Among the items selling was a Joe Sewell autograph, which I just had to pick up:
And if there are any doubts about its authenticity, let me clear them up for you:
Funny, being a very ignorant collector, I don't exactly know what he signed; all I care about is the picture and the autograph. Whatever the case may be, the back seems to have skipped about 45 years of Yankee history.
Fun fact about Sewell: only two pitchers ever struck him out twice in a game. The first was a rookie named Cy Warmoth, who accomplished the feat on May 13, 1923. Warmoth, however, was not a strikeout machine, tallying only 54 in his career to go with a 3.8 K/9 ratio. The other pitcher to fan him twice in a game was just as obscure: his name was Pat Caraway, and he did it on May 26, 1930. Caraway had a career K/9 rate of just 2.8, and Sewell only struck out three times in the entire 1930 season. Why Caraway got the best of Sewell that day, nobody quite knows for sure.
