Joe Sewell Autograph

Joe Sewell is one of my favorite players in baseball's long history. A lifetime .312 hitter who played excellent defense at shortstop, he is best known as the hardest batter ever to strike out, fanning only 114 times in 8,333 career plate appearances. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1977. 

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.