Inside the hollow, in a rusted coffee can packed with newspaper from October 1960, was a baseball.
It was scuffed and yellow and one seam was coming loose. Somebody had written on it in fountain pen, carefully, in small letters. Game 7. Forbes Field. Oct 13, 1960. Caught by me, Eddie Kostka, age 11. Then, in different ink, underneath: For my son, when he is old enough to know what it means.
There was a newspaper clipping in the can too. The Weirton Daily Times. A photo of a skinny kid in a ball cap, holding a baseball up to the camera, grinning so wide you could count his teeth.
The couple who hired me, Jake and Ashley, did not know much about baseball. I do. Every man in the upper Ohio Valley does. On October 13, 1960, Bill Mazeroski hit a home run in the bottom of the ninth of Game 7 to win the World Series for the Pirates. The ball went over the left field wall at Forbes Field. Nobody ever knew for sure who caught it.
Apparently, an eleven year old kid from Weirton did.
That boy caught the most famous home run in Pittsburgh history, and then he hid it in the wall of his own house so nobody could ever take it from him.
Ashley found the family through the church bulletin archive. Eddie Kostka had worked at Weirton Steel for forty years. He died in 2011. He had one son, Michael, who was fifty two and lived in Steubenville, right across the river.
Michael came over the next day. He held the ball in both hands for a long time. He said his father told him the story a hundred times when he was a kid. How he snuck into the game with his uncle, how the ball bounced off the wall and rolled right to his feet. But Michael never saw the ball. His father said it was in a safe place. After he died, the family searched the whole house for it. Michael figured it had been lost or sold.
He said, he really caught it. He was not making it up.
Then he laughed and cried at the same time.
Michael took the ball to an expert in Pittsburgh to be sure. The man studied the ink, the stitching, the newspaper. He said it was as close to certain as anything from 1960 could be. He said there were collectors who would pay a fortune for it.
Michael said it was not for sale.
Instead, he lent it to a history museum in Pittsburgh for a year, with the clipping and a photo of his father. The display card says Caught by Eddie Kostka, age 11, of Weirton, West Virginia.
Jake and Ashley drove up to see it. So did I.
When the year is up, Michael says it is going to his grandson, who plays Little League. He is eleven.
Twenty two years hanging siding. I have found wasp nests and squirrels and one very angry raccoon. I never found a World Series before.