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Lots and lots and lots of baseballs

Let there be balls

National League drawer

I have five big drawers that each hold 144 balls.

Game balls

Each drawer has four layers, and in this one, every ball on the bottom was game-used.

American League drawer

After snagging 720 balls, I needed a new storage system . . .

Barrels

. . . and decided to go with 32-gallon barrels, which hold 400 balls apiece.

CBS visits

I used to keep thousands of balls in my old childhood bedroom at my mom's place (and yes, I used to collect cards).

28

My 28-ball performance on 4/10/08 at Nationals Park inspired balligraphy . . .

32

. . . and when I broke my one-game record with 32 balls on 6/18/09 at Kauffman Stadium, I got a bit more creative. (There are only 31 balls in this photo because I'd given one to a kid. The three balls on the lower right are in Ziploc bags because I'd fished them out of the fountains and they were wet.)

36

Then, on 9/14/11 at Great American Ball Park, I broke THAT record by snagging 36. (I gave away 10 balls over the course of the day — also a personal record at the time—so there are only 26 pictured here.)

Seat

The first time I broke double digits at Yankee Stadium, I had to find a new way to photograph the balls.

Railing

Then I started taking pics everywhere — on a railing after this game at Shea Stadium . . .

#7 train

. . . and on John Rocker's favorite subway line . . .

Hotel

. . . and in a hotel room in Houston.

Duffel bag 

I caught 321 balls in 2005. This is where they lived until I hauled them to a storage space and dumped them into a fifth barrel. I now have 15 barrels full of balls.

Dump Zone

This happened.

Balls to the horizon

Sometimes I feel the need to get a little artsy-fartsy.

Hallway

And sometimes I wonder what it'd look like if I took 158 balls and lined them up in a hallway. (Good thing the neighbor's dogs didn't make an appearance.)

Pyramid (1990s version)

I built this pyramid back in high school. Want to know how many balls were used? Do the math. The bottom layer is 13 x 13, the second layer is 12 x 12, etc.

Pyramid (2008 version)

Bigger. Better. I had two friends helping me this time. Click here to see more photos of it on my blog. And okay, fine, I'll do the math for you: 2,870 baseballs.

Balls on the floor

This was done for a film shoot in 2014. As you can see, all sorts of random objects were used to create borders and confine the balls to one area. I was skeptical during the set up, but it ended up looking great.

Basement storage locker

Here's my extra storage space. It sucks. But that's what I get for living in New York City, where there's no space for anything.

Baseballs everywhere!

This is how a South Korean film crew set up my collection for a shoot in 2015. It was a fun challenge to keep the balls from rolling off the shelves.

Commemorative balls

If you looked closely at the drawers in the photo above, you may have noticed some interesting logos. This is how I now store my commemorative baseballs. You can see all the individual photos of them here.

Pyramid (2016 version)

This one had more than 6,000 balls! Click here for the video on YouTube.