Thrift-store find is a bargain of a bat

Grant Hartley had gotten lucky before.

When Hartley, a 24-year-old student and summer intern from Brigham Young University, walked into the Heidelberg Goodwill in Western Pennsylvania on July 1, he was hoping to find something "weird or cool."

So it goes for thrift-store shoppers like him.

Maybe he would snag another brand-new, wool Pendleton coat for $7, as he did last year. That's a $193 markdown.

"I paid more to dry-clean it," Hartley, who's interning at American Logistics Co., said.

What he walked out with was a lot cooler than a jacket, though. Mixed in with bins of yellowed books, legless G.I. Joes, and cracked salt shakers was a really old baseball bat. A really valuable baseball bat.

"The place isn't super-organized," Hartley said. "Everything's just in bins, so you just have to dig and look under things. Then in one of the bins, I see this bat, and I realized it looked a lot older than I initially thought."

A Harold "Pie" Traynor baseball bat, specifically; one the Pittsburgh Pirates Hall of Fame third baseman used at some point between 1926 and 1934 that could be worth several thousand dollars, according to Troy R. Kinunen, the owner of Mears Auctions. The bat's knob - thinner and far less pronounced than anything used by players for decades - tipped off Hartley.

Hartley got the bat for $2.22. The Heidelberg Goodwill sells its stuff by the pound. Hartley paid with a $5 bill.

"Pie Traynor used that at Forbes Field," Kinunen said last Friday. "At the end of the season or the end of the game or whatever, he gave it to somebody. He gifted it.

"He said 'Here.' It was common for players. The kid took it home and probably put it in the corner of his basement or garage, and it probably sat there through the '20s, '30s, '40s, '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s, 2000s and 2010s.

"So for 90 years, it sat laying around somewhere and then somebody bought the house, or they cleaned it out and said, 'Hey, let's take this junk to the thrift store.' It went from Pie Traynor to the thrift store, basically, with one stop at the original owner's house. Pretty cool."

And, potentially, pretty valuable. We'll find out how much it's worth starting on Aug. 25, when the bat goes up for auction on Mears' website.

Hartley began the process while he was still inside the store by Googling words stamped on the bat. Hand-turned; No. 200; oil temp. Not bad for a baseball merchandise novice.

"I had no idea about antique bats or bat stamps or anything like that," Hartley said.

Though he went to two Pirates games at PNC Park while he was in town, the Nampa, Idaho, native is not a particularly huge baseball fan.

"But I think every kid growing up in the '90s watching The Sandlot instantly becomes one," Hartley said. "I've always wanted to be able to find something like, a piece of baseball history."

After a 20-minute crash course on his iPhone, Hartley had figured out that Spalding, the bat's manufacturer, periodically changed those stamps - and the version on his Traynor bat was used for eight years in the '20s and '30s. One from that batch that belonged to Traynor's grandson had gone for $7,000. Another, found by a Pittsburgh police officer, went for about $1,900 in 2016.

Mears ran the auction for the latter, so after some more research, Hartley - with the bat sitting in the closet at the DoubleTree he lived out of for six weeks - contacted Kinunen. It seems as if he called the right guy.

Kinunen runs what's essentially a private museum out of a 15,000-square-foot converted church hall in South Milwaukee, Wis.

Only player bats received "hand-turned" stamps in the wood, a tell that Hartley's thrift-store find was the real deal. One of Traynor's bats, Kinunen said, will pop up every couple of years.

"They're rare. They don't just show up," he said.