The Richard Angrist Collection

Born in Brooklyn and raised in Queens during the golden era of baseball in New York, Dr. Richard Angrist was raised to be a baseball collector.  He came of age when the game’s holy trinity – the Yankees, the Dodgers, and the Giants – all played just a subway ride from his home.  His father taught him the foundations of collecting with a fine assortment of Indian head pennies and, with his undivided loyalty to the Dodgers during the 1940’s and 50’s, the elder Angrist also taught his son a sense of passion and commitment.  Richard played third base for the Sands Point Academy baseball team in Long Island, and he learned a hard lesson about life’s capacity for heartbreak when the Dodgers left Brooklyn and his father became, gulp, a Mets fan.

Thus was the path laid for one of baseball’s most celebrated collectors, and the development of an unmatched connoisseurship for articles that most distinctly evoke the essence of, as Angrist puts it, “what happens between the lines.”  Nearly four decades later, Angrist’s odyssey is almost finished.  By pursuing his avocation with the ferocity and determination of Ty Cobb stretching a two-base hit into a triple, Angrist has assembled the worlds most significant private collection of baseball artifacts, an achievement that should be ranked with the great American collections of the century and not simply with other accumulations of sports memorabilia.

True to his roots, the core of the Dr. Richard Angrist collection has a heavy New York flavor, including jerseys, bats and caps donned by the game’s most prolific icons such as Ruth, Gehrig, Mantle, Mays, and Robinson to name a few.  In addition are peerless compilations of New York Yankees and Brooklyn Dodgers team signed baseballs, culled through decades of relentless upgrading in pursuit of the finest examples known.  Angrist’s extraordinary collection is also shaped by baseball’s most significant milestones, such as 500 Home Runs, 3000 Hits, or 300 Wins.  Angrist sought and nearly achieved the acquisition of a jersey and bat used by every member of these elite clubs.  And if the collection lacks a jersey of bat from a certain player from one of these categories, it simply doesn’t exist.

Pictured are a few examples from the Dr. Richard Angrist Collection sold in April 2008.