So many photographs I would love to have. There’s a closeup of Donie Bush by Charles Conlon that is the only known extreme closeup contact print that I never owned. A portrait collector in Europe owns it—someone who cares nothing for baseball. Through a dealer, I made an offer that I estimate was about five times what it would achieve at auction, and I was instructed never to inquire again.

There is also an image of the 1914 World Series in which Herb Moran and Wally Schang are waiting for the ball to make its way to Bender for the first pitch—Bender is unseen—and the viewer is forced to imagine what is happening beyond the frame. For me, it is an expression of what one poet called “slow time.” It’s the antithesis of an action shot; it is about anticipation. I’ve begged its owner for many years, to no avail.

My collection really began to evolve when I started to think of what I was doing as a form of storytelling. I would imagine my collection as a photography book or a museum exhibition and ask myself both what was missing and what had to be edited out to make the stories cogent and compelling. The two stories that I brought to a reasonable sense of completion were, first, the work of Charles Conlon, which has been donated to the Metropolitan Museum and, second, Jackie Robinson and the Color Line, which will be exhibited at New York’s Gitterman Gallery starting Jackie Robinson Day.