I like Craigslist a lot. Give me your dilapidated, your taxidermied, your bedoilied -- I love it all. With the Mets in the World Series, I checked to see if anyone had any interesting baseball memorabilia floating around -- ‘86 artifacts, perhaps, or memorials to bygone players, yellowing pennants with which to disgust my roommates.
For $10,000, you can drop this man’s custom Red Sox car from a crane
And that’s when I came across a man in the Bronx asking for Yankees fans to destroy his custom Red Sox car. “Being our country is a want something for nothing mentality,” the ad began, “no one has offered to buy this adorable little car.”
I built it hoping a well-to-do family would adore it and want it, would be for a song, and nobody cares. I am therefore willing to use it in a negative advertisement in New York City collaborating with a television station or radio station allowing people to take strikes at it with a baseball bat or a sledgehammer to raise money to recuperate my investment. Then hang it from a crane 2,000 feet in the air and drop it.
Tim Hall is not actually in the Bronx -- he’s lived in Denver for nearly 30 years. The Rhode Island native and lifelong Red Sox fan runs a custom golf cart company there, and it’s where in 2000 he decided to turn a 1957 Nash Metropolitan he had restored into a rolling Red Sox-mobile.
It’s got green grass carpet and home plate floor mats. It has a baseball bat for a shifter. It’s been to three World Series, including 2004’s in St. Louis, where Boston finally kicked the curse. It’s been to the All-Star Game, to Cooperstown, to Las Vegas’ Stratosphere Hotel.
“I’ve been in parades and little kids sitting there look up at it and go, ‘Whoa, that’s the coolest car in the world,’” Hall says.
Courtesy Tim Hall
But Hall feels that his time with the car has run its course.
“The car sits. It’s just a sitting thing that I have to mess with every year and protect from getting wet,” he says. It runs, but -- well, it’s Rockies country.
Courtesy Tim Hall
So he thought he’d sell it. Over the years, he’s been offered money for it many times including $16,000 at a sports auction -- but never anything quite to his liking.
“I had hoped for the possibility of something great happening with it, like MLB coming and saying, ‘We want 30 of these, one for every team to drive around town.’”
This, of course, never happened. So he turned to Red Sox fans, parking the car outside Fenway Park and hoping someone would fall in love. Once, in Boston, someone -- “some kid” -- offered him $9,000 on the spot. Hall felt the price was too low.
Courtesy Tim Hall
With no well-to-do Red Sox fan materializing, Hall has other ideas. See: handing it over to Yankees fans and asking them to drop it from a crane.
“I’m just pissed off that no one has found it and seen it and loved it and sincerely offered me something for it. I’m just disappointed, mostly. That’s really all it boils down to,” Hall says.
“So I thought to heck with it, let me see if someone in New York wants to do something big with it, something crazy, since there’s the rivalry. I would do it. I’d hate to do it. I love the little car. But you know -- I want to do something with it and move on with my life.”
Courtesy Tim Hall
$10,000, he says, would be a decent starting price. “It took me 400 hours to build the baseball cap and recarpet it,” he says. “I put probably $8,000 into making it a baseball car.”
Hall has gotten some less-than-sincere responses to his ad in the Bronx. “A few people were screwing with me and writing to me, and I’m like, you know, buddy, you don’t know my pain. This is what pisses me off about our country -- people are crass and they’re not afraid to be. It’s the Internet.”
“There’s days I just want to take it to the crusher and say to heck with it,” Hall says. “I’ve been tired of trying to market it. There’s other things to do.”
Would he rather see it stay in the hands of Sox faithful? Of course.
“It’s a gorgeous little teeny car. It’s adorable. Everywhere you go -- everywhere you go -- you get people stopping and looking and taking pictures. That’s worth something. It’s not just another car.”
