Cooperstown of the west: attorney's baseball collection might be unmatched.

• Author: Taylor, Mike
• Position: Attitude at Altitude

MARSHALL FOGEL INCHES HIS WAY around a large upstairs room of his Cherry Hills Village home, showing off the greatest collection of baseball treasures this side of baseball's hall of fame. The 58-year-old attorney points to the gray, wool jersey that Joe DiMaggio wore in the 1951 World Series. "The last World Series he ever played in," Fogel says of the famed Yankee Clipper. Around him, a hundred or so original photos, some well over 100 years old, take up nearly every inch of space on the four walls.

And Fogel hasn't even gotten to the historic bats, balls, gloves, jewelry and trading cards yet.

Fogel's passion for collecting began in 1989 when he attended a collectibles convention in Chicago. That passion has turned parts of his home into a veritable baseball museum, a shrine for Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Mantle, the scandalous Chicago "Black Sox" of 1919 owns the only known full ticket to Game are of that infamous World Series) and countless other baseball legends and events.

Fogel has treasures from other sports, but baseball dominates, mainly because he believes no other aspect of American culture matches it for nostalgia and meaning.

"When you really look, where was the first place people assembled from different ethnic groups?" Fogel asks. "A baseball game. Think about it. Other than war--baseball games! And that's when people started to talk to each other, and they formed friendships, business relationships. So it really was a part of homogenizing our country."

Fogel's treasures and his accompanying stories are seemingly endless: a baseball showing the surprisingly elegant penmanship of Babe Ruth; a 1952 Mickey Mantle trading card that Fogel estimates is probably worth $750,000; the bat that Lou Gehrig used to hit four home runs in a single game in 1932; as well as the last bat Gehrig ever used, in 1939, before he succumbed to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, now known simply as "Lou Gehrig's Disease."

If Fogel is an expert on baseball photography, he's master on the subject of bats. He once even traveled to Louisville, Ky., where Louisville Sluggers are made, to gain insight into interpreting the trademarks and determining the ages of the wooden instruments.

Fogel is generally modest, but he doesn't mince words about his bat collection. Before unlocking the door in his basement where dozens of bats are kept on handsome racks, he announces, "What you're going to see here is the largest game-used hall-of-fame bat collection...