World's Largest Baseball

In the tiny town of Muscotah stands a baseball twenty feet across, billed as the world's largest. It honors a hometown hero, Joe Tinker, born here in eighteen eighty. Tinker became a Hall of Fame shortstop for the Chicago Cubs and the middle man in one of the most famous double play combinations in baseball history, Tinker to Evers to Chance, immortalized in a poem.

He helped the Cubs win the World Series in nineteen oh eight, the last title the team would claim for more than a century. By the time the giant ball went up in twenty thirteen, Muscotah was a shrinking town looking for a reason to keep people around and draw a few travelers off the road. Volunteers built the sphere from an old steel water tank, with rebar bent into stitches.