Metro

New York Public Library fighting to retrieve baseball artifacts stolen by thieves and sold online

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Here’s a New York mystery for the books.

Baseball artifacts stolen 40 years ago from the main branch of the New York Public Library are popping up online, and the FBI appears as stumped as a grade-schooler deciphering the Dewey Decimal System.

The library is missing several hundred relics donated by baseball magnate Albert Spalding’s widow in 1921 — including a $50,000 photo of the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings, ancient baseball cards and letters to and from one of baseball’s founding fathers, Harry Wright.

The missing materials — including score sheets from baseball’s first game in 1846 between the Knickerbockers and the New York Nine, and the constitution of Brooklyn’s Excelsior baseball club from 1865 — are worth more than $1 million, memorabilia blogger Peter Nash estimated.

“It’s almost a crime against humanity,” said Keith Spalding Robbins, a descendant of the famous executive. “Albert Spalding made a great effort to hold on to these letters and pictures so everyone in the world could see them. To have people sell them is an abomination.”

The FBI launched an investigation into the ballgame bygones in 2009, confiscating 25 lots of letters from Pennsylvania-based sports memorabilia dealer Hunt Auctions.

But four years later, the FBI has returned most of the items to consignors and some are appearing online — even as the FBI says its probe is ongoing.

Sources familiar with the probe say the FBI struck out on getting enough proof of ownership, especially because the library’s 1920s inventory isn’t detailed.

Now the library is playing hardball to get its property back and is exploring legal options against consignors.

“The New York Public Library has made it extremely clear that it wants all of its materials returned and made accessible to the public, where they belong,” said spokeswoman Angela Montefinise.

One collector told The Post he bought 25 letters worth $20,000 after the FBI returned them to a Texas consignor earlier this year. Auction houses such as Hunt hawk items on consignment for collectors, and collect a commission if the item successfully sells.

A rumored library letter from Wright to catcher Pop Schriver — who played for the Brooklyn Grays before moving on to Wright’s Philadelphia Quakers — is up for sale on the Web site of sports auction house Huggins & Scott with a starting bid of $750.

Scores of items from the Spalding collection are still missing; only three cabinet cards and a scorecard have been returned since the federal investigation. But the still-large collection continues to be open to the public.

Some thefts were highlighted in a 1979 Time magazine report on library cops who caught a crook stealing “a small fortune in baseball cards” from the Spalding stack.

Back then, the collection was part of the General Research Division, and readers would have to request the materials before taking them into a main reading room.

Still, no one has ever been charged. It wasn’t until a 1987 inventory that the library realized how much was gone.