Restoration
1960 Pirates Roberto Clemente
Royalty again pays a visit to The Dream Shop... Roberto Clemente's actual 1960 Pirates Road jersey needs surgery. Am I up to the challenge? Here we go...
A devoted Pirates collector won this priceless relic at auction: Roberto Clemente’s Pirates road jersey from the Bucs’ 1960 World Championship year. He sent it to me asking me to renew the braid trim on the neck and armhole openings. Now, we here at the Dream Shop regularly handle a lot of precious artifacts, but we admit this one made our knees go a little weak… were we up to the task of making this collection centerpiece museum-worthy?
Looking closely at the neck and sleeves, all three openings showed heavy wear. The trim had deteriorated to mere threads and strings at the points of heaviest wear.
Normally, we turn to our cabinet of notions and odds and ends to see what is there… I have spools and spools of almost all the trim braid used by all the teams over the past 50 years. But this was different… a flannel jersey that was 60 years old, and it used an obsolete kind of fine-woven nylon trim rare today.
Here is how the modern trim looks next to the original style. Close, but how could we do better?
The answer is found in an idea that is unthinkable for most collectors. Our customer procured another 1960 Pirates jersey, that one having belonged to a coach, and asked me to “harvest”: the trim from it and swap it onto the Clemente. Gulp.
We start with taking dozens of detailed photos of the Clemente: all the stitching front and back, the trim placement in relation to the seams and the edges of the fabric, how it is inserted and pinched inside the seams of the garment which we’ll likely have to open up as a part of the process. When it goes back together it MUST be undetectable.
The trim needs to come off the coach’s jersey one painstaking stitch at a time. But it too has wear spots and is frayed, so that it is obvious we are not going to be able to swap the entire strips onto the Clemente. This is going to be even more tricky than that.
We carefully remove the trim from the Clemente only in the spots where it has worn through, which amounts to about 2/3 of it. Two reasons we don't take it all off: we want to leave as much as possible of the original in place for historical value. And secondly, we quite simply don't have enough of the replacement trim to do it all! In sequence you can see the steps involved in the splicing. The good trim is sectioned so that we find pieces that are exactly the right length to cover the bare spots on the Clemente. We then blend the edges of the woven fibers together and stitch the new using the exact color of top stitch (dark gold) and bobbin thread (medium gray) as the original. I don’t want anyone to “see” the repairs unless they are really looking for them. You can see the result in the final photo.
Here is the final result, up close.
Here is how the completed jersey looks, ready to be displayed. Sharp eyes will also notice that I swapped the entire set of original style 2-hole buttons from the coach's jersey to replace the mismatched set on the Clemente.
But that’s not the end of the story… we can’t leave the #43 jersey ruined and bare. That one is restored as well, using the modern trim, which unless I told you, you probably would not know it was not original.
Finally, and this is so important— a Document of Restoration is completed and supplied with the restored jersey. It tells exactly what was done: when, and by whom. The importance of this is very simple. Any future collector who might want to purchase this 1960 Clemente, upon researching auction photos will surely notice the worn trim in the auction photos and wonder what happened, and perhaps suspect this is a fraudulent copy of the original. Our document cements the value of the item by providing a visual trail to explain the transformation. Onto. the next project!