Alexander: Orel Hershiser’s shrine to sports

CLAREMONT – You might miss it unless you’re actually looking for it. But once you get there, whether you are a sports memorabilia collector or just a fan, you might not want to leave.

Located right next to the DoubleTree hotel, at 619 W. Foothill Blvd., is Legends Attic, a treasure trove of sports art, jerseys, helmets, bobbleheads, trading cards and the like. If you are a Dodger or Laker fan, especially, this might as well be sports heaven.

It is a collaborative effort between former Cy Young Award winner and current Dodger broadcaster Orel Hershiser and his business partners, Eddie Allizadeh and Mike Caposio. It’s open Tuesdays through Saturdays, from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., and admission is free.

“A lot of people come here and go, ‘Oh, you’re a museum,’ ” Hershiser said. “‘Oh, you’re a gallery. Oh, you’re a baseball card store. Oh, you have game-used equipment and jerseys. Oh, you have pinball machines. Oh, you have a video arcade. Man, you have Dodger stuff, you have celebrity stuff.’”

“The biggest question we get online is, ‘What’s the admission charge?’” Allizadeh added. “And then, what people are thinking is that this is all a museum. Some people ask, is anything for sale?

“And we typically say everything is for sale, but we want it to have the museum feel, because it’s really important for me to protect the brand of the DNA behind it, which is Orel Hershiser. And if we open one in the future with another ballplayer, like that’s the uniqueness that’s so important to him, I don’t want it to come off.”

Take, for example, the room filled with Dodgers artwork. The bulk of it is from Dave Hobrecht, who has his own Hobrecht Sports Art gallery in Laguna Beach but has created a lot of imaginative pieces for this gallery as well as the All-Time Dodgers Art Book, which was produced in collaboration with former Dodgers general manager Ned Colletti and is available there.

Among the prints, all in black and white: A depiction of the night in San Diego that Hershiser broke Don Drysdale’s consecutive scoreless innings record in 1988, not necessarily reproducing one moment but creating a montage of the sights surrounding that night.

Or what Hershiser called the “all-time spring training meeting,” a depiction of a Dodger clubhouse meeting with managers Tom Lasorda and Walter Alston giving the speech, and Jackie Robinson, Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale, Kirk Gibson, Fernando Valenzuela, Pee Wee Reese, Clayton Kershaw, Pedro Guerrero, Roy Campanella, Steve Garvey and Hershiser himself all listening. Owners Walter and Peter O’Malley were depicted as well, along with Vin Scully, Dr. Frank Jobe, veteran clubhouse guy Mitch Poole, and Branch Rickey. Even Babe Ruth (a coach in Brooklyn in 1938), was in a corner of the room.

And there’s a print of what may be Hobrecht’s most famous painting, “Grace,” depicting Robinson, Campanella, Don Newcombe and Martin Luther King saying a prayer before a meal. Hershiser purchased that painting in April, along with several other Hobrecht pieces, and determined that the original would remain right where it was, at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City.

“When it was shipped there, it broke,” Hershiser said. “And when they saw it (at the museum) they were going to fix it. And then the curator of the museum said, ‘No, let’s leave the break, because that’s the strife and the pressure that these men were under when they went through this time in America.’ “

Yes, there’s a lot of visual storytelling behind these walls.

And it’s not all art. Hershiser’s 1988 Cy Young and Gold Glove awards are in prominent places. The star spangled catcher’s gear that Will Smith wore for a July 4 game is displayed on a mannequin (though, for some reason, the mannequin is wearing Shohei Ohtani’s Dodger jersey). There are framed jerseys of Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal, among other Lakers memorabilia, as well as a room filled with autographed football helmets.

There are also pinball machines, lockers, dozens and dozens of bobbleheads, posters, a ribbon board with a functioning sports ticker. There are non-sports items as well: A painting of Frank Sinatra in performance, a program from the Copacabana club signed by Sinatra and Dean Martin, and Elvis Presley memorabilia signed “to Maria.”

“Do you know somebody named Maria that wants to spend $12,000?” Hershiser quipped.

And yes, before you ask, Hershiser was a collector while he was a player. He had stuff, Allizadeh had stuff, Caposio had stuff, and what’s currently on display is only a fraction of what’s going to rotate through the exhibit space.

“It’s really more than a store,” Hershiser said. “It’s an experience. That’s what we want to be. And so we’ll keep moving stuff around like Nordstrom does, getting new stuff, so that keeps it fresh.”

The inspiration for this concept was the Legends of Dodger Baseball display at Dodger Stadium, Allizadeh said.

“They asked Orel (for) some personal things,” he said. “They wanted to catalog a bunch of things. … Orel’s like, ‘I don’t know how big the space is,’ but he had a bunch of things we brought out from his archive room. And I looked at this and I’m like, ‘This is amazing.’ I’m watching him go down memory lane and explaining what everything was. I said, ‘You know, I thought I had an impressive collection.’ “

Out of that came the concept for a permanent, standalone exhibition space. And while the collectibles don’t necessarily carry price tags, Allizadeh said, “If somebody wanted to have some of these for the home collection, who are we to deprive them of that?”