In a house in Scottsdale, Ariz., folded and sitting atop a mass of other papers inside a storage bin, is an obscure slice of baseball’s most infamous scandal.



Calling it a slice actually is generous. It is smaller than that — a sliver, as itsy-bitsy a crumb of a baseball artifact as could be imagined to exist. It is the death certificate of a long-dead baseball player’s long-dead wife, and there’s no reason for it to be sitting in storage in anyone’s home office. Yet there it is in Jacob Pomrenke’s.



The 37-year-old Arizona transplant is not related to Lyria Williams, but he knows just about everything there is to know about her. He knows the day she was born in 1889 and the day she died of heart failure in 1975. He knows she was the daughter of Mormon pioneers and that she spent the last few years of her life in a retirement community called Leisure World Seal Beach. He knows her remains rest in a separate location from her...