Question of the Day - 28 March 2024

That statue was a casualty of the untimely demise of Tony Hsieh, not to mention his lack of a final will and testament.

According to Jessie Hartlauer, Sr., of Hartlauer Signs, “Tony Hsieh and his property manager Dave Dugan are the two who commandeered this thing.”

Their intention was to plunk the oversized ballplayer (12 feet tall by 10 feet in diameter) on one of the many Hsieh parcels of land in downtown Las Vegas. That ultimately didn't come to fruition, thus the fate of the statue remains very much in doubt.

The Hartlauer family undertook the task of repainting and restoring the massive figure, which had deteriorated from at least 20 years of exposure to the harsh vicissitudes of Vegas weather. However, like the Flying Dutchman of legend, the statue never found a final resting place.

“Instead of this thing sitting in my yard and rotting away, I say they should take it and donate it to the Las Vegas Aviators,” says Hartlauer, who thinks it would be a perfect fit for the roundabout in front of the Summerlin ballpark.

If you can talk your way into the boneyard of Hartlauer Signs, headquartered at 3900 W. Dewey Drive, you'll come face to face with the oversized baseball player. The elder Hartlauer says he gets lookie-loos and people taking photos of the statue all the time — not to mention would-be buyers “who want to put that in their house.” 

Anyone interested in saving the statue had better not wait. Says Hartlauer, “After four years, I’m pretty much done with it.”

The ballplayer in the statuary is a left-handed slugger, by the way, but not Shoeless Joe Jackson. It would be ghoulishly appropriate to decorate a casino with a statue of a player who was banned from baseball for associating with gamblers. But that's not the case.

“It's probably Mickey Mantle,” writes Vegas memorabilia collector Jeff Leatherock from Oklahoma City. “It appears to be a home run swing by a power hitter who is hitting left-handed. Mantle was a switch-hitter. The batter is muscular with large thighs and Mantle's most famous image was this swing for the fences. He appears to be wearing a natural-fabric uniform with short sleeves and no batting helmet, a classic look in the 1950s.

“The biggest pro and con of this theory is that Las Vegas Club managing partner Mel Exber was Brooklyn-born and raised and appears to have been a huge Los Angeles Dodgers fan throughout his time in Las Vegas. He was very close to Maury Wills and others. Although it's usually hard to bridge the Yankees-Dodgers rivalry, the appreciation of the post-WW II era, when New York was ‘The Capital Of Baseball,’ could make a man memorialize the brilliance of Mantle.”

We would like to thank downtown Vegas podcaster and historian Jonathan Jossel (who moonlights as CEO of the Plaza Hotel, across from where the Las Vegas Club once stood), for putting us on the trail of the statue and leading us to Hartlauer Signs.