Pleasant Hill man finds thousands of baseball cards along Highway 4, searches for owner

PLEASANT HILL, Calif. (KGO) -- It was a Sunday drive that turned into an hours-long scavenger hunt for Pleasant Hill's Randy Wilferd.

Wilferd was driving along Highway 4, eastbound near the Antioch Bridge, towing his work trailer, when something went wrong. "I got a flat tire on the freeway on my trailer," said Wilferd. Fixing the tire was easy. It was what he discovered next that turned into a huge chore.

"It became like an Easter Egg hunt, explained Wilferd. "You start going from bush to bush and then I realized how far up the hillside they went. It was crazy." At first, he thought all those specks of paper along the side of the road were litter, but then he took a closer look.

"It definitely doesn't look like it was garbage," he said. "This stuff was packed and there are in these neat collectible sleeves. I don't know what to call them."

Wilferd told us it took nearly two hours for him to pick up some two thousand baseball cards, spread along a quarter mile of roadway. The cards appear to be mostly from the early 1990s.

Many were loose, but some were in protective plastic pages, with those of individual players-like Chili Davis and Ron Darling---all grouped together.

Once he got them home, wife Tara and son Randy helped clean up and organize the collection. "I was thinking gross it's dirty," Tara Wilferd said. "It's all over my kitchen, but it was neat to be able to look through them."

Wilferd isn't into baseball cards. He just wants to do the right thing and return these to their rightful owner.

"You realize there's probably much more of a personal value than financial...right?" he told us. "So, somebody's going to miss this. They spent a lot of time putting it together so they'd want them back."

Wilferd has put a call out to potential owners on his Facebook page and he's contacted several local police departments, but so far, the collector has yet to come forward.