Rick Swig has spent decades hunting down some of the most iconic Giants memorabilia in existence, and now he’s making sure it actually matters. The 74-year-old San Francisco collector just donated roughly 375 of his most prized artifacts to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, a move that Hall of Fame president Josh Rawitch called “arguably the greatest collection of Giants artifacts on the planet”.

We’re talking about pieces that span from the 1880s all the way to modern day. Game-worn jerseys, signed baseballs, bats, World Series rings, rare photographs, and one-of-a-kind documents. Swig’s been collecting this stuff his whole life, attending Giants games since 1958 at the old Seals Stadium and building relationships with legends like Willie Mays and Orlando Cepeda along the way.

What makes this donation wild is that it took years to actually happen. Swig originally wanted to give the collection to the Giants themselves, hoping the team would create a nonprofit to display everything at Oracle Park or preserve it in their archives. That never materialized due to legal complications around creating another nonprofit entity, which frustrated Swig but didn’t stop him from doing the right thing. He pivoted to the Hall of Fame instead, and now a massive chunk of Giants history will be preserved for future generations.

Some of the donated items are absolutely legendary. There’s a scorecard from an 1883 game when the team was still called the New York Gothams (they became the Giants in 1885). There’s a jersey worn by the late Bruce Bochy during the 2016 season finale when the Giants clinched a postseason berth in Vin Scully’s final broadcast. There’s original Time Magazine artwork of Mel Ott from 1945. The list goes on.

But here’s the thing, Swig held back all his Willie Mays items. He’s banking on a Mays museum actually happening in San Francisco, and honestly, it’s looking more likely. The Say Hey Foundation, which oversees Mays’ legacy, is working with the Giants to explore displaying his memorabilia at the ballpark or nearby. There’s even talk of using the King Street Warehouse directly across from Oracle Park as a potential site.

For Swig, this whole thing comes down to connection. When he holds a baseball signed in the 1920s by Carl Hubbell, Mel Ott, and Bill Terry, he’s not just looking at an artifact, he’s touching something that touched his heroes. “My DNA is touching the DNA of those guys,” he said. That’s the kind of passion that gets collections like this preserved.

The Hall of Fame will spend the coming months cataloging, authenticating, and deciding how to display everything. And because museums typically only show about 10% of their collections at any given time, expect some rotating exhibits featuring Swig’s Giants gems for years to come.