Regarding coal futures: more likely a reference to the quixotism of "selling coal to Newcastle"[1], and by extension to that famous Irish-American Quixote, Timothy Dexter, who indeed did so, and broke a miner's strike. The similarities probably end there; Mr Rosier was clearly a literate man, and Dexter was not.
As for the final baseball anecdote, I think you've misread it. It is not from the point of view of the batter, but the catcher -- the anonymous narrator was a boy watching the game from the stands, and he caught the ball at the final moment. It is unarguably a 12 year old Mr Rosier; this would have been during his "youth gang" era, and he tells us that
>Whiston is glaring daggers at me: I will suffer eternally for letting them down. The other guys look away at the stand ...
-- Whiston is one of his boyhood friends, and prior to this incident he disappointed them in some way. Catching that ball was a singular moment of glory, one that he dwelled on for the rest of his life, looming larger and larger in his mind until it could no longer be contained, but spilled out into a vast museum cataloguing everything connected to that instant. It was his "Rosebud". Everything about the war, Poland, etc is a red herring. He founded the museum precisely 30 years after the game, at the age of 42, possibly brought on by a midlife crisis.
It's a funny inversion of Ezra Buckley's project from Tlön; Buckley wanted to secretly invent an entire planet, Rosier wanted to publicly preserve an infinitesimal point in time and space (one which, per The Aleph, contains all other points in time and space, and through it they may be perfectly understood).
As for the final baseball anecdote, I think you've misread it. It is not from the point of view of the batter, but the catcher -- the anonymous narrator was a boy watching the game from the stands, and he caught the ball at the final moment. It is unarguably a 12 year old Mr Rosier; this would have been during his "youth gang" era, and he tells us that
>Whiston is glaring daggers at me: I will suffer eternally for letting them down. The other guys look away at the stand ...
-- Whiston is one of his boyhood friends, and prior to this incident he disappointed them in some way. Catching that ball was a singular moment of glory, one that he dwelled on for the rest of his life, looming larger and larger in his mind until it could no longer be contained, but spilled out into a vast museum cataloguing everything connected to that instant. It was his "Rosebud". Everything about the war, Poland, etc is a red herring. He founded the museum precisely 30 years after the game, at the age of 42, possibly brought on by a midlife crisis.
It's a funny inversion of Ezra Buckley's project from Tlön; Buckley wanted to secretly invent an entire planet, Rosier wanted to publicly preserve an infinitesimal point in time and space (one which, per The Aleph, contains all other points in time and space, and through it they may be perfectly understood).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coals_to_Newcastle
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Dexter