When one of those "Have you seen me?" mailers with photos of missing children arrives at your house, you might look to see if the faces are familiar and then toss it in the trash.

	Robin Rombach, Post-Gazette Dennis Bair holds one of the autographed team photos with a picture of a missing child in the corner. Bair thinks fans will keep a team photo longer than a mailed flier, thus giving more exposure to the missing child. Click photo for larger image.

But what if you had a photo in front of you for weeks or months -- on the refrigerator or posted on your child's bulletin board? Would the extended shelf life make any difference in the hunt for missing children?

Former minor league baseball pitcher Dennis Bair thinks it might, so he's begun working with several minor league teams through a project he calls BairFind, which he runs out of his small garage apartment in Squirrel Hill.

In essence, he prints multiple copies of a team photo with an addition in the corner -- the face of a missing child, plus all the relevant information. Then the team stages an autograph session before a game, inviting fans to walk around the field collecting signatures from all the players, coaches and managers. His corporate sponsor is Office Depot in Homestead's Waterfront development, where manager Dixie Leonard is donating all the photos.

"It's great promotion for the missing children, the team and the sponsor," said Mr. Bair, 31, who grew up in Munhall and Homestead, graduated from Allerdice High School, and walked onto the baseball team at Penn State. That lead to a career pitching for the minor league affiliates of the Chicago Cubs, Cincinnati Reds and Arizona Diamondbacks before a recurring shoulder injury forced his retirement in 2003.

"Kids don't throw away autographed pictures of athletes," he said. "They keep them for a long time."

Team photos reach a different audience than the fliers that arrive in the mail, he said.

"You and I look at a group of kids and see a group of kids. But kids look at each others' faces and recognize them in ways that grown-ups don't. If we enlist kids in the search, that's a whole new level."

Mr. Bair has staged six such events since 2001, with the teams distributing 2,000 to 4,000 photos per session. The next one will take place July 30 in Charleston, S.C. It will be his second session with the Charleston RiverDogs, the single A affiliate of the New York Yankees. The featured child is Georgina Lynn DeJesus, now 16, missing from Cleveland since 2004.

"We think it's a great promotion and a really unique way to help find missing children," said Jim Pfander, director of promotions for the RiverDogs, who confirmed that team owner Michael Veeck is an enthusiastic supporter of the BairFind concept. "It's another way to get the faces out there and make people more aware."

It may sound like a needle-in-the-haystack undertaking, but Mr. Bair says two of his featured missing children have been recovered.

One is a teen who was found in September 2001, just 10 minutes from the stadium where the Canton Crocodiles play. Mr. Bair was pitching for the team, which had featured her photo in June, July and August of that summer. He said the case was not publicized because the girl turned out to be a runaway.

"The detective in charge said it was an anonymous tip, so there's no way of knowing if the card helped," said Mr. Bair. "But it didn't hurt." The detective on the case could not be reached for confirmation.

The second recovery involved Tanya Kach of McKeesport, who walked into a shop in March and identified herself to the owner. She had disappeared 10 years earlier at age 14, and had been living in McKeesport all along. Mr. Bair and the Erie Seawolves had distributed her photo on autographed cards last August.

Her recovery had no connection to the Seawolves' photo, but Mr. Bair noted that every missing child who eventually turns up gives the parents of other missing children hope, which is the same thing he's trying to do.

"I watched a TV documentary profiling parents of missing children, and I just felt so bad for them, I wanted to do something. This idea came to me. People always ask if I have any connection to the missing children we feature, but I really don't. It just seems like something that could work."

Part of his inspiration came from cleaning out his old bedroom closet in his mother's house a few years ago.

"I found these old autographed photos of Rocky Bleier and Jim Morrison [former pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates]. It hit me I kept them because they were signed by athletes I admired."

Nancy McBride, national safety director for the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children in Alexandria, Va., hadn't heard of Mr. Bair's project but said the idea was a good one.

"I think it's fabulous," she said. "Any time you've got a captive audience like people engaged in sporting activities, that's a positive thing. It just takes one set of eyes to recognize a child, and any tool is effective if it gets people to look at photos."

The odds of recovery look daunting. Ms. McBride noted that an average of 2,000 children are reported missing each day to the National Crime Information Center. Widespread photo distribution improves the odds of finding them, but most recoveries cannot be linked directly to the pictures.

The direct-mail company ADVO sends fliers to 85 million households each week. One of every seven featured children has been recovered -- 142 as a direct result of the fliers.

Wal-Mart has featured roughly 7,600 faces on its Missing Children bulletin boards around the country since 1996. Of those, more than 6,000 have been recovered -- 148 as a direct result of the bulletin boards.

But these numbers may be misleading, because nobody knows how many times a child's photo led to an anonymous tip.

A case in point: during the 1991 Masters golf tournament in Augusta, Ga., pro golfer Tim Simpson played the course with a computer-update photo of Shannon Minor attached to his golf bag. The child had disappeared from her Atlanta home in 1983, at the age of 18 months. Five days after the tournament, an anonymous tipster called to say she was in Houston with her father. A spokeswoman for the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children said at the time she couldn't link the photo directly to the tip, but allowed that the coincidence was noteworthy.

Mr. Bair is undeterred by the odds, and thinks the staying power of athletes' autographs can only help. He has applied for nonprofit status for his organization, and established a Web site, www.bairfind.org. He also can be reached at 412-414-3620.

If the organization grows as he'd like, he foresees branching out into other sports, recruiting a national network of teams and sponsors. Meanwhile, he's working as the pitching coach at Steel Valley High School and earning his master's degree in education at the University of Pittsburgh, with the aim of becoming a high school history teacher and baseball coach.

"Right now it's just me, so I can't do as many events as I'd like to," he said. "But this has a huge potential. Minor league baseball has teams in over 150 cities. They set a record last year of 41 million fans, which is more than a lot of other sports. They have thousands of fans lining up for autographs because the players are so accessible.

"I must have signed thousands of them when I was playing and the fans didn't even know who I was. The kids know these are the major players of the future. Any one of them could become the next big star, so they really hold onto those pictures.

"I didn't get to the big leagues because of my shoulder," he said, "but I can do this."