Standard Catalog Update #34 : You like Globes? We got 'em!

Among the subjects we regularly touch on in this space, one of the most popular appears to be the early 1950s Globe Printing Co. minor league team sets.

One of Globe's biggest fans and most ardent collectors, though he, like all other Globe collectors has a tough time finding specimens to add to his holdings, is Mark Bowers.

Mark recently sent in some enhancements to the checklist for the 1952 Dallas Eagles set which we share with you herewith.

Like all Globe minor league sets, there is nothing on the cards to identify the Dallas set as being a Globe product. And, while the Dallas cards are not identical in format to other known Globes, they have more in common than they do differences. The Dallas cards, as exemplified (BTW: Why isn't it "examplified?) by the Don Mossi pre-rookie shown here, have a white border. They are, however, in the same 2-1/4" x 3-38" size with full-length player photos in a stadium setting and a simple name strip. So, it is more likely than not that they are from Globe.

Another difference between the Dallas set and most other Globe issues, is that there are currently 21 known players on the checklist. Most other Globe sets top out at 18 cards. Since it appears that most Globes were printed on six-card sheets, we might reasonably expect to see three more Dallas Eagles cards in the future.

The Eagles were the Class AA Texas League farm club of the Cleveland Indians. Looking over their roster for 1952, about the biggest name that has not yet been seen in the set is pitcher Jose Santiago, though there were a few other cup-of-coffee future major leaguers on the team.

Here, then, is the revised checklist for the Globe Printing Co. 1952 Dallas Eagles team issue (Mark's recent additions are in bold):

Ralph Albers

Dick Aylward

Jodie Beeier

Bob Bundy

Johnny Creel

Bob Cullins

Hal Erickson

Dave Hoskins

Bud Hutson

Edward Knoblauch

Joe Kotrany

Joe Macko

Allan Maul

Peter Mazar

Dutch Meyer

Don Mossi

Clyde Perry

Ray Peters

Harry Sullivan

Frank Tornay

Edward Varhely

Tales of T212 #18 : Franklin J. Spencer

Back in the early 1980s I thought I'd combine my interests in minor league baseball and vintage baseball cards by assembling a collection of the Obak cigarette cards that were distributed on the West Coast in 1909, 1910 and 1911.I didn't realize it then, but those cards are so much rarer than most of the contemporary T206 cards from "Back East" that putting together complete sets of the Obak could take decades to accomplish -- and that's if a guy had more money than God to buy the cards when they became available.At about the time I started my Obak collection I also started researching the players who appeared in the sets. Over the course of several long Wisconsin winters I pored over microfilms of The Sporting News and The Sporting Life from the period several years before to several years after the Obak cards circulated, making prodigious notes on 3x5 file cards for each player in the set.I gave up trying to collect the T212s (that's the catalog number Jefferson Burdick assigned the three sets in the pioneering American Card Catalog in 1939), long ago, and have since sold off all my Obaks, one-by-one, first on eBay, then on the Net 54 baseball card forum. As I was selling each card, I included interesting tidbits about each player from my notes. The bidders seemed to like learning a little bit about these guys on the cards, so I thought I'd now begin sharing their stories here.

"Stub" Spencer was nearing the end of a lengthy, though undistinguished, minor league career when he made his lone Obak baseball card appearance in the 1911 set. (By the way, I'm long overdue apologizing for the quality of the card pictures I use in these postings. They are lo-res images that I scanned from my Obak collection many years ago. The cards are now long dispersed in other collections, so I'm stuck with what I had.)

We don't know when or where Spencer was born. The SABR Minor League Database records his first professional engagement as being with St. Paul in 1901. A player's first pro team is often, though by no means not always, close to home, so it's possible Spencer was a "western" boy. He did, in fact spend his entire pro career west of the Mississippi River.

Spencer started out as an outfielder. In 1902 he was with three of the six teams that made up the short-lived (1902-1903) Class D Iowa-South Dakota League: the Sioux City Cornhuskers, Sioux Falls Canaries and Le Mars Blackbirds. Though the league's stats appear to have been unrecorded, Spencer earned a berth on a Class A team, Seattle of the Pacific National League, for 1903. In 1904 he was with Butte, also in the PNAL.

In 1905, Bellingham of the Northwestern League moved Spencer went behind the plate, where he remained for the rest of his playing days. It looks like Spencer spent most of his career as a second-string catcher, obviously because of his light hitting. Between 1903-1913, he never hit above .248, and four times failed to break out of the .100s. He had only two career home runs.

Spencer rarely spent more than a single season with any team. In 1906 he was with Davenport. He played for both Vancouver and Aberdeen in 1907, and split 1908 with Aberdeen and Butte. In 1909 he was with Spokane. He played for Seattle and Tacoma in 1911 and ended his professional career in 1913 at Edmonton. In looks like Spencer was out of Organized Baseball in 1910 and 1912.

As with his birth specifics, the date and place of his death are unknown.

UPDATE: Veteran collector Dave Eskenazi, who specializes in early professional baseball in the Northwest, has provided some further details about Stub Spencer. Armed with his findings, it looks like we've also found Spencer's whereabouts during the 1910 season.

In 1910 the Edmonton Eskimos of the Western Canada League had a catcher named Spencer. Since biographical details (such as furst names) for that Class D minor league circuit are hard to come by, we can't be sure, but it looks like that was ol' Stub. He hit a decent .280 that season.

After his return to the NWL with Seattle and Tacoma in 1911, Spencer was back in the WCL in 1912, with the Red Deer (Alberta) Eskimos, where he hit .251. That's Spencer's photo, provided by Dave, at left.

We noted earlier that he had ended his pro career with Edmonton of the WCL in 1913, but Dave found both a photo and a record that show that Spencer caught for the Saskatoon Quakers of the WCL in 1914, when they won the league pennant, though Spencer contributed only a .146 batting average to the effort.

Standard Catalog Update #20-21a : Another Globe Discovery

O.K., I think I've got it now. Another piece of the puzzle that is the Globe Printing Co. minor league opus of the early 1950s has come our way . . . and forced a correction to what we had posted here on Aug. 25.

In that post we listed a checklist of nine Globe Printing Co. Ponca City Dodgers, speculating they were probably part of a set of 18, since it appears that Globe printed six-card sheets. The next day we posted about a Globe card for Fred "Rip" Collins, that had been reported by the same collector who turned up the P.C. Dodgers. We speculated that the Collins was probably part of a Globe team-set of the Independence Browns.

The other day, in response to the SCD Update #20-21, we heard from collector Chuck Hensley, woh has a friend who has a 1952 Globe Ponca City Dodgers album, with all nine of the checklisted P.C. Dodgers. What really caught my attention, though, was that the scans he sent also included the Rip Collins card, along with two other non-Dodgers.

Earlier I had been willing to believe that the inclusion of the Collins card with the first group of P.C. Dodgers was an anomaly, but when the same card turned up in a second grouping, it dawned on me that Collins was actually part of the Ponca City issue.

The two other non-Dodgers cards that Hensley has in the album are Hershel Martin and Al Reitz. It then became clear that Globe's issue for the P.C. Dodgers included not only their manager Boyd Bartley, but also the managers of at least three other teams from the 1952 Kansas-Oklahoma-Missouri League. Collins, as mentioned was one of them. A little poking around on the SABR Minor League database confirmed that Reitz and Martin were also K-O-M skippers in '52.

Reitz was plying manager for the Blackwell (Okla.) Broncos, the Chicago Cubs affiliate in the Class D K-O-M. Martin was manager of a Pirates farm team that moved from Bartlesville, Okla., to Pittsburg, Kans. during the 1952 season, the final year for the K-O-M.

Reitz was a career minor league player and manager whose career spanned 1924-1953. He made it as far as Milwaukee and Buffalo, but never saw any major league meal money. With the Broncos in 1952, he was still pitching at age 48.

Martin, in contrast, did enjoy a modest major league career, albeit mostly during the WWII years. After having been playing professionally since 1932, he spent the 1937-1940 seasons with the Philadelphia Phillies. He appears in both the 1939 and 1940 Play Ball card sets. After stints wiht Jersey City, Tulsa and Milwaukee, 1940-1944, he was traded to the New York Yankees, for whom, he played in 1944-45. After the war he played in 1946-1947 for Oakland in the Pacific Coast League, where he appeared on such regional minor league issues as the 1946-1947 Remar Bread Oaks, and the 1947 Signal Oil Oaks. He remained in the minors as a player and/or manager through 1957. With the K-O-M Pirates in 1952, at the age of 42, he managed and played some at first base and in the outfield, batting .298.

With those three managers and the nine known P.C. Dodgers, we come up with 12 cards -- two press sheets if Globe followed its usual format. Whether or not there was a third six-card sheet with a few more of the P.C. Dodgers and [the other managers of the K-O-M League, Woody Fair of the Iola Indians and John Davenport of the Miami Eagles, remains to be seen.

Harry Decker: Catcher, inventor, convict . . . missing

One of the more interesting players to be found among the 500 or so in the Old Judge tobacco card series of 1887-1890 is Harry Decker. He not only played four seasons of major league ball and was immortalized on a baseball card, but he was also an inventor and a felon.

Decker was born in Lockport, Ill., in 1864. His given name was Earle Harry Decker, but in the course of his lifetim, he was known to have adopted several aliases, making the tracking of his life outside of baseball impossible.

He began playing pro ball with Evansville as a teenager in 1884, before Indianapolis, then in the major league American Association, signed him later that season. After just a handful of games with the Hoosiers, he joined a second short-lived major league, the Union Association, with the Kansas City Cowboys.

Though the UA folded after just one season, Decker remained with the Kansas City team in the Western League for 1885.

He opened the 1886 season with Macon, then it was back to the bigs, with both Detroit, then Washington, of the National League. He was not a strong enough hitter to stick in the majors, even as a second- (or third- ) string catcher and utilityman, so he played the 1887-1888 campaigns with Toronto in the International Association.

Decker was again called to major league service in 1889 with Philadelphia, but was released in late July. He caught on with the Phillies again to start the 1890 season, then was sold in June to the Pittsburgh Alleghenys, with whom he batted .274 and hit all five of his major league home runs.

Decker's last known gig in professional baseball was in 1891 with the New Haven Nutmegs of the Eastern Association.

He next pops up publicly in 1904, when he filed for a patent on a catcher's mitt. According to Decker's application, "My invention relates to certain new and useful improvements in base-ball gloves, and has more particular reference to that type known as 'catchers' mitts.'

"The primary object of my improvement," Decker claimed, "is to provide a glove which is thumbless and, further, one in which the padding can be adjusted or regulated to suit the user."
The specifics of Decker's glove can be seen by searching on his name in a Google Patent Search, for, indeed, Decker was granted U.S. patent number 812921 in February, 1906.

Somewhere along the road, Decker fell into a life of crime, and in the 1910s his home was in San Quentin prison in California, where he was serving time under the name Earl Henry Davenport.
An item in the March 7, 1915, Sporting Life by an unnamed writer mentioned Decker, "The star base ball team of San Quentin prison, to which the Venice and Los Angeles teams sent uniforms last season, has sent Manager Hogan [of the L.A. Angels] an autographed photo of their team.

"They are led by a player who calls himself Davenport, but who is E.H. Decker, who is said to have been a catcher for the Detroit team years ago. When the writer knew him he was catching for the Keokuk, Iowa, team, and was a good man in the field in his position."

According to baseball historian Peter Morris, who is active in the SABR Biographical Committee, Decker was released from San Quentin in 1915, but can be traced no further due to a "very long career of crime" and the many aliases he used. The committee would like to be able to attached a date and place of death to Decker's records.

Decker appears on no fewer than five different poses in the Old Judge cigarette cards, all with Philadelphia. His cards are priced as "commons," but like many Old Judge cards, finding a specific player in the hobby market at any one time can be a challenge.

Standard Catalog Update #33: Another loopy 1954 Bowman Dodger

We have confirmed another "loop / no loop" variation card in 1954 Bowman, and like the other recently discovered variation, it involves a Brooklyn Dodger's card. In this case, it is #218 Preacher Roe. The report came via e-mail from collector Peter Eilenberg. That's Peter's PSA-slabbed Roe card in the picture.

Details of the earlier variation, including our theory on how the variation was created, can be found by checking out our postings of Sept. 24 and Oct. 26 regarding a similar error/correction on the 1954 Bowman Carl Erskine card.

It would be interesting to know which player's card appeared above Roe's on the printing sheet, and thus whose autograph originally intruded into the top of Roe's card. If you can provide that information, please drop me a line in the Comments section or by e-mailing to scbcguy@yahoo.com.

A check of eBay on the day this variation crossed my desk showed 12 1954 Bowman Preacher Rowe cards offered at auction or in stores. Four of those showed the loop. That's a significantly greater percentage of "loop" cards vs. "no-loop" than has been the case thus far with the Erskine variations.

The Roe variation will be added to the 1954 Bowman set in the 2011 Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards.

My custom creation John Madden football card

Another of my custom card creation projects has been completed, a 1959-style football card of John Madden. Love 'im or hate 'im, Madden has been a significant factor in the broadcasting realm that helped make the NFL the fan favorite that it is.

Madden started at both offensive and defensive tackle at California Polytechnical University San Luis Obispo and was the 244th player selected in the 1958 NFL draft.

He injured his knee in the Eagles training camp and never played in the NFL.

Madden was in camp long enough for the Topps photographer to take at least one photo of him, a color shot of Madden in the three-point stance. The photo, however, is so fuzzy that it couldn't have been used on a Topps card back then, or even on my custom card creation 50 years later. I was fortunate enough, though, to find a great black-and-white portrait of Madden on the internet. It appears to have been taken by the team photographer. It colorized real nice and the result is what you see above.

What else was Grisham wrong about?

While on vacation recently I read the first John Grisham book that I had picked up in more than 20 years.


The Innocent Man (2006), rather than being one of his crime/courtroom novels, was touted as the true story of a man wrongly sent to death row in Oklahoma.


I decided to give it a read when I found out that the principal character was a former minor league baseball player by the name of Ronald K. Williamson.


Williamson knocked around the A's farm system 1972-73, then after a couple of years off, was given a shot by the Yankees with Oneonta.

According to both the SABR Minor League database and the Baseball Guides for the appropriate years, Williamson started pro ball with the Koos Bay-North Bend A's short-season A team in 1972 after being drafted by Oakland as a catcher. He ended the '72 season with Brulington in the Midwest League and opened the 1973 season there. He was cut after five games and finished the season in the Florida State League with the independent Key West Conchs.

Williamson was out of OB in 1974-1975, drinking, doing drugs and committing petty crimes.

The Yankees gave his another shot in pro ball in 1976, signing him as a pitcher and assigning him to Oneonta in the New York-Pennsylvania League. He pitched eight innings in five games, giving up 12 earned runs (13.50 ERA) and walking 15. According to the "official" sources, that was the end of Williamson's professional baseball career.

However, according to Grisham's supposedly factual account, Williamson pitched for the 1977 Ft. Lauderdale Yankees of the Florida State League. The photo section of the book even shows a picture it says is the cover of a team program with Williamson and three others in a posed photo. Grisham even quotes such statistics that say Williamson pitched 31 innings in 14 games with a 2-4 record. However, there is nothing in the SABR records or the 1978 Guide to support that.

Since Grisham never met Williamson and didn't publish his book until 2006, two years after Williamson's liver did him in, it's possible the author took the word of a mis-remembering relative for the 1977 discrepancy.

While such a glaring factual faux pas gives one pause to wonder what else Grisham may have gotten wrong in this supposedly factual account, the book is worth reading. Former minor leaguer Ron Williamson was a bad-ass, but not of sufficient depravity to have warranted the downright abuse of the legal system that put him on death row, evem in those days when forensic criminal science was in its infancy.