Tales of T212 #20 : George Wheeler

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. Please excuse the lo-res nature of the card pictures; they were scanned for my auctions many years ago.

Ferreting out George Wheeler's identity was one the more challenging during my Obak biography quest. I had it wrong for a long time, attributing his Obak cards to George Harrison Wheeler, rather than the correct George Louis Wheeler. The George Wheelers' careers overlapped around the time of the cigarette card era.

Again it was the SABR Minor League Database that straightened things out for me. This George Wheeler was really even a Wheeler, he was born George L. Heroux in Methuen, Mass., on either July 30 or Aug. 3 (sources differ), 1869. George was a right-handed pitcher who is said to have thrown lefty on occasion; he was a switch hitter, as well. Naturally enough he began his pro career in the northeast, at the age of 22 in 1892. Between 1892-1896 he played in the Class B New England League for Manchester/Lawrence, Lewiston and Bangor.

In mid-September of 1896 he made his major league debut with the Philadelphia Phillies. He was 1-1, earning a permanent spot in the 1897 rotation. He had an 11-10 record that year and pitched part of each of the next two seasons with the Phils, playing with Rome of the N.Y. State League in between major league tours (and also in 1900-1901). His overall big league record was 21-20 with a 4.24 ERA.

Wheeler also pitched in the American League, but it was in 1900 for the Milwaukee Brewers, before the A.L. was considered a major league. After opening the 1902 season with the Syracuse Stars of the NYSL, Wheeler took his act to the West Coast, where he spent the rest of his baseball days, increasingly filling the role of a utility player and pinch hitter. He played with Los Angeles in 1902 and 1903, before the formation of the Pacific Coast League as aClass A minor league. He opened 1904 wiht L.A., then moved to San Francisco through the 1907 season. He was traded back to the Angels in 1908 and closed out his playing days with them in 1911. He appears in al three Obak card sets of the era.

In 1913-1914 he managed Fresno in the outlaw California League and in mid-season 1914 joined the Northwestern League's umpiring staff. When his baseball days were over, Wheeler retired to farming. He died in Santa Ana, Calif. on March 21, 1946.

Standard Catalog Update #36 : 1954 A's Stickers

Considering that the Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards' 20th edition is in the works, the set which is listed as 1954 Philadelphia A's Stickers is a relatively new addition to the comprehensive guide.

It was added about four years ago with a checklist comprising 10 players, and it was noted that "The issuer of this novelty set and the exact scope of its checklist are currently unknown."

We still don't know who issued it, or how it was distributed (my best guess would be a stadium concession stand souvenir). We do, however, have a better idea of the set's scope, thanks to reports from a couple of collectors, most recently including Scott Roberts, who provided the scans shown here.

The stickers are black-and-white, printed on gummed paper. They are uniformly about 4-1/2" wide, but range in height from about 6-1/2" to 8-1/4", depending on the pose. An instruction printed on each piece says, "Moisten back. Paste on Cardboard and cut out."

In 1954, The Athletics were in their final season in Philadelphia. They ended the season with a 51-103 record, 60 games behind the pennant-winning Cleveland Indians.

Here's the revised checklist for the sticker set:

1. Joe Astroth
2. Don Bollweg
3. Bob Cain
4. Joe DeMaestri
5. Marion Fricano
6. Forrest Jacobs
7. Eddie Joost
8. Alex Kellner
9. Morrie Martin
10. Ed McGhee
11. Arnold Portocarrero
12. Vic Power
13. Bill Renna
14. Jim Robertson
15. Bob Shantz
16. Pete Suder
17. Bob Trice
18. Elmer Valo
19. Leroy Wheat
20. Gus Zernial

As you can see, there were no Hall of Famers on the team, and only a few players who are recognized as even minor stars today -- Zernial, Shantz, Power. The checklist stands at 20, which is a nice round number. The only regular missing is third baseman Jim Finigan. Whether or not this checklist will stand remains to be seen.

The "big book" currently lists the stickers at $25 in NM, $12.50 in EX and $7.50 in VG for most players, with a few of the bigger names at $35, $17.50 and $10.50. That seems cheap to me considering the age and scarcity of these collectibles, but the few that have sold recently at auction haven't generated sufficient demand to warrant raising the prices.

Tales of T212 #19 : Harry Scharnweber

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. Please excuse the lo-res nature of the card pictures; they were scanned for my auctions many years ago.

Known variously in his playing days as "Henry" or "Harry," Scharnweber was a light-hitting shortstop. He was born in Iowa in 1882 and spent his early years as a professional ballplayer around the Midwest.

He debuted in the Three-I (Illinois-Indiana-Iowa) League in 1902, playing for both Bloomington and Rockford at the Class B level. When he hit only .179 for the year, he was sent down to Class D Grand Forks for 1903 and Waterloo for 1904 (the team carried the unlikely nickname of the Microbes).

Scharnweber returned to the Three-I League for 1905, and spent the next four seasons with Springfield, including managing the team in 1907 at the age of only 25 (they finished third). In 1909 he moved out West to the Vancouver Beavers of the Northwestern League, also a Class B circuit. He played with Vancouver for six seasons -- remarkable consistency for the minor leagues in that era. He man aged the team in 1914 and won the NWL pennant. The team finished fourth in 1915 under Scharnweber.

His whereabouts from 1916-1919 are unrecorded. In 1920 he joined the newly formed South Dakota League as manager of the Mitchell Kernels, and at the age of 38 played some shortstop and hit .295. The Kernels won the pennant that year, and also in 1921 and 1922 with Scharnweber at the helm. One of Scharnweber's prize players in 1920 was future Hall of Famer Jim Bottomley, playing in his first pro season. The league folded in mid-1923.

Scharnweber must have hung around the Mitchell, S.D., area after his playing days, because that's listed as his locale on the U.S. Patent (#2,088,753) he was granted in 1937 for an automotive air cooling apparatus!

Standard Catlog Update #35 : 1966 Mantle anomaly

Some weeks back reader Steve Stazenski contacted us about an unusual 1966 Topps Mickey Mantle card he had in his collection. The card is unusual in that its number on back appears to

have been printed in green, rather than the usual orange/red ink.

My first thought was that this might be a Venezuelan-issued '66 Topps. While I'd never heard that the card numbers of the South American version Topps cards were green, I'd never heard that they weren't.

I posed some inquiries on some of the baseball card forums and a couple of the top Venezuelan specialists informed me that the card numbers on that issue were not green, they were the same color as the player name and stats box, just like on the Topps U.S.A. cards.

One or two collectors raised the idea that the "50" on this card may have turned green as a reaction to chemical exposure. I'm not inclined to accept that theory, because there is no indication that any of the other red ink, nor the black, nor the card stock had been altered by a foreign substance.

The theory that seems most plausible to me, but which I have been unable to verify, is that this particular Mantle was cut off the three-card salesman's sample strip that Topps used back in the 1950s and 1960s to alter retailers on the look of the product. While the backs of those strips usually were predominantly given over the a sales pitch, at least one card on the strip was usually presented with a full back, again to give the retailer an idea of what the new cards had to offer.

I'm hoping that one of you can provide a scan of such a 1966 sales strip to verify this notion. Otherwise this card will have to be considered merely an anomaly or curiosity.

1952 Red Man Mickey Mantle Custom Card

I've expanded my custom card repertoire with this latest creation. It's a "what might have been" fantasy card of Mickey Mantle in the format of the 1952 Red Man tobacco cards.

My custom Mantle is in the original 3-1/2" x 4" format. To better replicate the original Red Mans, I used a thinner cardboard stock for this one. It really has the "feel" of the originals.

As opposed to most of my custom cards, on which the back -- which usually has biographical details, stats, cartoons, etc. -- takes more time to create than the front, this one was a snap. Since the backs of 1952 Red Mans (and 1953, 1954, 1955, as well) were "generic," I only had to scan an original and clean it up a bit.

The front is essentially a mashup of three elements. The background is from the front of a 1955 Red Man Whitey Ford card. With one click in my Photochop Elements graphics program, I flopped the image and moved the Yankee Stadium details from the left to the right side of the card.

The coupon at bottom started out on a scan I found on an auction site of a 1952 Red Man Ted Williams card. I changed the card number and cleaned up the typography and color bars.

Mantle's picture came from the cover of the 1953 Dell Baseball Annual. I had to do a lot of trial-and-error cutting and pasting to find a size and positioning that would allow for maximum detail yet still leave room for the text box.

I've always been frustrated that the Photoshop Elements program doesn't have the ability to create justified text . . . at least not that I've ever been able to find on my ancient 2.0 version.
After giving the matter some thought and trying a few workarounds, I determined that if I wanted to create justified text such as usually found on baseball cards, I'd just have to bite the bullet and do it the hard way. After writing my text in the designated space, I nudge every single word of it into a position that creates a pretty good approximation of justified type.

There's currently one more Red Man-style card on my to-do list, though I don't know when I'll actually get it into production. You'll see it here first.

As always, you can access images of many of my custom card creations at www.tinyurl.com/customcards. If you think you'd like any of the actual cards as holiday gifts, contact me for details at scbcguy@yahoo.com.

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.