Standard Catalog Update #41 : First Bakersfield Globe confirmed

In our Oct. 17 posting about the Globe Printing Co. and its body of work in the field of minor league baseball cards in the early 1950s, we mentioned that the exitence of an album for a set of 1952 Bakersfield Indians cards had been reported, but that no cards from that set had yet been confirmed.

We're now able to confirm the first card from that set. As "predicted," the card is of manager Gene Lillard. The report comes from veteran Maryland collector Al Moore, who has promised to provide us with some more fodder for our columns as he digs through his collection of heretofore uncataloged cards.

Al's example of the Globe Lillard card appears to have been authentically autographed, in fountain pen, no less.

In 1952, Lillard, who had played major league ball with the Cubs as a shortstop and third baseman in 1936, and as a pitcher in 1939, also pitching for the Cardinals in 1940, was the playing manager for the Class C Bakersfield Indians of the California League in 1952.

With Bakersfield that year, at the age of 38, he pitched in 13 games, and filled in as a second baseman, third baseman and catcher, batting .292.

Like many of our correspondents, Al would like to expand his holdings of Globe Co. minor league cards; his particular goal is to acquire one card from each team set.

Billy Clyde Puckett Gets a Football Card

This is another in a semi-regular series of blog postings about my custom card creations. For more than six years now, I have been creating "cards that never were" in the formats of some of favorites from the 1950s as well as some of the card hobby's most popular designs of the last century.
I have now completed something like 125 different cards in a dozen or more designs, but the format that started it all was the 1955 Topps All-American Football set, a childhood favorite.

As much as possible when creating fantasy cards, I stick to the real world of actual ballplayers and classic designs. Early on, though, in my "update" to the All-American set, I stepped outside the box to create a football card for Billy Clyde Puckett.

Billy Clyde is a fictional football hero who starred for the TCU Horned Frogs and the New York Giants in several novels by Dan Jenkins: Semi-Tough, Life Its Ownself, Rude Behavior and You Gotta Play Hurt. He also pops up in cameos in some of Jenkins' other works.

If you've ever read Dan Jenkins, you understand why I made a Puckett card. If you haven't read any of Jenkins, you really should start. Jenkins' books are simply among the funniest I have ever encountered. I began reading him in college and have never stopped. In fact, while compiling the list of football books above, I found a new Jenkins title that I haven't yet read and ordered it from Amazon. (OT sidebar: How can those used-book seller on Amazon make any money selling books for a penny? Sure, they probably make a little on the $3.98 postage/handling charge, but even so . . . )

I've not only read most of Jenkins' novels, I've read many of them two or three times. They are laugh-out-loud funny, decidedly politically incorrect and whether he's writing about football, golf (Dead Solid Perfect, etc.), or the worlds of big "bidness" or magazine journalism, his characters, insights into human foibles and, especially to me, his turns of phrase, made him one of my all-time favorite authors. I see that he has also authored, co-authored or edited quite a number of non-fiction books as well, including biographies of several football stars.

Do yourself a favor and check out a Jenkins book at your local library . . . you'll go back for every one they have on the the shelf.

Anyway, back to my Billy Clyde card. Recognize him? That's actually Burt Reynolds in a photo from his football days at Florida State. Since Burt played Billy Clyde in the movie version of Semi-Tough, he seemed like the natural choice to embody Puckett on my card. Reynolds is also included among my '55-style cards on an FSU card of his own. You can see that, and many of my other creations, in my Photobucket albums at www.tinyurl.com/customcards.

Standard Catalog Update #42 : 1921 O's

One of the better-kept secrets among those who hoard "uncataloged" cards has been a regional issue of the 1921 Baltimore Orioles that was issued as inserts in loaves of White's Big Tip-Top bread.

In that era, the O's were an International League dynasty, winning seven consecutive (1919-1925) championships under Jack Dunn (1907-1914, 1916-1928), who was most famous for bringing Babe Ruth into Organized Baseball.


The White's baseball cards are printed in sepia tones on 3-1/4" x 5-1/2" thin cardboard stock, and are blank-backed. Because there is nothing on the cards to identify their issuer, odds and end from the set have sat unidentified in various collections in and around Baltimore for decades.

Only a select few cognizeti were privy to the source of these rare cards, by virtue of contemporary newspaper advertising that had proclaimed the availability of "Gravure Photos of the Enite Team of 1921 'Orioles'". The ad, which pictured three of cards, including those shown here (in the ad, the "T" on Maisel's cap had been artlessly changed to a "B") said "A Different One Each Day Will Be Wrapped With Each Wrapped Loaf of White's Big Tip-Top Bread".

The cat was let out of the bag relative to this card set when a group of 14 was brought through the door of a Baltimore card shop and subsequently was consigned to the Dec. 10 Huggins and Scott auction. Thirteen of the team's lesser lights were offered in a single lot -- confounding vintage minor league type card collectors -- while the superstar card from the set, a pre-rookie card of Lefty Grove (ignominiously misspelled "Groves", was offered seperately.

The 13-card lot, all graded by SGC in a range from "Authentic," through Fair and Good to Very Good, sold for $32,250. The Grove, SGC-certified as Fair, went for $29,563 -- good for the consignor and auction house, not so much for the buyer when the second, third, etc., examples come to market.

The actual extent of the White's Orioles set remains unknown, but veteran Maryland collector Al Moore, who provided the examples shown here, believes the set is complete at 21 or 22 cards.

In a blast from the past, Al sent us an honest-to-goodness U.S. Postal Service package the other day with information about the White's cards, photocopies of several of his cards (as well as the first confirmed card from a Globe minor league team set) and of the ad that had appeared in the Baltimore Sun in 1921 (not suitable for reproduction here).

Al has been rummaging around in his safe deposit box and has promised to send more information about current uncataloged cards that have come his way over the years. We look forward to those packages and will be sure to share his finds with you.

By the way, poking around the SABR Minor League Database in an effort to find out what team's cap Maisel is wearing on his White's card, I cam up dry. The "T" on the cap doesn't seem to fit any of Maisel's previous placements in O.B. Between 1911 and 1928 (when he took over the reins of the Orioles from Dunn), Fritz had played only for the Orioles, the N.Y. Yankees and the St. Louis Browns.

We'll wrap up this posting with the list that Al provided of 19 of the 1921 White's Baltimore Orioles cards, in alpha order:

1. James Aitcheson
2. Max Bishop
3. Rufus Clarke
4. Ducky Davis
5. Jack Dunn
6. Ben Egan
7. Harry Frank
8. Lefty Groves (Grove)
9. Bill Holden
10. Merwin Jacobson
11. R. (Rudy) Kneisch
12. Otis Lawry
13. Wade Lefler
14. Jimmy Lyston
15. Fritz Maisel
16. Lefty Matthews
17. Jimmy Murphy
18. Jack Ogden
19. Jim Sullivan
    

1953 Cardinals photo book update

I'd kind of despaired of getting any useful information about the 1953 St. Louis Cardinals player photo book that was featured in our Oct. 31 posting. I'll wait here while you go back through the archives and refresh yourselves on the original post.

Today, however, I received an e-mail from a former Sportsman's Park/Busch Stadium concessions employee with first-hand knowledge of this great memorabilia item. You might know my correspondent, it was George Michael, former "Sports Machine" broadcaster.

He wrote, "I was selling scorecards in 1953, saving my money for school. For weeks I had admired this little book with these great glossy photos. It was for sale for $5.00, which was a fortune to me.

"Anyway I finally bought the book and got 22 of the original photos because some of the guys in the book at the start of the year had been traded. Because there was only 22 photos, I was thrilled to get a discount." He continues, "This book is one of my most cherished items because I really could not afford it, but thought it was the coolest thing I ever saw.

"I told my mom I bought it, and instead of getting mad at me, she told me to get everyone to sign it and she would be impressed." George recalls, "I went to work on the players and got most of them to sign it. Stan Musial signed it twice because the pen didn't write well on the photo. Even today these autographs rate a mint '10.'"

George listed 16 players who signatures he obtained in the photo book. He doesn't, however, have Rip Repulski or Harvey Haddix. "I do not know how I missed them because both were very good guys."

Another autograph missing from George's book is manager Eddie Stanky. George recalls, "He was a 100% jerk! Three times I waited for him until late at night after games to sign and he would always tell me to get lost. I showed him the whole thing one night and said I would be very grateful if he would sign it for me. He told me to go home and never bother him again."

George calls Stanky, "the worst Cardinal I ever dealt with." He continued, "Solly Hemus asked me if I wanted him to get Stanky to sign it and I told him 'No, tha nks.' I wanted to remember Mr. Stanky forever!"

I guess that's why Stanky's nickname was "The Brat."

George has offered his assistance identifying any of the player photos that are still in question.

This welcome first-hand information dispels my notion that because the photos do not have printed identification the photo book was likely not a souvenir stand type of item.

As George points out, $5 was a fortune in 1953. The Cards' yearbook was only 50 cents. Five bucks would buy a kid more than four boxes of baseball cards back then. I imagine that steep price explains the scarcity of the photo book today.

It's also interesting to learn that when players left the team, their photos were excised from the book. That would make a complete 28-player example all that much scarcer.

UPDATE: I've just learned that George Michael passed away on Dec. 24. That's a real shame. I'm guessing he would have been a regular contributor to this blog and we'd have all learned a lot and been entertaind.

Tales of T212 #22 : Jimmy Agnew

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.

Jimmy "Toots" Agnew was born in Portland, Ore., in 1890, and never left the West Coast during his injury-shortened career in professional baseball. When the sporting press first took notice of him, he was described as a "college pitcher from Seattle."

According to the SABR Minor League Database, Agnew's first pro gig was in the Pacific Coast League, with Los Angeles, in 1911. However, he appears in the 1910 Obak cigarette card set with L.A., so either SABR dropped a stitch or Obak jumped the gun. Considering that his 1911 Obak card says his pitching record for 1910 was "unavailable," it's more than likely that Agnew was Angels' property in 1910, but never actually played.

In 1911, Agnew lost 20 games, winning only five. That caused him to be sold to Vancouver (Class B, Northwestern League) for the 1912 season. He was reported traded to Tacoma (without an y record that he actually pitched for them), then to Portland (NWL).

With Portland again in 1913, he injured his arm in May. According to the baseball custom of that era, he was paid for two weeks at his regular salary ($200 per month), then for another two weeks at half-pay, per the standard injury clause of the day's contracts. The team then put him on as a gatekeeper, and we hear no more of Jimmy Agnew.

Besides his 1910 and 1911 Obak cards, Agnew appeared in 1911 sets from Pacific Coast Biscuit and Zeenuts candy.

Standard Catalog Update #40 : 1953 Lincoln Chiefs

Many of the set listings in the Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards started with only one or two cards and over the years grew as additions to the checklist were confirmed. Whether or not that will be the case with this early 1950s Lincoln Chiefs minor league set remains to be seen, but thanks to dedicated Nebraska baseball collector/historian Dan Bretta, we'll at least get a start when this set is listed in the 2011 SCBC.

So far, these are the only two cards known from this set. Because both players were on the Chiefs in both 1953 and 1954, it is impossible to pinpoint the year of issue.

Dan leans towards 1953, since that was the year that Lincoln changed affiliations and nicknames in the Class A Western League, becoming a farm club of the Milwaukee Braves. Seems logical, so unless or until another player card surfaces to contradict that notion, we'll go with it.

The cards are printed in black-and-white on think, blank-backed card stock, about 3-1/4" x 4-1/2". They carry on front the advertising of Weaver's Wafers, which was a local potato chip company that went out of business only in recent years. The cards also have an ad for radio station KOLN, which broadcast the Chiefs' games.

The manner of distribution for the cards is unknown, but again, their owner has a theory. The staple holes at the top of each card suggests they may have been stapled directly onto the top of the bag of potato chips.

Neill was one of seven 1953 Chiefs who had formerly played in the majors (the others were Clarence Beers, Norm Brown, Jack Daniels, Fred Hancock, Walt Linden, Red McQuillen); one other Chief (Fred Waters) would in the future.

With only two players known from this set, and each card being unique, the catalog listing will carry a "Value undetermined" notation rather than pricing.

Baseball Players on Football Cards

Many of my regular readers know that for the last 6+ years I have been engaged in creating custom baseball and football cards -- cards that never were. I started the series by creating some cards in the format of one of my childhood favorites, the 1955 Topps All-American Football set.

One of the earliest cards in what I call my All-American Second Series is the Lou Gehrig card shown here. Early on in my research I was surprised to discover that a fair number of baseball's stars over the years had also played some college football.

As I read up on their gridiron days, it became apparent that several of these two-sport collegiate stars could have easily made the the grade in professional football. Most of them, however, seem to have eschewed pro football because there was little money to be made in the game's early decades.

I was able to acquire the football photos I used on my Jackie Robinson and Lou Gehrig cards from books I found in the public library. Gehrig's photo was in a book about Ivy League football, while Robinson's was in one of the several biographies about him. Each picture was in black-and-white, so I had to colorize them in my Photoshop Elements graphics program for use on the cards.

Besides these Hall of Famers, I have done 1955 AA-style cards of Christy Mathewson (Bucknell), Kirk Gibson and Steve Garvey (Michigan State) and Bo Jackson (Auburn). You can find images of those cards in my Photobucket albums at www.tinyurl.com/customcards.

I still have some baseball players on my "most wanted" list to be used in creation of All-American cards; I'd love to find photos of these guys in their college football uniforms: Bill "Moose" Skowron (Purdue), Ted Kluszewski (Indiana) and Frank Thomas (Auburn).