Tales of T212 #27 : Ted Easterly

(Sorry, no T212 Obak card photo; this is his 1909 T206.)

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.

Ted Easterly appeared only in the 1909 Obak set, but by then he was in the major leagues. He had been born in 1885 in Lincoln, Neb.

A note in my files indicates he had played with Charleston of the Class D Eastern Illinois League in 1907, from whom he was purchased by Los Angeles of the Pacific Coast League, at the age of 22. Presumably that was late in the season, as he played in only 11 games that year, as a catcher. No stats are available for the EIL.

Easterly was the Angel's full-time backstop in 1908, and hit .309. He was drafted after the season by the Cleveland Naps. Easterly played for Cleveland from 1909-1912, both catching and in the outfield, batting .297. In August of 1912, he was purchased by the White Sox, playing with them through the 1913 season, when his batting dropped off to .237. With Chicago he led the American League with 13 pinch-hits in 1912.

When the Federal League was formed as the third major league in 1914, Easterly jumped to the K.C. Packers, and hit for a .336 average. When the Federal League folded after the 1915 season, the 30-year-old Easterly was unable to catch on with another major league team and he returned to the Pacific Coast League in 1916 with Salt Lake City and Los Angeles, but played only 33 games. He appeared in only two games in 1917, with L.A. In 1918 he joined Sacramento, also in the PCL, as a back-up catcher, hitting .259.

Easterly was out of Organized Baseball in 1919, but reappeared in the Texas League in 1920, where he batted .310 for Beaumont into July, when he was released, "for the good of the game." It was his last professional engagement.

Somewhere in my files I have a folder with notes on Easterly that indicate he was involved in some sort of funny business, probably gambling. Someday I'll probably work up a more thorough presentation, but that would be beyond the scope of this Tales of T212 series.

Easterly died July 6, 1951 (just five days before I was born) in Clearlake Heights, Calif.

Standard Catalog Update #42 : 1973 A's variations

I'm not sure how well you'll be able to see the details of what we're presenting here . . . the site that hosts this blog comes up short in regards to WYSIWYG.

Based on a report and scans provided by Illinois collector Eric Loy, I'm considering adding a variation to the 1973 Topps listing in the Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards. Actually it would be a variation of a variation.

Currently "the bible" lists variations for 13 of the teams' manager/coaches cards. Most of these involve an early version on which the background of the coaches' photos was printed in brown, and a later version on which the background was rendered in orange, presumably to make the portraits stand out better.

These variations have been recognized for more than 30 years, though collectors generally do not place a premium value on them.

Perhaps it was A's manager Dick Williams' election to the Hall of Fame in 2008, but recent scrutiny of his 1973 card by Loy has revealed what is indubitably three versions of card #179.

Version 179a has the earlier muddy brown background behind the bug-sized portraits of the staff. What we will now call version #179b has the coaches' backgrounds changed to orange, but in the process, many of their ears were deformed or nearly removed.

The #179c version retains the orange backgrounds, but the coaches' ears were restored to a more normal appearance.

Loy points out that in #179b, Vern Hoscheit's right shoulder is considerably bigger than it is in #179c, while Irv Noren's left shoulder is noticably larger in #179b than in #179c.

I believe I'm going to hold off making this addition until the 2012 edition, as I have a feeling that closer inspection of all 1973 manager/coaches cards by today's more focused and communicative variations collectors may turn up further variations that are candidates for inclusion.

On the other hand, I'm going to delist three variations from the 1973 Topps set. Currently for cards #20 Stan Bahnsen, #31 Buddy Bell and #504 Earl Williams, the book lists "a" versions that have complete black frames around the photos, and "b" versions that have small gaps in the frames. It now appears that this type of anomaly occurs much more frequently in the '73 set (and others, as well) and probably more accurately comes under the heading of printing error, rather than design variation.

Post a comment or email me -- with scans -- if you find other unlisted variations among the 1973 manager/coaches cards.

A new version of my Jim Brown card

I'm just back from a lengthy Christmas-New Year vacation of nearly three weeks' duration.

Pretty much everything that has been posted here since Dec. 16 was done in advance and scheduled to appear at regular intervals while I was gone.

The readers kept in contact during that period with lots of inquiries and discoveries, etc., which I'll get to as time permits.

I also spent a great deal of time working on my custom card creations. Besides venturing into some new types, I did a few updates to my 1955 All American-style cards, generally replacing sub-par photos that had been the best available when the cards were first worked up several years back.

One of those that got a face lift was my Jim Brown creation. The new version is shown at left, the first attempt is below (they share a common back). Obviously no set of second-generation All American cards would be complete without a Jim Brown card, but when I made my initial homage, I didn't have much to work with as far as a college-era photo. The running pose shown on the original creation ( ) was a low-resolution black-and-white that didn't frankly was not my best job of colorization.

A recent check of the cyber world, however, turned up a couple of Brown-Syracuse photos that were new to me and I chose the portrait you see here. On the Syracuse player that Topps included in its original 1955 All American set, the gum company went with a generic football player profile in an orange helmet.

In doing both this Syracuse card (originally completed about 2006) and a later Ernie Davis card, I harkened back to an older Syracuse mascot/nickname. In the 1950s and before, Syracuse's athletic team were sometimes called the Saltine Warriors, evidently having something to do with Indian artifacts found on the campus during construction .

The caricature of the Indian that appears on my cards was taken from a felt pennant that dates to those pre-political correctness days.

Keep checking back on the blog as I get caught up on my vacation backlog.

Thanks for your support.

Tales of T212 #21 : Jimmy Adams, Will Chenault

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 Adams, Will Chenault

This pair of Vancouver Beavers were (probably) teammates for a short time in 1910, and each appeared on a single Obak card, Adams in 1911 (I never owned one, so no picture) and Chenault in 1910. While each had a five-year career in pro ball, neither ever tasted major league meal money.

Adams, a career outfielder, started his professional career at the highest level he would attain, the Class A Pacific Coast League in 1906 with Seattle and Los Angeles. Jimmy's ball-playing whereabouts for 1907-1908 are uncertain. There was an Adams (first name unrecorded) who played the outfield for Edmonton of the Western Canada League in 1907; that may have been our boy.

He was back in the PCL in 1909, with both Vernon and Sacramento. In 1910 he dropped down to the Class B Northwestern League with Seattle and Vancouver. In 1911 it looks like he opened the season with the Beavers then moved on to Brownsville in the Southwest Texas League. He was back in the NWL with Victoria in 1912, which looks like his final year in pro ball.

Will Chenault was a pitcher, like Adams, there is no record of when or where he was born or died, He also began playing in the minor leagues in 1906, in the Class D Kentucky-Illinois-Tennessee League, where he split the season between the Paducah Indians and the Vincennes Alices (!). The next year he started at Class B with Terre Haute of the Central League, then loved up another notch to A ball with Indianapolis of the American Association.

He dropped back down to the Class C Virginia League in 1908, pitching for three different teams in the circuit: Norfolk, Portsmouth and Richmond.

In 1909 Chenault took his glove to the West Coast, with Portland of the Northwestern League. In 1910, his last season of pro ball, he threw for both Vancouver and Seattle of the NWL.

Considering that so little is known biographically, at least in baseball historical circles, about these men, it's good they have been immortalized on their Obak cigarette cards.

A 1971-style Carl Weathers custom card

I just noticed this will be my 100th blog posting for 2010. That's not as productive as I would have liked to have been, and falls short of the 123 posts I had in just over half a year in 2009 when I began. However, with my "day job" and my contributor's work on the Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards, there never seems to be enough time to work on my custom cards or to share the results here with you.

I'm pretty proud of the principal topic for this entry, as it represents another new format in my expanding opus of custom cards done in classic styles . . . in this case, 1971 Topps football. 

As I mentioned last time, after years of searching for photos of actor Carl Weathers in his earlier incarnation as a college and professional football player, I found three different, all very suitable, photos in just one Google-search.

The photo on which my custom card is based likely originated with the Topps photographer who shot the other Raiders who appeared in the 1971 set. The format (full-length pose) and background of the Weathers photo are consistent with most of those that were actually used.

The photo I found was black-and-white. I can't tell whether the Topps Raiders cards started out as b/w pix; I doubt it. I can't imagine anybody shooting for Topps, or hoping to sell photos to them, was working in black-and-white at that time. If they were, I know the ease with which I was able to colorize the black-and-white image with Photoshop would have seemed like magic to the bubblegum company's airbrush artists of four decades ago.

Besides the colorizing, I had to do a bit of pixel wrangling to eliminate the red "watermark" on the photo, but that, too, was made easy by Photoshop.

That's not to say that producing my 1971-style card was a piece of cake. There were other challenges.

Most daunting was the need to produce the volume of back copy required for the player biography. While much has been written about Carl Weathers' acting career, specific details of his football playing days, especially statistics, proved extremely hard to come by. 

Signed as a free agent in 1970, Weathers was, according to the Raiders media guide for 1971, "active for" seven games in 1970 as a linebacker and on special teams. If he had any stats in those areas, they eluded me.

I opted to go with an "INTERCEPTION RECORD" stats box at the bottom on back anyway, largely because I just didn't have enough other information to write two or three more sentences  about his career to that point.

As it is, my back copy runs to 147 words. I'm used to trying to squeeze a lifetime into 80-90 words on my 1955 All-American style cards, so writing "long" was a real change of pace for me.

Also, more than usual, recreating the work of the Topps graphic artists in the choice of fonts on back was a challenge. I had to use eight different fonts from four "families" to closely replicate the originals. And some of those aren't as exact a match as I'm used to being able to make, but I doubt that anybody would notice if I hadn't mentioned it.

Finding the cartoon for the back wasn't too hard, I correctly guessed that the back of an O.J. Simpson card would have a mention of his acting aspirations, and I found it on his 1970 rookie card.

That's really all I can tell you about the process of creating this 1971-style Carl Weathers card.

I'm expecting to receive any day now a 1972 O-Pee-Chee football card that will provide the template for my third Weathers' card. That will probably be the subject of my first post of 2011.

I do envision one special challenge in creating my first Canadian-style card, though. The backs of the '72 OPC are in both English and French. I suppose I'll wind up using an internet translation program, but I'm a bit skeptical of their ability to transform football idiom into something that a native French speaker wouldn't find laughable.   

Re-habbing my 1955 All-American Unitas

Without a doubt, the custom card with which I was the least pleased upon my first effort was my 1955 All-American style Johnny Unitas.

Obviously, no updating to that classic college football card set would have been complete without a Johnny U card, but my initial effort really fell short of the mark.

When I originally searched for a contemporary photo of Unitas during his college days I found only a few rather poor images. They were all too small or too fuzzy, but I chose the best of the bunch and did what I could to colorize it and sharpen it up for use on my card.

As if the photo wasn't bad enough, I somehow managed to "over expose" the black-and-white background action photo. washing out much of the detail and giving it a ghastly ghostly appearance that was not at all in keeping either with the original Topps cards or with my own latter-day reconstructions.

I even muffed the choice of school logo, picking the most insipid cardinal when I really should have gone with a more feisty bird. Like Topps did in 1955, I like to avoid using official school logos on my cards; it gives them more of my own personal touch.

I've known for a long time that I would someday replace my original Unitas effort, but had pretty much despaired of finding a better photo. Imagine my surprise then, the other day when I image-googled "Unitas Louisville" to find that the football Hall of Fame had acquired a much better college image. The photo on their site had the posed action shot outlined in white, indicating it was probably used as a newspaper photo some time in the past.

With a couple of hours of work with Photoshop, I was able to clean up and colorize the picture.

I dropped a new background photo into my existing Unitas card "frame," replaced the cardinal logo and had my new and improved Johnny Unitas All-American card. It is a great improvement to my set.

As with the other cards that I have replaced, I was able to use my original card back, so the new card was done in a releatively short time.

Now, if I could just find a really nice Jim Brown Syracuse photo . . .

Tales of T212 #26 : William (or Walter) B. Stevens

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.

The evergreens in the background of Stevens' 1910 Obak card (it was his only year in the cigarette company's three years of issues) just scream Northwestern League. It is those backdrops that give the Obaks a unique look that attracts many collectors.

Now we just have to figure out who the guy on the card is. My file card indicates that it is William B. Stevens. The SABR Minor League Database thinks it is Walter B. Stevens. Could both be the same guy? Their records in the SABR database don't overlap, they were both outfielders and there is no biographical information about either Bill or Wally.

The player identified as Walter B. Stevens debuted with Duluth (Minn.) of the Northern Copper Country League in 1906, then took a big step from that Class C circuit to Milwaukee in 1907, My research failed to turn up the Duluth connection, but does note that Stevens was traded from the Brewers to Spokane of the Northwestern League for 1908. During the 1909 season he went from Spokane to Tacoma, for whom he also played in 1910. That's where the SABR data loses track of Walter Stevens and picks up the record of William Stevens.

Both SABR and I agree that Stevens (whether William or Walter) began the 1911 season with Helena in the Union Association (Class D). When the Boise Irrigators released Stevens, he went to Boise, from whom he was purchased by Rock Island of the Illinois-Indiana-Iowa League.

The 1912 season found Stevens back in the UA, with Ogden. His baseball trail ends there.