Finished my T202 Red Sox Triplefolder

As I promised last week, here are the images of my completed homage to the 1912 Hassan Triplefolders. My custom card features what would come to be known as the Million Dollar Outfield. I would have liked to give my card that title, but I wanted to make it appear "period," and that nickname had not yet been applied to the Red Sox trio when the real T202s were current.

In doing my research for the write-ups on the back, I found out something I didn't know about Harry Hooper. I knew that he was a Hall of Famer, having been selected by the Veterans Committee in 1971, three years before he died. What I was unaware of, is how little support Hooper had received from the baseball writers in his years of eligibility. In his first year on the ballot he received only 3% of the voters' support. In subsequent years he never got as many as 2% of the votes. This must have been one of those cases that are rumored to have been the result of Ted Williams' twisting of Veterans Committeemen's arms to get former Red Sox into the Hall.
I'm glad Hooper received the honor while he was alive, but a quick look at his stats indicate he was probably not among the elite players of his era.
This card will probably be the last of my custom T202s; I'm going to shift gears to work on some other card projects for a while.

Tales of T212 #28 : Howard Murphy

(Sorry, no card photo.)

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.

I don't have an Obak card photo of Howard Murphy because he only appeared in the scarcer 1909 set. (The Murphy that appears with Los Angeles in 1910 Obaks in Frank Murphy.) That was his only year in the Pacific Coast League, when he was an outfielder with the Oakland Oaks. I tell a lie . . . Murphy was also with the Oaks in 1908, for one game, as an unsuccessful pinch-hitter.

Murphy played with four Class A minor league teams in 1908, each in a different league. He was with Memphis (Southern), Lincoln (Western), Kansas City (American Assn.) and Oakland (PCL).

His stop with Memphis in 1908 was his second stint with the team then known as the Egyptians. He had begun his pro career with them in 1901 at the age of 19.

Murphy was botn on Jan. 1, 1882, in Birmingham, Ala. He tried hios hand at pitching in his early minor league days, with Class D clubs in Sherman-Denison/Texarkana (Texas Lea.) and Baton Rouge (Cotton States Lea.) in 1902-1903, and Pine Bluff (Cotton States) in 1904.

Having hit .343 with Pine Bluff, he moved to the outfield and split 1905 with two American Association teams, Kansas City and Louisville in 1905. He started 1906 with Louisville, then dropped down a class to Decatur in the Three-I League. That may have been due to an injury, as he does not appear to have played in Organized Baseball in 1907.

After his four-team sojourn in 1908, he was back with the Oaks to begin 1909, then was sold to the St. Louis Cardinals in mid-season, taking over in center field for Al Shaw, but hitting only .200 fore the rest of the season.

The 1910 season found him back in the Southern League in his native Alabama, with Mobile. He headed out West in 1911-1913, playing with Great Falls (Mont.) and Salt Lake City of the Union Assn., batting a cumulative .374, including 240 hits in 1912.

There is another gap in Murphy's record for 1914. In 1915, at age 33, he appeared with Shreveport (Texas Lea.), before wrapping up his professional ballplaying days with Tulsa and Sherman of the Western Assn. in 1916.

After his playing days, Murphy was baseball coach at Decatur (Tex.) Baptist College. Decatur Baptist College, established in 1898, was the forerunner of Dallas Baptist University. It had the distinction of being the first two-year institution of higher education in Texas.

Murphy died in Ft. Worth, Tex., Oct. 5, 1926.

T205 style Harry Hooper, Duffy Lewis "rookies"

As I've mentioned earlier, I'm in the process of creating a second T202-style "Triplefolder" custom card.

This one will feature the Boston Red Sox.

As part of the process, I've created T205 "Gold Borders" for Duffy Lewis and Harry Hooper. If such cards had actually been created in 1911, they would have been the "rookie cards" for the pair.

As you may know, when Hassan cigarettes created the T202 Triplefolders in 1912, most of the player panels that flanked the black-and-white "action" photo at center were close-up versions of the previous year's T205s. Unlike most of my custom card creations, I won't be producing T205 backs for these two cards, or actually printing them as singles. But since I needed them for the end panels of my Red Sox T202, I thought it was worthwhile to "complete" the fronts.

Keep watching this space for the completed T202 Red Sox card.

Standard Catalog Update #47 : 1963 Jim Davenport variations

It looks as if, after nearly 47 years, we have a new variation to list for the 1963 Topps set, brought to our attention by collector Tony Gordon.

Card No. 388, Jim Davenport, can be found with photo cropping differences on both the large color portrait photo and the black-and-white inset action pose.

Some cards are found on which the shadow of the jacket collar touches the red box at bottom. On other cards, the shadow is significantly above the red box.

On the shadow-touches-box cards, the glove in the inset photo touches the edge of the green background circle and there is a larger area of Davenport's right wrist visible beneath his dark sleeve. On the shadow-above-box cards, the glove is well inside the green circle and there is only a sliver of skin showing on the right wrist.

Without seeing an original press sheet for verification, it is my theory that the variations occurred because Davenport's card was in the double-print row that was common with Topps cards in the 1960s. If that's the case, there are 10 other double-printed cards from that row that may or may not show similar cropping variations.

A check of '63T Davenport cards being offered on eBay recently does not indicate that either variation is significantly scarcer than the other.

A 1989 Fleer-Topps hybrid

There's no easy way to effectively show it in a single picture, so you'll have to take my word for it that the images above are the front and back of the same card.

After close examination I cannot conclude other than this is a true hybrid between a 1989 Fleer World Series subset card and a 1989 Topps.

The 12-card Fleer World Series subset was a factory set-only insert, chronicling the 1988 Fall Classic between the Dodgers and the A's. The cards were not included in wax packs, etc.

It is only logical to assume that this mash-up resulted when at least one sheet of 1989 Topps backs was mistakenly fed into the press when the World Series highlights cards were being printed.

This would have had to occur at a contract printing facility that did work for both Topps and Fleer at about the same time. Whether or not somebody in the press room was screwing around to create the error is open to speculation. In theory, there should have been a minimum of 131 other examples of this type of Fleer/Topps hybrid printed . . . and that's if only one Topps sheet was involved. Whether any or all of them made it into factory sets is unknown.

This card's owner, George Sands of California, said a friend of his gave him the card about 20 years ago. The friend had purchased a number of 1989 Fleer factory sets, presumably to look for Billy Ripken variations. It is unknown whether the friend's set contained other examples of this error type.

Because this is a printing error, it doesn't qualify for inclusion in the Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards, but it is certainly worth sharing with you.

Standard Catalog Update #46 : Pinkerton postcards

Thanks to a question from a reader, we have made a pair of additions to the blank-back checklist of the 1913-1915 Pinkerton Score/Photo/Post Cards checklists. They are card #252 shown at right, Fred Merkle, and #205 Heinie Zimmerman, not shown. Both Merkle and Zimmerman had previously been cataloged among the scorecard-back Pinkertons, but had not been seen as blank- or postcard backs.

These approximately 3-1/2" x 5-1/2" cards take their name from the fact that they are printed versions of some of the photographs that appear as the central portions of the 1911 T5 Pinkerton cabinets. It's unknown whether these latter-day cardboard versions have any connection to the "real" Pinkertons, and the checklist for this type is considerably shorter, with fewer than two dozen known players, compared to more than 300 known T5 cabinets.

These cards can be found with score cards printed on back, with postcard backs, or with blank backs. The score card versions are considerably scarcer than the others, and valued at about 2X.

The 2010 Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards lists blank/postcard backs at $150 in NM, $75 in EX and $45 in VG, with typical Hall of Famers at $250, $125 and $75. Superstars like Matty, Wagner and Cobb currently carry values of $350-1,500.

Newest custom card: T202 Triplefolder Honus Wagner

As promised several days ago, here is my latest custom card creation.

It's done in the style of the 1912 Hassan Triplefolders that have been known to generations of collectors as T202, the set's number in the pioneering American Card Catalog by Jefferson Burdick.

There were 132 different cards in the original T202 set, comprised of 110-120 or so black-and-white center panels with various combinations of color end panels featuring teammates or rivals. For the most part the end panels were cropped versions of the players' cards from the previous year's T205 Gold Borders set.

My T202 homage features a couple of Pittsburg (that's how it was spelled at the time) Pirates who did not appear in the original T202s. Max Carey was only in his first full major league season in 1911 when the T205s were issued. His "rookie card" appeared in 1912 in the T207 Brown Background set. The portrait I used for this card is that used on his T207, though I tweaked the color a bit and "flopped" it to have him facing the center panel.

Wagner, of course, had made his displeasure at being pictured on a cigarette card known to the tobacco company in 1909, when his card was pulled from the T206 set. The picture I used on my T202 is one that appeared on a circa 1910 celluloid pinback.

The central action photo is something I stumbled across on the internet. It is so close to the one used on the classic T202 card, "Ty Cobb Steals Third," that when I first saw it, I knew a T202 creation was in my future.

Despite having collected baseball cards for decades, I've never owned an original T202, so I had to solicit a lot of help from the experts to broaden my card-making into this format. Most instrumental was T202 guru Lee Behrens who provided some original scans and some valuable critique as the project developed. Thanks, Lee!

Another collector, on viewing my T205 versions of the Carey and Wagner cards, told me something I never knew about T205s (and, by extension, T202). The National Leaguers in those sets feature the first use of a facsimile autograph on a baseball card. At least I always thought about it as a facsimile signature. It turns out that the signatures on the cards made no attempt to replicate the players' actual autographs; they were just identification applied by some long-gone commercial artists working on the T205/T202 issues.

By the time I fould that out, I'd already become attached to the actual signatures of Carey and Wagner, so I decided to go with those for my cards.

You'll notice that the signature on the Wagner reads, "John H Wagner." In reality, his name (as shown on my card back) was John Peter Wagner. My best guess is that by the 1910s, Wagner had capitulated to popular demand and that the "H" on this version of his signature was intended to represent his universally-known nickname of Honus. In fact, I've seen later Wagner autographs that are signed, "J. Honus Wagner."

I have one more T202-style card on my immediate to-do list of custom card projects. Be sure to watch this space for it.

Standard Catalog Update #45 : Pogue's Department Store

As promised yesterday, we present here a newly reported regional issue courtesy of Cincinnati Reds collector Patrick Smith.

What we have here is a photocard along the lines of other contemporary issues that appear to have been produced in conjunction with autograph appearances by Reds players at area stores.
It is 3-1/2" x 5-1/2" with a semi-glossy surface and blank back.

In this case, Smith speculates we're looking at a 1973 issue, as the photo of Joe Morgan on this card is identical to that on the team-issued postcard of that year.

For those not familiar with Cincinnati's retail scene, Pogue's was founded in 1863 and was a typical big city downtown department store, famed for its elaborate Christmas displays. It was merged with L.S. Ayres in 1983.

We'll list this Pogue's card in the next (2011) Standard Catalog. Perhaps in time other players in the series will turn up.

Standard Catalog Update #44 : 1970 Dayton Daily News All-Stars

I suppose it's all relative, but I've always felt that collectors of Cincinnati Reds cards and memorabilia had more than their share of regional collectibles in the post-war era. From the Harry Hartman team issues of 1939-1940 to the Kahn's hot dogs issues from 1955 through the Sixties, to Burger Beer photos, to team-issued postcard sets most years since the mid-Fifties. (I know, I know . . . we Milwaukee Braves collectors had a pretty nice selection of regionals through the 1950s. As I said, it's all relative).

I'm sure that wealth of goodies is what inspires what seems to be an extraordinary number of very dedicated, very competitive collectors. Fortunately for us, most of the these collectors are extremely generous in sharing their discoveries and their knowledge with the rest of the hobby.

One such collector, Patrick Smith, recently forwarded information about a couple of Reds items that are worth adding to the Standard Catalog.

The first is a pair of variations of the 1970 "Bubble-gumless Cards" issued as newspaper cutouts by the Dayton Daily News. This is one of the largest of that eras's newspaper "card" sets, at least among sets that were baseball-only.

For many years the checklist for that set stood at 160 players from what looks to be all major league teams in both leagues. The pictures were printed in black-and-white in a size of about 3-1/2" x 4".

Smith has sent scans of two previously uncataloged paper cards that have to be considered variations of the basic set. They are All-Star cards of Tony Perez and Johnny Bench, the two Reds that had been selected to the N.L. squad in fan balloting. The All-Star versions are very similar to the regular cards except that they are printed with red background decor to complement the black type and b/w photo. Instead of a card number in the panel below the picture, there is the designation "All-Star".

The existence of these two special cards leads a cataloger to wonder if that was the extent of the All-Star series. The 1970 All-Star Game was played at Riverfront Stadium on July 14. The Nationals won their eighth consecutive A-S contest and the game is famous for Pete Rose's slide into home plate that broke the left shoulder of Indians catcher Ray Fosse.

Smith is unsure of when the All-Star cards were printed in the Dayton paper. They might have been printed when the team rosters were announced, or they might have been printed on July 14.

Were the other A-S starters included in the series? Were the other Reds who were chosen for the team (Pete Rose and pitchers Jim Merritt and Wayne Simpson)?

Let us know if you can shed any light. Tomorrow we'll present Smith's other Reds "find."

Standard Catalog Update #43 : 1955 Topps Jim Robertson variations

I'm still working through my holiday vacation backlog and I came upon a report from Cliff Bowman about an heretofore uncataloged variation among the 1955 Topps high numbers.

Bowman sent a scan of the back card #177, Jim Robertson, on which the red lines that complete the stat boxes for lifetime batting average and putouts are incomplete.

I checked the various '55T Robertsons for sale on eBay, and ALL of the cards that had back images available were like this (incomplete boxes).

When I posted an inquiry on the post-war section of the Net 54 baseball card forum, however, I was surprised to find the several of those who responded were able to provide scans of Robertson cards with complete boxes in that area.

I'm not sure which version was printed first, and so far the relative numbers of the two variations seem about equal, so that initially there doesn't seem to be any value differential warranted.

Back on Sept. 20 we published a similar discovery concerning the 1956 Topps Willard Schmidt card. Two days later we had an update that showed the Schmidt card was really a progressive problem that occured during the course of printing, rather than a pre-press variation. For that reason we decided not to list it as a variation in the Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards.

That makes it hard to specify why I'm leaning towards listing this card as a variation. If, after publication of this report, and a suitable time for reader response, we don't hear of any "transitional" variations between the "full boxes" and "partial boxes" versions. You'll likely see this listed in the 2011 edition.

Michael Oher -- I'll jump on the bandwagon

No, I haven't seen the movie yet. I haven't been to a movie since 2006 (The Longest Yard) when I was totally turned off by the entire theater-going experience.

But I have been an Ole Miss fan since the 1980s. So when I noticed that there were a lot of great color pictures of Oher available on the 'net, I figured I'd knock out a 1955-style card over the holidays.

Now that the Packers didn't advance in the playoffs, and since the Giants (Eli) aren't in it, I guess I'll pull for the Ravens to make it in the AFC. In the NFC I'm hoping to see the Vikings in the Super Bowl. I'm not all caught up in the love Brett/hate Brett thing that we have going here in Wisconsin, but how can you not root for a 40-year-old quarterback to win the big one? Though if he does, I'll have to revise my Brett Favre custom card. I made that right after he "retired" the first time and it really should be updated.

My T205 Honus Wagner, Max Carey

I've been expanding my repertoire of custom card creations. In recent weeks I've been working on replicating the classic 1911 T205 Gold Borders with a Honus Wagner card "that never was."

Because he said he didn't want children buying cigarettes in an attempt to get a card with his picture, Wagner refused to cede the rights to issue a card of him to the cigarette companies during the heyday of the tobacco-card era circa 1909-1919. That's what makes his T206 card the "King" of baseball cards and worth six figures in even the most deplorable condition.

It was therefore quite natural that I chose "The Flying Dutchman" as the subject for my first T205 project. I'm still fine tuning the images, but shown above are the back and two possible fronts I'm considering when I finally get the cards into print.

The green-background card uses a portrait identical to the famed T206 Wagner, but has more of an artwork look as the result of its having been used on a contemporary American Caramel Co. issue. The blue-background card uses a portrait that originally appeared on a pin-back celluloid button.

At right is the semi-final version of a T205 Max Carey "rookie card." Actually, Carey's real rookie card came in 1912, in the T207 Brown Background set, but he could have appeared in T205 if the tobacco/card magnates had recognized the future Hall of Famer's potential earlier.

The portrait on my T205 is a "flopped" version of that which appeared on his T207.

I haven't produced a back for my T205 Carey, and I may never do so, because the fact is that both of these T205s are just stepping stones to a more ambitious project I've got underway.

I'm currently at work on a pair of 1911 T202 Triplefolders. Like the original T202s, the end panels of my cards will be adaptations of the players' T205s. I've got a great action photo of Honus Wagner to use as the card's center panel, and have completed the back write-ups in a style that I'm confident pays proper tribute to those unsung writers who did the work on the original T205s and T202s.

Kepp your eye on this space in coming days for the debut of my T202 custom card, titled "Wagner Safe at Third."

Watch out for Mantle program reprints

If there was a Hall of Fame for unsung baseball historians, the minor league wing should be named for John G. Hall of Columbia, Mo.

For the past 16 years, Hall has been chronicling the Kansas- Oklahoma-Missouri League, a Class D circuit that existed for only half that long, from 1946-1952.

Hall publishes a quarterly (or so) newsletter called The KOM League Remembered, and in recent years has been supplementing the print presentation with what he calls KOM League Flash Reports on the internet.

Hall seems to know virtually every alumnus of that minor league or their surviving relatives. His newsletter and Flash Reports are full of great stories of the ballplayer veterans of the K-O-M League and of virtually everything else related to the circuit. His writings bring to life many of the faces that card collectors are familiar with from their Bowman and Topps cards of the late 1940s and 1950s.

These reports are not only historically important, but they are written in an entertaining style that makes them great reading for any baseball fan. You can get a sense of the author's style from the copyright notice on each issue, which concludes, "All rights reserved until the day I die. Within a month afterward no one will remember ths publication ever existed. And, justifiably so." Elsewhere he states, "Some of the news in this publication isn't fit to print, but is."

Besides his work in detailing and preserving the history of the K-O-M, Hall was in the past involved in setting up reunions for its players. In conjunction with the 1998 reunion, he created reprints of a pair of scorecards for games in which Mickey Mantle had played with the 1949 Independence Yankees and the 1950 Joplin Miners.

Mantle is unarguably the most famous alumnus of the K-O-M League. Hall wrote a 2005 book titled, Mickey Mantle: Before the Glory, that has long since sold out at its cover price of $29.95 and now sells on used-book sites for as much as $100+. He's also the author of a K-O-M League photo book, Images of Baseball, published in 2004.

In exchanging e-mails with Hall in recent months, since he contacted me following our recent posts on Ponca City Dodgers cards of 1952, the subject of his scorecard reprints came up and we agreed that it would be a good idea to publicize their existence so that collectors are less likely to be fooled into buying them as valuable original artifacts of Mantle's minor league days.

And that IS a concern, because the reprints are extremely well done and are not overtly identified as reproductions. There was a total of 500 of each of the scorecards made in 1998, and besides distributing them to the players at the reunion, some have been dispersed to fans and collectors over the years.

The cover and that portion of each of the scorecards that lists Mantle are shown here.

At top is a 1949 scorecard of a game between Mantle's I-Yankees and the Iola Indians. Like the original, it is a four-pager printed in 7"x 11-1/4" format, printed in red and black. The Mick, wearing number 16 and playing shortstop, batted seventh in that game and was hitting .315 at the time. I can't decipher the scorer's (Hall said the original from which this was reprinted was scored by a friend of Iola right fielder Dick Getter) system, but it looks like the Yankees were 6-0 winners over Iola, though I can't tell what Mantle's contributions might have been. Obviously this neatly detailed scoring would immediately identify any example of a 1949 Independence-Iola scorecard that might be offered in the collector market as a reprint. So would the unique "Lucky Number" 10016 on the cover.

Some years ago I got into a bidding war on eBay for a similar Independence-Iola scorecard. It wasn't one of Hall's reprints, since it was unscored and had a different lucky number on the cover. I lost out to another collector, but can't today recall what the winning bid was. I wanted the card because of its Iola connection, rather than its ties to Mantle, so I wasn't willing to seriously compete with the Mantle fanatics.

The other Hall reprint is for a 1950 Western Association game with the St. Joseph Cardinals visiting Mantle's Joplin Miners. This was an eight-page affair, in 7" x 9-3/4" size, printed in red and black. The scorecard portion is unmarked, but the reprint would be readily identified by the Lucky Number 5307 on the third page, under a photo of Joplin infielder Carl Lombardi. (I wonder if other printings of the scorecard might have a photo of Mantle?). For the Miners, Mantle was at shortstop, batting clean-up and wearing number 12.

The historic value of scorecards like these would be significant even without the Mantle name. Significant at least to true fans of minor league baseball back in the day.

Just off the top of his head, Hall made these comments about some of the players listed in the line-ups on the Joplin-St. Joseph card.

"The guy in the St. Joseph lineup, playing first base, was "Smokey" Joe Cunningham who was with the Cardinals four years later. Hal Olt was at Springfield, Mo. in 1941 with Stan Musial. The Barth playing left field was Eugene Barth whose greatest fame came as an official in the National Football League. The right fielder that night for St. Joseph was Ace Adamcewicz. He was killed during the Korean War. He died November 21, 1952 in Ft. Devens, Mass. Both catchers at Joplin that year had major league affiliations. Cal Neeman eventually made it to the Chicago Cubs et. al. and the other catcher was the late Lyle Westrum. He was the younger brother of long-time major league catcher, Wes Westrum. Lyle died at an earlyage while duck hunting. I got to know his family a few years ago when I had the reunion of the Joplin Miners at the kickoff of my "book tour" for Mickey Mantle: Before the Glory.

Hopefully, publication of this information on the scorecard reprints will help prevent any fraudulent misrepresentation while at the same time engendering some appreciation for Hall's enthusiasm for K-O-M baseball.

If you have any interest in minor league ball in the immediate post-war era, I can't urge you strongly enough to contact John Hall and support his efforts at historic preservation. Check him out at http://komleaguebaseball.blogspot.com. Hall has also offered to make the few remaining pairs of his reprints available to collectors at $25 per pair, postpaid. The chances of an original of one of these Mantle-related scorecards turning up in the hobby market are slim to none, so this is a rare chance to get the next best thing. The revenue raised will be put towards the printing and mailing of his newsletter. You can order by sending check or money order to John Hall, 1709 Rainwood Place, Columbia, MO 65203.

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.