Charley Pride's game Boise career detailed

As I mentioned in my last posting, I was recently moved to finally compile the 1953 Organized Baseball stats of country singing legend Charley Pride. (See also my blog entries for Aug. 18, 2009, and Feb. 14, 2010 for more detail about Pride's baseball career.)


Rounding up the data for Pride's two-game stay with the Fond du Lac Panthers of the Class D Wisconsin State League was relatively easy, since I only had to travel 75 miles to access local newspaper microfilm. 

First-hand perusal of such source material relative to Pride's one-game "career" with the Yankees' Class C Pioneer League farm club at Boise, Idaho, was not feasible.


In today's tech-enhanced world of research, there are several once undreamed-of resources. One is NewspaperArchive.com, a subscription site that offers on-line access to millions of pages of historical newspapers spanning more than 200 years. 


Unfortunately . . . the archive doesn't offer access to any Boise newspapers.


Fortunately . . . other newspapers in cities represented in the Pioneer League did an excellent job of covering the circuit for their readers.


Thus, with only a couple of hours of searching, I was able to find an Associated Press account of Pride's lone effort for the Boise Yankees. Complete with a full box score, the article appeared on the lead sports page of the May 1 Ogden (Utah) Standard-Examiner.


Only 17 years old (actual or possibly "baseball" age), Pride took the mound on April 30, 1953, against the visiting Salt Lake City Bees. On a cold (the AP called the weather "near freezing") and/or wet night in Boise, there were only 203 paying customers in the stands.


Pride worked the first five innings in a slugfest. He gave up three runs on three hits and five walks, hitting one batter. He struck out two and left the game with a 4-2 lead. He had no-decision in the 9-8 Boise victory. At bat, Pride singled in two trips to the plate. 


Without being able to read the Boise papers, I still don't know when Boise optioned Pride to Fond du Lac, where he debuted May 12. Maybe someday I'll find myself in Boise and can look it up at the local library.


The information I found allowed me to create a "corrected" version of my 1954 Topps-style fantasy card of Charley Pride with the Negro American League Memphis Red Sox. My earlier version of the card had mostly blanks in the stat lines.