Jim McCarnes, this Wheaties custom is for you

An item in the Nov. 18, 1944, Sporting News column "In a Minor Key" had a tidbit that caught my eye. The column offered bits and pieces about minor leaguers around the country.

One of them read, "Outfielder James (Wheatie) McCarnes, Jr., Atlanta Crackers, acquired his nickname by saving baseball pictures from cereal boxes."

I'm not aware of any other ballplayers whose nickname stemmed from his baseball card collecting interest.

The mention of McCarnes being with the Atlanta Crackers is a bit of a mystery. His page on baseball-reference.com does not show him ever playing with the Crax. In fact, McCarnes isn't shown with any team in Organized Baseball prior to 1946. 

That doesn't mean he wasn't at least on the roster of the Atlanta Southern Association club in 1944 or 1945. Those were war years and players were scarce, so the 19- or 20-year-old McCarnes may have had a trial with Atlanta.

McCarnes was born in 1925 around Albemarle, N.C. In 1940 he was the right fielder on the Stanly County (N.C.) team that won the American Legion Junior National Championship.

James "Wheatie" McCarnes played on the 1940 American

Legion Junior World Championship team.

The record shows McCarnes got his start in pro ball in 1946, at age 21, with Waycross in the Class D Georgia-Florida League. His ,336 batting average was tops in the circuit for any player in 90+ games and he was named to the All-Star team.

In 1947 McCarnes appears to have been picked up by the N.Y. Yankees organization. He split the season between Class C Joplin, where he hit .303, and Class B Quincy (.107).

McCarnes had his best season, stats-wise in 1948 with Longview in the Class C Lone Star League, batting .305 with 11 home runs. He never had more than two homers in any other season. He was again named to the league All-Star team.

In 1949 "Wheatie" played in 11 games at the Yankees' Class A team at Binghamtom (.241), and in five games at Double-A Beaumont, where he was 1-for-2 at bat. That appears to have ended his professional baseball career.

McCarnes died in an auto wreck in 1964, at the age of 38.

Now, about that custom card . . .
Off and on during my days with Sports Collectors Digest and the Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards I entertained the notion of collecting Wheaties box-back cards of the 1930s.

I never got around to starting such a collection, but I admired their variety of sizes, art deco designs and the star power of the players that appeared.

Some time ago I found a posed action photo of NFL Hall of Fame quarterback Sammy Baugh during his one season (1938) with the St. Louis Cardinals AAA teams at Columbus and Rochester.

I was struck by the similarity of the pose to some of the Wheaties cards of the era. The result of pairing that photo with an original Wheaties card of Arky Vaughan is as you see it here.

I cheated a bit chronologically in working up my custom. The design I used was not from 1938, but rather from Wheaties Series 6 6-1/4" x 8-1/4" box-back issue of 1937, "How to Star in Baseball". Given the complexity of Wheaties designs in the late 1930s, I doubt that any but the most die-hard of Wheaties collectors would notice the deception.

There probably won't be many, if any, further Wheaties-style cards from my custom studio, but I did enjoy the process of making this one.

Custom baseball card of Sammy Baugh

One of the greatest nicknames in NFL history was that of Slingin’ Sammy Baugh, the TCU All-American, Hall of Fame Washington Redskins quarterback and arguably the best all-around pro football player of the 20th Century.

Most fans and collectors, however, don’t know that the nickname was given to him by a Texas sportswriter in tribute to his ability to throw a baseball, rather than a football.

Baugh was All-Southwestern Conference third baseman at Texas Christian in 1936-37.

In the summer of 1937, between graduation and reporting to the Washington Redskins, Baugh took a job at a Pampa, Tex., lumberyard owned by the mayor and played semi-pro baseball for the Pampa Oilers.

The team went to the prestigious Denver Post Tournament where they met the best semi-pro teams in the country.

At the tournament, Baugh was scouted and signed by Ray Doan of the St. Louis Cardinals, to report to spring training in 1938.

As a rookie quarterback, Baugh’s Redskins defeated the Chicago Bears for the NFL Championship in 1937.

Following the title game, the Redskins and Bears embarked on a post-season barnstorming tour. In the last game of the exhibition tour, Baugh separated his throwing (right) shoulder, but was good to go when he reported to Cardinals’ manager Frankie Frisch at St. Petersburg for spring training in 1938.

He said that if he made good in the major leagues he’d give up football. While he was a terrific drawing card in the exhibition season, Baugh was farmed out to the Cardinals’ American Association team at Columbus when the season started. Early on in spring training he was being projected as the St. Louis Cardinals opening day third baseman, but as his baseball weaknesses began to show, the team decided to convert him to a shortstop and sent him down.

Writing in the Dec. 17, 1942, Sporting News, Merrell Whittlesey of the Washington Post, recalled, “His lack of experience, weak hitting and his bad shoulder left him too much of a risk for the Cardinals to carry him into the regular season.”

Columbus installed Baugh at shortstop. For the first two weeks of the season Baugh led the Red Bird hitters, then opposing pitchers began to curve him and throw change-ups. He lost his starting spot.

After a month with Columbus, Baugh was traded to Rochester of the International League in a five-player deal between the Cardinals’ AA clubs.  With the Red Wings, Baugh found himself playing backup to future MVP and perennial All-Star Marty Marion.

Whittlesey said of Baugh, “His fielding was fair and his arm was good in throws across the diamond.” Baugh hit only .183 with Rochester, bringing his season’s average down to .200, with little power (two doubles, a triple and a home run among his 26 hits).

In August he left the team to report to the Redskins.

Baugh was assigned to Sacramento of the Pacific Coast League for the 1939 season, but the Cardinals’ organization said he would not be allowed to leave Aug. 1 to join the Redskins, so he opted to end his professional baseball career.

The rest is football history.

It's not surprising that there are no career-contemporary baseball cards of Baugh. He played only a single season of pro ball and never got into an official major league game.

There are, however, a decent number of black-and-white 1938 spring training photos of Baugh in the uniform of the St. Louis Cardinals. One of those was so compelling that I recently decided to stretch my usual custom-card "rules" to create a 1940 Play Ball-style card of Baugh. 

It would have been less of a stretch to work in the format of 1939 Play Ball, but that design is just so . . . plain.

I'm currently working on another Sammy Baugh baseball card. It, too, is a bit of an anachronism, but it provides a good excuse to expand my repertoire. Watch this space for future developments.