1900 Base Ball World's Championship: Pittsburgh Pirates vs Brooklyn Superbas

I recently covered a 1910 "Most Tied Game Ever" between Pittsburgh and Brooklyn, itself a statistical oddity that wouldn't happen in today's no-tie leagues. But that profile omitted their more significant matchup one decade earlier, as Brooklyn traveled to Pittsburgh for one of the post-season "championships" that presaged our modern World Series.

1900 Pirates team photo (sold for $7170 in 2013)

Honus Wagner starred for the Pirates that year (and many after), appearing front and center in this rare team photo. As runner-ups, I suspect Pittsburgh paid a decent "appearance fee" to the National League champion Superbas, anticipating high public interest in seeing the top two teams face off. (NL champs were crowned by W/L record at the time, so this was considered an exhibition.)

1900 Brooklyn Superbas team composite (sold in 2010 for $14,400)

Credit goes to a Retrosheet discussion for finding the original 1900 Pittsburg Press coverage of that series, as Brooklyn won the best-of-5 and its "Punch Bowl" prize.

• Pre-series coverage: Clubs Ready for World's Championship Games
• Pirates Were Outclassed By Champions (Brooklyn wins 5-2)
• Pirates Give The Champions Another Game (Brooklyn wins 4-2, note "champs plunged" sidebar about mid-game betting)
• Phillipe Was Too Clever For Pitcher Howell (Pittsburgh wins 10-0)
• The Punch Bowl Goes To Pitcher Joe M'Ginnity (Brooklyn wins 6-1)

You can find plenty more on pre-World Series champions at Wikipedia, as records stretch all the way back to the 1857 Brooklyn Atlantics, organized baseball's first title winner, who went 7-1-1 in a season just nine games long.

TRIVIA: The 1870 champion "Chicago White Stockings" later became the Cubs and are the sole original NL franchise to keep both name and location since 1876. (Atlanta's Braves, the other founding member, have moved twice since debuting in Boston.)

National Poster Stamp Society's 1944 Yankees and 1949 Eureka Sportstamps Baseball #5, Red Barrett

Eureka, it's a stamp! This 200-count set of MLB players stands out for two reasons. Most prominent are the full-color, Kodachrome photos, which bubblegum cards didn't premiere until 1953. Second, and less visible, the backs use lick-and-stick glue, a substance rationed during WWII, but back in public circulation by 1949.

Stamp front (blank back)

Vintage catalogs record these as "Eureka Sportstamps" because of the tiny print under that yellow bar.

"Eureka" doesn't appear on the album or packaging, so it's possible the stamps were printed under a separate company name for financial reasons. Thanks to its photo album and some deep investigation by a stamp collector (see Cinderellas and Poster Stamps of F. H. Dietz), we know an entity called National Poster Stamp Society designed the set itself, arranged on 10 sheets of 20 players each.

Brooklyn Dodgers and Chicago Cubs sheet

National Poster Stamp Society planned to release further Sportstamps sets, but stopped at this single run of 200 National Leaguers. Scans of the company-made album cover, pages, and "collectors' club" hint at what could've been.

Sportstamp cover

Brooklyn Dodgers pages

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UPDATE: Return address on one of the original mailing envelopes. Sportstamp kept their offices in the Weightman Building on 1524 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA.

The album itself echoes the Sportstamps text and claims a home in Scranton, PA.

Even with just the National League represented, this set's checklist features big HOFers like Jackie Robinson, Snider, Campanella, Spahn, and Musial. The first two stamps picture MLB executives Happy Chandler and Ford Frick, and then teams appear alphabetically. The Boston Braves come first, so right-hander Red Barrett gets the #5 between Johnny Antonelli and Clint Conaster.

A good wartime baseball performer, Red Barrett won 23 games in 1945 (career stats) and scored this April 1, 1946 cover of Life Magazine.

Barrett also set a baseball record for efficiency by completing a 2-0 win over Boston's Braves in just 58 pitches on August 10, 1944; Baseball-Reference covered both it and other quick games.

UPDATE: Terrific find by fellow OBC collector Greg, who pointed me to this October 1949 Poster Stamp Bulletin profile of the Eureka set. Its article states a 600,000 print run and August release date, with the whole set (plus album) costing just $1.

Poster Stamp Bulletin, Vol 15, #5

According to Alphabetilately.org, the National Poster Stamp Society was a hobbyist arm of the Mid-States Gummed Paper Company, making their 1949 printing one of the earliest direct-to-collector baseball sets. It's only preceded by another NPSS set, this 24-player 1944 sheet of New York Yankees that celebrates their 1943 World Championship.

NPSS credits longtime baseball photographer George Dorrill with taking these images and, as in 1949, they created an album to hold the stamps. Its design echoed the American air power theme familiar throughout WWII.

October 1944's issue of the Poster Stamp Bulletin priced the full set (with album) at thirty-five cents.

Full credit to Alphabetilately.org for tracking down all this extra info and providing scans!

Value: Single stamps are scarce but easily damaged, so come cheap in low-grade. Stars in good shape can run $20 and up, and albums with full sets cost hundreds.

Fakes / reprints: Haven't seen any in the marketplace, but it's worth being careful when buying stars, since sets with blank backs take half the energy to fake.

1974 Fleer Baseball Wildest Days and Plays #5, Most Tied Game Ever

This post's a chance to return to one of my favorite baseball card eras, the growth of 1970s oddball publishing. In collecting terms, "oddball" typically refers to sets with short print runs or unusual subjects, often sold directly to collectors instead of wax-wrapped for stores. Baseball artist Bob Laughlin created many such sets over the decades, doing both self-published work and sets like this one for Fleer, itself a company that spent many years jousting with Topps over the right to make "real" (non-oddball) player cards.

If you haven't read much about Laughlin's work, start with the 1st Issue of Inside Pitch over at The Fleer Sticker Project. It's a great profile of Bob's sets, advertising, and the 1970s Topps and Fleer zeitgeist. (It also notes that Laughlin first sold this set to collectors in 1974, but it's often misdated 1973 by catalogs.)

Each card from Fleer's Wildest Days and Plays is like an unusual fact you'd find sprinkled into a sports almanac, but on cardboard. The set's #5 highlights a statistical oddity from Saturday, August 13, 1910, the second game of a Pittsburgh-Brooklyn doubleheader.

Thanks to Google news archives, you can read original coverage of this doubleheader game from the Pittsburg Press.

Pittsburgh Press game headline, August 14, 1910

While searching Pittsburg Press archives for game info, I also came across this comic of the Pirates on a late-season chase after Chicago for the NL crown. Unfortunately for the hometown faithful, Chicago went on to win the pennant easily and Pittsburgh finished a distant third, 17.5 games back.

"To The Pennant" (Pittsburg Press, 1910)

If you ever need to find old baseball coverage, Google's news archive provides a wide range of cities and papers back to the early 1900s and is especially handy for those willing to page through scanned original newspapers, microfiche-style. If you've got an hour or two to kill, that's an easy way to do it.

UPDATE: Some of my favorite Laughlin art appears in this set; to wit:

According to eBay dealer Columbia City Collectibles, Fleer also issued this (scarcer) two-card version in wax packs.

Wildest Days and Play two-card panel

These larger panels purportedly came with Fleer's team logo patches and gum, so might've be a special version issued to help clear out back stock. Their eBay listing's the first time I've seen one.

Value: Not many cards in this set represent "stars," so most (like this #5) cost a few dollars. The cards that refer to Babe Ruth run somewhat more.

Fakes / reprints: Haven't seen any in the marketplace and they'd be a tough set to profit by faking.

Workmanlike Performances

I recently accepted a position at the wireless HiFi company Sonos, so am pulling regular hours again. This means a little less time to blog, but inspired me to look for players who come ready-made for hitching up their overalls and putting in a hard day's work. (All found via B-R's name search.)

2013 Panini America's Pastime, Brandon Workman

My place of work's in Cambridge, just across the river from Boston's baseball club.

1982 Topps #479, Rowland Office

I'm pushing electronic papers, not breaking rocks, and most of it happens in an office.

1922 E120 American Caramel, Walter "Duster" Mails

I send a lot of emails.

Clarence Beers (photo)

The break area does have some beer.

1937-38 Zeenut PCL, Harley Boss

The founders, our company bosses, are on the West Coast. They say I'll be visiting HQ soon enough, and I bet people clamor for it during New England winters.

Enough blogging, back to work!

1949 Bowman Baseball Wantlist (Updated Sept 25, 2016)

This post tracks progress on my low-grade 1949 Bowman baseball set. Some collectors call it the ugly duckling of post-WWII issues, given its stark (and probably cheap) hand-tinted colors over black-and-white photos, but it also broke ground in set size (240 players) and featured plenty of stars, most notably New York's Yankees, Dodgers, and Giants.

1949 Bowman #50, Jackie Robinson (his first Bowman card)

Ron Hobbs noted Bowman printing sheets had space for 252 cards, but "reprinted" a dozen players from earlier series, so numbering stops at #240. Stock and design variations push the master set to 324, a real challenge considering the scarcity of higher numbers (#145 and up).

WANTLIST -- COMPLETED!

April 19: Three arrived from eBay, including Fritz Ostermueller, a pitcher called out as "targeting" Jackie Robinson in the movie 42. (His daughter objected to the portrayal and the scene itself gets several points wrong, which can happen when moviemakers pick larger themes over real events.)

#227 Fritz Ostermueller

#145 Sylvester Donnelly

#190 Jim Hearn

Feb 8, 2015: Edwin "Duke" Snider and Dom "Little Professor" DiMaggio arrived!

Late in 2016, I procured Jackie Robinson's first Bowman card and put this set to bed! Thanks to everyone who traded and sent cards along the way.

1922 T85 Strollers Tobacco Actors & Actresses #5, Barbara La Marr

Hollywood writer and actress. Six movie roles per year in the Roaring Twenties. Touted as The Most Beautiful Girl in the World, capital letters. That's one way to find yourself on a trading card.

Those winsome eyes belong to Hollywood's silent film star Barbara LaMarr. First employed as a writer and soon encouraged to perform, she burned through silver screen stardom in just six years (1920-25). Her candle-burning schedule included almost no sleep, at least one drug habit, five marriages, and death by tuberculosis at age 29, one of the hardest of hard-lived starlet lives.

A decade later, actress Hedy Lamarr "inherited" her screen name from this La Marr via studio head Louis B. Mayer, who considered Barbara one of his favorites.

Some T85 backs show a Strollers Tobacco ad instead of the personal bio. I'm not certain if all subjects have multiple backs or certain cards always show the ad instead of a bio; this might vary by type of issue.

Strollers Cigarettes ad for T85 movie stars

A terrific 1922 T85 gallery supplied my #5 scans and includes luminaries like Gloria Swanson, Rodolph (Rudolph) Valentino, Jackie Coogan, Norma Talmadge, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Lionel Barrymore. It's a who's-who of early Hollywoodland and the set's a great one for movie fans to attempt, in any of its three permutations: Type 1 (100 cards, sepia), Type 2 (220 cards, black-and-white, numbered), or Type 3 (220 cards, oval portrait). Per the full checklist, #201-220 are labeled "© Mack Sennett" and don't identify the actresses shown.

Strollers also marketed this series via the Montreal-based Tobacco Products Corp. and collectors catalog it as C142 ("Strollers Canada").

Value: Non-sport type cards cost a lot less than 1920s tobacco equivalents and this #5 can be had for $10 or less in low-grade.

Fakes / reprints: Don't know the non-sports market well enough to say for sure, but I imagine the set's most famous names might have been reprinted or faked. I doubt that a lesser start like La Marr would be vulnerable to it.

1975 TCMA Larry French Baseball #5, Brooklyn Dodgers years (1941-42)

Collector and dealer Mike Aronstein's publishing company (TCMA) spent the early 1970s making retrospective looks at baseball, temporarily bringing past players and teams to the fore as simple black-and-white designs with a common theme. As with their other "focused" sets, today's biography of pitcher Larry French started with a handful of contemporary photos (six total), found an interesting "baseball-plus-war" story to tell, and sold them via mail order to collectors for a few dollars each.

In baseball, Larry French was a classic 1930s innings-eating pitcher, one of those guys who made 30 starts every year and won often enough to keep management happy. He pitched often enough and long enough, in fact, that he's one of only 90 pitchers to allow 3000 hits from the mound. It's a much rarer feat for batters to achieve, but also says something about your longevity and effectiveness as a hurler to hit the same mark. (HOF Phil Niekro holds the top spot and is the only pitcher to give up over 5000 hits.)

French's back text story ("The Porkchop Pitcher") covers his baseball and personal life and reads much like TCMA's companion set about ballplayers stationed in Guam. Their brief biography, partially told in his voice, was co-written by Harrington "Kit" Crissey, who later published a WWII baseball book called Teenagers, Graybeards, and 4-Fs.

UPDATE: Wrigley Wax scanned some TCMA ads from 1984 that show how the company marketed their sets (and several made by others) via hobby publications.

So that's how TCMA did it

Value: I bought this #5 on eBay for $6, which isn't beyond the pale. They're hard cards to track down, perhaps because TCMA collectors rarely break their sets into singles. As of April 2014, there's an autographed #5 on eBay for $14.

Autographed TCMA #5 on eBay

Fakes / reprints: I doubt anyone would make money faking obscure TCMA sets, even if it'd be easy to do with modern equipment.

1975-76 Calbee All Star Game Baseball #5, Tsutomu Wakamatsu & Katsuya Nomura

This is my latest "one that got away," a scarce Japanese type card that ended with me as runner-up bidder on eBay.

According to collecting expert Rob Fitts and reader Ryan G, this card's from a multi-series set covering Japan's 1975-76 seasons and pictures a 1975 All-Star Game. The batter's future Hall of Famer Tsutomu Wakamatsu, who played, broadcast, and managed for the Yakult Swallows franchise. The catcher's another future Hall of Famer, Katsuya Nomura, who was then player-manager for the Nankai Hawks.

Here's a 1977 trading card of the sharp-hitting Wakamatsu, as found in a tribute to 2009 Japanese Hall of Fame inductees.

The 1975-76 back's titled "Pro Baseball Card 5," followed by what I believe are details about the 1975 All-Star Game pictured on its front. Japan played three such exhibitions that year and this one's dated July 19th (7/19).

Calbee itself is a food company and packed their cards into potato chip bags like the one above. They printed large sets, some numbering over 1000 cards, but proved so discardable (and localized) that few exist in American collections today.

1975 Calbee #329, Sadaharu Oh

Japanese-Taiwanese slugger Sadaharu Oh's the best-known player from 1970s Calbee sets and often appeared on a dozen cards each year, thanks to their generous set sizes.

Former major leaguers played overseas often enough they also pop up in those sets, but I especially enjoyed this custom "1975 Calbee" of Frank Howard by Cards That Never Were. Big Frank barely played thanks to a back injury, but appears on a handful of vintage and retro cards in Japanese gear.

Value: This #5 closed at $20 ( $13 bid + $7 shipping). I'll have to track down more Calbee auctions to know whether this is typical for singles. Mid-1970s Japanese issues are obscure (and specialized) enough that setting a real market price is hard to do, so you might have to pay more than expected for specific cards.

Fakes / reprints: Sadaharu Oh might be famous enough to reprint or fake, but it'd be easier for a counterfeiter to stick with more familiar American cards, so the risk seems low.