CardBoredom

Blog

  • The Great 1948-1949 Leaf Debate Is Settled

    The Great 1948-1949 Leaf Debate Is Settled

    The colorful postwar Leaf Gum cards are a 1949 issue, not 1948. As with nearly every area of life, I find it helpful to step back and look at some cards from the Junk Wax Era.

    Image: 1989 Upper Deck and 1989 Donruss Ken Griffey, Jr. rookie cards.

    When you pull a 1989 Upper Deck, or perhaps the purple bordered Rated Rookie Ken Griffey, Jr. from your collection, nearly four decades after they popped out of a pack there is zero confusion about what you are holding. The airbrushed hat, big smile, and hologram immediately anchor the Upper Deck card to a specific point in collecting history. The same goes for the purple borders and blue “Rated Rookie” logo on the Donruss card. Everyone viewing its image of a teenage Junior trying to look comfortable at Spring Training knows this card and calls it the same thing. It’s 1989 Donruss with no further debates. Everyone immediately enters the same identifying terms into a search engine or flips to the same chronological page in their price guide. This kind of universal agreement allows collectors to communicate without friction, feeling like it has always been the natural order of things. It hasn’t.

    Go back another 40 years from Griffey’s rookie cards to the genesis of the postwar card boom and you will find a set so frustratingly misidentified that it has sparked debates lasting longer than some marriages. The Leaf Candy Company’s foray into postwar baseball consists of 98 cards spread across two series. It has been variously referred to as 1948 Leaf, 1948-49 Leaf, and 1949 Leaf depending on which price guide you consulted, which grading service slabbed your cards, or apparently which side of the bed the cataloger woke up on that morning. The second series wasn’t even fully confirmed in size and scope until 20 years after the cards first appeared.

    Image: Front and back of the author's 1949 Leaf Johnny Hopp baseball card. Note the 1948 copyright date at the bottom of the card back.

    The confusion starts, as most taxonomic disasters do, with copyright dates. Flip over a Leaf card and you’ll see copyright dates of either 1948 to 1949, which is about as helpful as a map with two different “You Are Here” markers. When Jefferson Burdick was cataloging cards for his American Card Catalog, the Rosetta Stone of early collecting, he did what any reasonable person would do when confronted with a 1948 copyright: He labeled the set R-401 and called it a 1948 issue. Hobby publications of the 1960s, like good disciples, adopted Burdick’s dating with little questioning. This was gospel, handed down from the mountain, and who were they to argue with the man who had systematically organized the entire known universe of collectible cards? A few included notes in their descriptions that the cards were “issued through 1949” or that these were part of a “1948-1949” release, though their primary focus was more on finding collectors who had extras they were willing to part with.

    In February 1979 Dr. James Beckett and Dennis Eckes published the Sport Americana Baseball Card Price Guide, a publication that would eventually become to the hobby what the Oxford English Dictionary is to language. They looked at those mixed copyright dates and decided to split the baby, calling the set 1948-49 Leaf. This followed the precedent of other multi-year issues like the legendary 1909-1911 T-206 tobacco cards or the 1934-36 Diamond Stars, the latter actually having cards of the same players with multiple copyright dates to choose from. The Leaf approach seemed reasonable enough, a nice compromise that acknowledged both dates without committing fully to either.

    Fast forward to today and digital databases and third-party grading services, those plastic-entombing arbiters of authenticity and condition, can’t even agree on a consistent nomenclature. TCDB and COMC both identify cards from this set as being “1948-49 Leaf.” PSA, the 800-pound gorilla of the grading world, slabs these cards as “1948 Leaf” with all the confidence of a Georgian parson declaring the Earth to be 6,000 years old. SGC has long gone with “1948-49 Leaf Gum Co” on their labels, hedging their bets like a gambler who can’t decide which horse to back. CSG goes the PSA route and simply leaves it at “1948 Leaf.” Meanwhile, Beckett’s various grading services, Beckett Vintage Grading, Beckett Grading Service, and their discount option Beckett Collectors Club Grading all label these as “1949 Leaf.” It’s chaos. It’s like asking five people what to call a submarine sandwich and getting back hoagie, sub, grinder, hero, and “big honkin’ sammich” as answers.

    Image: Slab labels from various third party grading services showing the various ways Leaf cards are identified. Shown are PSA ("1948 Leaf"), BGS ("1949 Leaf"), SGC ("1948-49 Leaf Gum Co."), and CSG ("1948 Leaf").

    Debate about the issuance of these cards has been percolating in the hobby for decades, and this is key, there are zero contemporary accounts of someone opening these cards in 1948. None. Zero diary entries. No letters to friends. The inhabitants of 1948 are completely silent on the issue. After an ownership change, the Beckett price guides switched in the mid-’90s from calling this 1948-49 to simply 1949 Leaf, a decision that raised more than a few eyebrows among the vintage dealer community.

    Of course, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. There was more behind this editorial decision than just a growing awareness of the lack of contemporary references.

    Enter Ted Zanadakis, a collector from Hillside, New Jersey, who grew up two blocks away from Phil Rizzuto and had the distinct privilege of actually opening packs of these cards when they first appeared. Not in 1948. In March 1949. At his local store. Ted remembered it clearly, buying hundreds of first series cards, completely unaware that a second series even existed. He managed to complete the full 49-card first series and then did what most kids do with hobbies: He grew up and moved on with his life, returning to collecting in 1977 only to discover, to his considerable surprise, that there were another 49 cards he had never seen.

    Ted wasn’t content to just shrug and accept the hobby’s consensus dating. He went full detective mode. In 1981, he tracked down and interviewed a Leaf production employee as well as George Moll, cofounder of Bowman Gum, Leaf’s chief competitor and eventual courtroom adversary. He photographed a complete uncut sheet of the 49-card first series in 1988, a sheet that contained 33 cards with 1949 copyrights and 16 with 1948 copyrights. This is where the logic tightens: Those 1949 copyrights wouldn’t have existed in 1948, which means the sheet was only printed and distributed after January 1, 1949. The same copyright split exists on the second series sheet. Printing cards with 1949 copyrights in 1948 is legally…problematic.

    Ted also noticed something else. Regardless of copyright dates, the backs of these cards list player ages, not dates of birth, and every single age is calculated based on the year being 1949. Multiple cards reference events that took place in November or December 1948, events that would have been impossible to reference if the cards had been printed earlier in 1948. Lou Boudreau’s card with a 1948 copyright is the smoking gun here. The biographical text on this first series card mentions his winning the 1948 American League MVP, an award that wasn’t announced until November 30, 1948. Given that these cards were printed on the same production sheet as other first series cards, basic logic dictates they couldn’t have existed until late December 1948 at the absolute earliest, and more realistically not until early 1949 when they could actually be distributed.

    Ted wrote up his findings in the Fall 2006 edition of Old Cardboard and became something of a zealot on the topic. Anyone who asked him about the set got directed to that article, which became required reading for anyone who wanted to actually understand these cards rather than just repeat whatever received wisdom happened to come their way. In it, he lays out the four primary pillars supporting his argument that every one of the Leaf cards were issued in 1949.

    But wait, there’s more. In December 2024, inspired by Brian Kappel’s book Re: Leaf, John Racanelli published an article on the SABR Baseball Card blog that brought out the big guns in its focus on the lawsuits between Bowman and Leaf. These sworn-under-oath legal documents provided exact dates. Leaf shipped its first cards to Boston on March 14, 1949. Bowman noticed immediately and fired off a cease and desist letter like an overzealous HOA board member spotting someone stepping on their lawn. A lawsuit was filed on March 21, 1949. Leaf, in their legal response, admitted that March 14, 1949 was indeed when cards first shipped to Boston. This isn’t speculation or foggy childhood memory or copyright date interpretation. This is a company, in legal proceedings where perjury is a crime, stating exactly when they distributed their product.

    Racanelli makes the entirely sensible observation that if Leaf’s products had appeared on store shelves in 1948, Bowman, seeing the threat to its own sales, would have commenced legal action much earlier. Bowman wasn’t exactly known for their patience when it came to competition. Racanelli writes, “All evidence from this case, including Leaf’s own admissions, unequivocally confirms that the Leaf cards were first distributed in March 1949, to time availability with the opening of the 1949 season. Leaf had previously distributed its football cards in 1948 during the football season. This should put to rest any continuing questions whether the cards were distributed in 1948 and that the hobby should simply consider this a 1949 issue.”

    This looks pretty conclusive.

    So what does this mean for collectors beyond settling a decades-long argument? First, we can finally classify this set as a 1949 issue and place it in proper context with other issues of its time. Second, and this is where things get uncomfortable, several cards previously recognized as rookie cards are in fact not rookies. If Leaf is indeed a 1949 issue, and players appeared in 1948 Bowman, those Bowman cards are their rookies, not the Leaf cards.

    Does this even matter? It is widely recognized within the hobby that a person referring to the 1952 Topps Mantle as his rookie card knows absolutely nothing about baseball cards, but the hobby almost universally holds it to be the ultimate representation of the player. Nobody disputes Jackie Robinson’s debut came after his Bond Bread issues of 1947, which are the closest thing he has to a true rookie card depending on your definition of how widely released a rookie card must be. Robinson, and the ’49 Leaf issues of key names like Satchel Paige, will almost certainly remain the centerpieces of those players’ cardboard legacy, even if they have to share a bit of the spotlight with their more common Bowman counterparts. It’s the story that counts.

    Image: Front and back of a 1989 Donruss Ken Griffey, Jr. Rated Rookie baseball card. The front has purple borders and features Griffey posing for the camera with a bat on his shoulder. The back of the card is printed against a bright orange background.

    Here’s where the irony gets delicious. The 1989 Donruss Ken Griffey Jr. Rated Rookie, that card we started with, contains a 1988 copyright date and hit store shelves in late December 1988. Not a single hobby source, not one, refers to this as a 1988 issue or even a 1988-89 release. Nobody. The publishing cadence of baseball cards was well established within the hobby by then, and formal classification systems had been set up and accepted by the great majority of collectors. If someone wants to be adamant about calling the Leaf cards a 48-49 issue based on copyright dates, they must also be dogmatic enough to say Griffey’s only rookie is a 1988-89 Donruss issue and not one of his various other 1989 issues, such as Upper Deck. No sane collector will ever identify 1989 Donruss as a 1988 or 1988-89 issue, and applying that same sheer logic to the 1949 versus 1948-49 Leaf debate should land them squarely in the camp of referring to the cards as a 1949 issue.

    Image: Close-up view of the back of a 1989 Donruss Ken Griffey, Jr. baseball card. The 1988 copyright date appearing in the upper right has been circled in white by the author to draw attention.

    Jim Beckett initially resisted calls to change the references to the Leaf set from 1948-49 to 1949, and he had his reasons. He’d built long-standing relationships with most of the dealer community, many of whom were either upset at the prospect of having their “rookie” cards demoted or experiencing the cognitive dissonance of having their foundational knowledge of the hobby’s history shift beneath their feet. Baseball card collectors are a dogmatic, outspoken bunch, and Beckett didn’t particularly want to deal with their whining. He has said almost as much in subsequent public comments, though he did so with the tact and diplomatic phrasing that has marked his career. Over time he moved from the copyright influenced dual dating regime to an ever shrinking set of increasingly improbable scenarios that could still allow 1948 to be part of the naming convention. Beckett experienced a health scare in the mid-1990s, prompting him to reevaluate priorities and sell his eponymous price guide business. Freed from the relationships the founder had established, new leadership instituted changes, including renaming 1948-49 Leaf to 1949 in the pages of the monthly price guides and using 1949 Leaf in the identification of cards submitted to their grading services.

    Old habits die hard, though. The evidence is overwhelming at this point. Ted Zanadakis’s firsthand account, corroborated by other collectors who maintained contemporary journals of their pack purchases. The uncut sheets with their legally binding 1949 copyrights. The biographical references to late 1948 events. The legal documents with specific shipping dates. And yet PSA and CSG still slab these cards as 1948 Leaf, like cartographers still drawing sea monsters on maps long after we’d sailed those waters and found nothing but fish.

    However, the tide is turning. Collectors willing to put in the time and effort to understand these cards, to actually read the evidence rather than just repeat what they heard from some dealer at a card show in 1987, are coming into alignment on this being a 1949 issue. The old guard who grew up with the American Card Catalog as their Bible is passing away, and with them will go the references to 1948. It’s a generational shift, a slow-moving tectonic change that reshapes the landscape without anyone noticing until one day they wake up and realize the mountains anchoring their reference point have moved.

    The 1949 Leaf set deserves to be properly dated, not because it changes the cards themselves or makes them more or less valuable or more or less beautiful, but because accuracy matters. When we talk about these cards, when we catalog them and price them and grade them and buy them and sell them, we should be speaking the same language. Any collector should be able to pull a card from a box and identify it without confusion, the way we can with that 1989 Donruss Griffey.

  • “Mid” Century: 1952 Topps Demographics

    “Mid” Century: 1952 Topps Demographics

    Stats have been a regular feature of baseball cards since Topps made them a standard feature with the cardboard sold with gum in wax paper wrappers in 1952. Reviewing the on field numbers on the back of cards has been a staple of the baseball card experience since that time. Almost equally revered has been the time honored tradition of completely ignoring the other stats on the card backs: Player demographics. Aside from a brief flurry of interest in tracking year over year surges in player weight during the Steroid Era, items such as height and weight have largely been ignored despite being a seemingly required component of card content for three quarters of a century.

    I get it. Even if a collector cared about the exact birthdate or physical dimensions of whatever player is depicted on the card they are holding, it is a long acknowledged tenet of the hobby that the numbers are made up and at best were accurate only at one specific moment in time. We’re used to it.

    Image: 1986 Topps Cecil Fielder rookie card and 1992 O-Pee-Chee Premier Cecil Fielder baseball card. Cecil is noticeably larger on the 1992 card.
    These cards issued six years apart claim Fielder’s weight was unchanged at 230 lbs.

    Bill James, upon reading that Cecil Fielder weighed 230 lbs., once quipped that he wondered what the figure would be if Fielder placed both feet on the scale at the same time. This didn’t really matter in the analog world in which a super-sized Fielder frankly hit better than not-quite-as-large Fielder. However, a question arose regarding the exact size of players when the independent Atlantic League tweaked its rules for the 2019 season. The league was introducing the Trackman Automatic Ball/Strike system, a piece of tech that pinpointed the location of pitches crossing the plate with rapid, highly precise ball or strike calls.

    The strongest argument against the system wasn’t the accuracy of the sensors. It was the way the rules of baseball had been written in the 19th century. The strike zone was set in the 1880s as “…over home plate not lower than the batsman’s knee, nor higher than his shoulders.” That seems rather straightforward, and it worked with minor adjustments for well over a century. Edge cases were identified in the ensuing 130 years as players argued about exactly what constituted a pitch “over home plate.” Did it have to stay over the plate for the entirety of its passing the batter? Could it be a strike if it just nipped a corner and dove in or away from a batter? Designers of the ABS system had to apply the same precision of their pitch tracking to defining the strike zone. Leagues involved in the system’s testing subsequently adjusted the legally defined zone to match the constraints of the technology.

    One final adjustment was needed before MLB could be ready to make ABS part of live ballgames. The new system could not accurately produce a consistent strike zone using the traditional shoulder-and-knees dimensions of the height of the zone. A player changing his stance could produce wildly different dimensions. The rule makers opted to simply define the height of the zone as a percentage of a batter’s height. Gauging how tall a player stands should be a fairly straightforward measurement: All you have to do is look on the back of their baseball cards. After noticing player agents and marketing guys exchanging nervous glances, it was decided to have the entirety of the active MLB roster measured under identical conditions to produce an official height for use in constructing each player’s personalized strike zone for the 2026 season.

    The result? More than half of teams’ starting nines were shorter than initially advertised. Those who previously stood at the 6’0″ mark saw the largest adjustment, “shrinking” on average by nearly an inch from the round number so many had been mentally anchoring to. The back of next year’s cards promise to be more interesting than usual.

    Let’s flip back to the backs of those cards from 1952. Topps was producing cards with nearly 50% more real estate to fill than its closest competitor and sought to make the cards as informationally dense as possible. This resulted in a lot of useful information, such as the now familiar statistical batting and pitching statistical grids adorning almost every card issued since that time. There were also height, weight, birthdates, places of birth, current home, throwing and batting preferences, hair color, and eye color.

    Image: Back of a 1952 Topps Eddie Waitkus baseball card, card number 158 in the set. In addition to the numerous demographic metrics, note the biographical text that begins with "Shot by a crazed girl in June, 1949, Ed was close to death."

    I’ve looked through all 407 cards in the ’52 Topps checklist, looking for trends among the more obscure areas of these demographics. I started out looking for the extreme outliers, but as I went along with this project, the names and their underlying numbers started to blur together. This led to asking the question, “Who is the quintessential ’52 Topps guy?” What player is so nondescript compared to the rest that he represents the absolute average ballplayer in the set without even trying?

    1952 Topps by Height

    Let’s start with height given the remeasurement push for the current baseball season. Player height ranges from 5’6″ (Phil Rizzuto/Clem Koshorek/Chuck Dressen) to 6’6″ (Chris Van Cuyk and Ewell Blackwell), almost the same difference between Jose Altuve and Aaron Judge today. The average player depicted in the checklist stood an even 6′ tall with 22% of all names hitting this mark. The distribution of heights looks normal with a ±2 inch standard deviation.

    1952 Topps by Weight

    The weights reported on the backs of the cards range from 150-240 pounds with an average of 185 lbs. The Dodgers’ Billy Cox and Tony Bartirome of the Pirates anchor the lower end of the range. A few players were likely lighter than advertised given various reports of names like Billy Goodman, Tom “Muscles” Upton, and Cox all seeing their playing weights dip into the 130s towards the end of the season.

    Image: 1952 Topps baseball cards of Billy Cox, Tony Bartirome, and Luke Easter.

    The Cleveland Indians’ Luke Easter tipped the other end of the scale at 240 pounds. “Big Luke” is interesting, as he is listed as a full 10 pounds heavier than the second heaviest name in the checklist, Steve Bilko.

    Something I found interesting is the way the reported weights cluster around certain numbers, as if players were rounding up or down to the nearest five pounds. If you take 400+ people and weigh them under identical conditions, you would expect to find each possible ending digit to have roughly 40 names. However, instead of the 20% of names expected to appear with either a zero or five at the end of their weight, the collector finds 79% of the checklist ending in these round numbers.

    Eye Color

    As far as I know, this is the only set in which eye color is a recurring item to be reported to card collectors. Eye color is generally classified into six groups. Topps reports players falling into five of these categories with no examples of amber eyes found in the checklist. Seeking to be complete, the company still managed to classify players into six categories with the addition of “Blue-Grey” as a recognized color for Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Murray Dickson, the only such example in the set. More than 80% of the checklist has brown or blue eyes, with brown being slightly more common (175 out of 407 players). Blue eyes are vastly more common than in the general human population, while the prevalence of green eyes more closely match the American population at almost exactly at 5% of the checklist.

    Donut Chart: Distribution of eye colors appearing in the 1952 Topps baseball card checklist. 175 Brown. 156 Blue. 22 Hazel. 1 Blue-Grey. 33 Grey. 20 Green.

    Why would Topps think this was information that collectors wanted to know? Perhaps it was one more datapoint that could be used endear the cards to kids through evoking a thought of “this ballplayer is just like me.” More likely was the desire to fill space on these large format cards while appearing informational. Even more likely in my view is that the collectors opening packs were not the target audience for this information at all. The original photographs were black and white, requiring coloring via the work of artists using Flexichrome. Topps likely provided these contract workers with datasheets containing hair and eye colors to instruct which pigments to use, data that was sometimes treated more as a suggestion, as evidenced by cards like the set’s Eddie Mathews card.

    Image: 1952 Topps #407 Eddie Mathews baseball card. A closeup of his eyes is provided to the right in which it is clearly seen that Mathews' eyes have been colored brown.
    The back of the card states that Mathews has blue eyes.

    Hair Color

    With the exception of Athletics back-up catcher Joe Tipton, everyone in the ’52 checklist is wearing a hat and hiding their hair from the camera. Topps still thought hair color was important information to give to the art department and included it on the back of every card in the set. More variation is shown in hair colors than eyes, and the nine labels assigned by Topps line up with some of the color scales in use at the time.

    HAIR COLORCOUNT% CHECKLIST
    Black7819.2%
    Dark Brown20.5%
    Brown24760.7%
    Light Brown112.7%
    Auburn41.0%
    Blond5212.8%
    Sandy51.2%
    Red61.5%
    Grey20.5%

    Keeping up with the Pareto Principle seen at work in eye color, 80% of the checklist is represented by just two hair colors (black and brown). Given the number of older coaches and managers appearing in the checklist, it seems likely that the frequency of grey hair (or none at all) is underreported.

    Age Distribution (and Fudged Numbers) in 1952 Topps

    Dates of birth were included on every card, translating into an average age of 29.7 years as of Opening Day for the ’52 season, just inside of the psychologically important line of 30 years old that separates the “could-be” prospects from the “never-wasses.” The reported ages ranged from Bobby Del Greco celebrating his 19th birthday 8 days ahead of the first pitch to his 59 year old manager Billy Meyer.

    While Del Greco and Meyer displayed accurate birthdates, many names in the checklist did not. Using actual birthdates raises the average age to 30.1, though there is wide dispersion in this with a standard deviation being ±5.7 years. Roughly one third (31%) of the cards feature an incorrect birthdate. Some are clearly clerical errors with transposed months and days or the substitution of numbers that look similar when hurriedly scrawled on a notepad (4 and 9, for example, or any combination of 3,6, and 8). Some players, however, had active schemes to disguise their true age. Mickey McDermott added 243 days to his age to get his first professional contract accepted. Connie Marrero, Chuck Dressen, and Sam Zoldak each subtracted four years from their actual age. Luke Easter took a whopping 6 years off his actual age to appear younger, moving his birthdate from 1915 up to 1921. On average, a player willing to adjust the number of candles on their birthday cake removed 488 days from their true age.

    I have another set of notes in which I am tracking the lifespans of the ballplayers featured on these cards, three of which (Bob Ross, Bobby Shantz, and Vern Law) are still living. 347 names in the checklist (85.3%) had at least some overlap with my life. While almost everyone seems young in their photos, 71 of the featured players had already seen more than half their lives elapse by Opening Day. Several didn’t even make it out of the Eisenhower administration.

    Geography

    Two years ago I explored where baseball players came from in the 1950s, using the birthplaces on ’52 Topps cards as my sample set. The geographic center of these 407 locations was found to be a corn field (of course it was) in Waggoner, Illinois.

    Image: Map of continental United States. Amber stars mark the location of MLB ballparks in 1952. A blue star marks the geographic center of these stadiums. A red star over Waggoner, Illinois marks the geographic center of player birthplaces.
    Waggoner, Illinois (red star) shown against locations of MLB ballparks in 1952.

    Several names stand out as being born far away from that field. Larry Jansen was born more than 1,500 miles to the west on the Oregon coast. Venezuelan Chico Carrasqual was born in Caracas 720 miles away from the Equator. Despite the presence of four Canadians in the checklist, Bobby Thomson was the northernmost player, having immigrated from from Glasgow Scotland. Traveling the furthest from his birthplace was Elmer Valo, having been born nearly 5,000 miles away from Waggoner in Ribnik, Czech Republic. The reason for his move seems clear, with this border city seeing its population collapse by 95% after Germany sought to unilaterally redraw the map.

    As Valo’s case makes clear, where people are born does not necessarily reflect the same place as where they live out their lives. The 1950 US Census reported a geographic population center alongside a creek in Richland County, Illinois (38° 50’21” N, 88° 22’8” W). Among members of the ’52 Topps checklist, the geographic center of their homes is found in another field just outside of Elkville, Illinois (37°53’52.8″N 89°14’48.1″W), roughly 110 miles to the southwest of the general population. Interestingly enough, this implies the average ballplayer lived further south than the southernmost major league ballpark (St. Louis).

    Among individual players, Chico Carrasqual once again takes the title as living furthest south (and east) from this location. Larry Jansen is still likewise the furthest west, electing to maintain his permanent residence out in Oregon. The most northern ballplayer address could be found at Cuddles Marshall’s doorstep in Bellingham, Washington.

    The Most Typical 1952 Ballplayer Is…

    Which baseball player in this checklist blends in the most? I took each of the demographic categories discussed above and identified the mean for each quantifiable metric, comparing the squares of differences for each player and that of the overall average. For more qualitative categories such as hair and eye color, I identified the most frequent response. Based on this, we’re trying to identify the card closest to depicting a brown haired, brown eyed 30 year old who stands 6′ tall and weighs 185 lbs, hailing from Waggoner, IL but residing a bit south of Saint Louis on the Illinois side of the river.

    The demographic center of the ’52 Topps set arrives in the fifth series and takes the form of the Philadelphia Athletics’ starting catcher. Brown-haired, brown-eyed Joe Astroth celebrated his 30th birthday during the 1952 season. He stood 5’10” tall and weighed 187 lbs. He was born in East Alton, Illinois and continued to make his home along the Mississippi River in Alton, just 100 miles from the geographic center of the checklist.

    Image: Front and back of 1952 Topps #290 Joe Astroth baseball card.

    A lot of the baseball cards produced today tend to blur together. With their similar photos, standard white borders, geometric color blocks, and an ever-expanding palette of parallels that rarely match the quality of their ’90s predecessors, modern sets can feel remarkably uniform. Aside from a few recent standouts like the 2025 run, I often have a difficult time determining which year a modern Topps card was printed without flipping it over and, as collectors have done for decades, skipping right past the unchanging demographic data just to find the most recent row of stats.

    Yet, for all its vintage appeal, the 1952 Topps set that I am so engrossed in collecting shares this same visual sameness. At times it feels like driving past those unchanging corn fields at the geographic center of the baseball universe. When you look closely, the set is essentially a massive collection of slightly bored-looking 30-year-olds, almost all hiding their (possibly) brown hair under ballcaps, posed against Flexichrome-colorized or washed-out backgrounds. When you crunch the obscure demographic data on the backs of these cards, the checklist begins to converge into a single, remarkably average baseline; ultimately, it’s a set full of Joe Astroths.

    It’s not a bad card of an average Joe.

  • You’re Supposed To

    You’re Supposed To

    My wife and I are celebrating Mother’s Day weekend with an argument about Kirk Gibson.

    Yes, that Kirk Gibson.

    This “discussion,” as it has been styled, centers around a three game road series played by Gibson’s Arizona Diamondbacks against the Texas Rangers in June 2012. Following an 11-3 victory, the postgame Q&A turned a bit strained. With a high school graduation ceremony scheduled the same evening for Gibson’s son Cam, a reporter asked why managerial duties had not been handed off to the Arizona coaching staff so Gibson could attend.

    “You’re supposed to graduate,” Gibson answered, as if the response was so self evident that a more developed rebuttal wasn’t needed. He said this with pointed emphasis and an incredulous tone that set my head nodding in agreement. Of course you’re supposed to graduate high school. And good on Gibby for having a relationship that allows the family to break free of unneeded ceremony. My wife is firmly entrenched on the opposite side of this view, seeing this as indicative of a dynamic in which Gibson’s family is resigned to accept boorish behavior rather than make things worse by pressing the issue.

    I don’t blame Gibson for any of this unpleasantness. I blame Faye Throneberry.

    An aspiring outfielder for the Boston Red Sox, Throneberry is the subject of the next piece of cardboard in my box of 1952 Topps cards. One of the first things any of his biographical sketches mention is the fact that his academic career ended somewhere around the 10th grade. You can’t blame him for not getting the same memo about graduation as Gibson, with Throneberry failing multiple grades before finally moving beyond elementary school. This got me thinking a bit more about Gibson’s assertion about being “supposed to graduate” high school. I know high school wasn’t as widespread in the nineteenth century as it is today. At what point did the light switch flip on and expectations of graduation become embedded in our collective psyche?

    To answer this, I turned to the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics and its handy statistical digest. From there, I learned that recently 90.1% of all persons over the age of 25 had a high school diploma, or at least a GED. 9 out of 10 sounds a bit low, which tracks with the offhand nature of Gibson’s remark. Looking a bit further into this, the methodology incorporates a number of older adults from earlier generations where 9 out of 10 would have sounded incredible.

    The data starts in 1910 when just 13.5% of those aged 25 and above had graduated. While a large number of adults who came of age in the nineteenth century weighed on this metric, less than one-fifth of 15-18 year olds were actively attending school during this period with many dropping out to join an industrializing workforce by the 10th grade. This starting point coincides with the beginning of the High School Movement, a period spanning three decades in which the country experienced a massive shift in favor of expanding public education and a sustained boom in school construction.

    The effects were rapidly seen in the data. By 1930 the percentage of the population with a diploma expanded to 19.1%. That number increased further to 24.5% by 1940. The gravitational drag of earlier, less educated generations weighed on these statistics, which are much more impressive when targeted age cohorts are broken out. That 24.5% figure was buoyed by 73% of all 15-18 year-olds being actively enrolled in high school and represented the tipping point when the median 25-year old had a diploma. Coupled with the aging out of older generations, the graduation rate surpassed 50% of the greater adult population in the 1960s. The expectation of graduation was setting in.

    Throneberry left school just prior to 1950, when roughly one third of the population carried a high school diploma. His doing so wasn’t necessarily newsworthy, as Major League rosters of the day were littered with incomplete educations. Phil Cavaretta and Mort Cooper collected NL MVP awards in the 1940s without having ever donned a cap and gown. Despite this, Throneberry’s lack of a graduation date resulted in a minor scandal.

    Throneberry was an outstanding athlete as an amateur ballplayer, batting around the .500 mark in high school and American Legion competition. He signed a contract to play with the Detroit Tigers but ran afoul of another outgrowth of the High School Movement: A recently implemented prohibition within MLB against signing players prior to their high school graduation. The commissioner’s office voided the contract. Having been previously held back several grades, Throneberry argued that he would have already graduated had he continued on his original education track. The MLB rules at the time defined a player’s anticipated graduation date in terms of when they started high school, not when they first enrolled in lower levels of education. The decision stood and Throneberry found himself having to wait another two years to get a crack at playing professionally.

    The Tigers moved on to other prospects, but the well funded New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox were waiting with offers in hand as Throneberry’s “graduation” date finally arrived. He signed with Boston, and did so with all the optimism of those beautiful, singing idiots of Grease‘s Rydell High. According to an interview cited in his SABR biography, he felt he could break into the lineup as an outfielder on a roster boasting Ted Williams, Dom DiMaggio, and a string of platoon players batting not far below .300.

    He got his chance starting in 1952 when Ted Williams was recalled into military service for the Korean War. For Throneberry, this created an opportunity. He posted a positive WAR in his rookie campaign that year, getting legitimate playing time in a major league lineup. Then, at the end of the 1952 season, he was pulled into the Army himself. He wouldn’t return to the majors until 1955.

    Infographic: Career statistics of Faye Throneberry. Negative 2.9 WAR, .302 wOBA, 77.3 wRC+, .236 batting average. Ranks 355th out of 407 players in the 1952 Topps checklist.

    When you look at Faye Throneberry’s career statistics, the picture that emerges is not particularly flattering. Career WAR of negative 2.9. Career wOBA of .302. Career wRC+ of 77.3. Career batting average of .236. Only two seasons with positive WAR were that rookie campaign in 1952 and his return from the Army in 1955. He was also, by all accounts, a terrible defensive player. When you combine below-average hitting with actively harmful defense, you get a player who doesn’t stay in the starting lineup very long. By 1961, he’d signed with the expansion Los Angeles Angels, where he primarily served as a pinch hitter. His younger brother, Marv, signed with the expansion New York Mets that same period. Marv would become more famous than Faye, though largely for being comically bad. He became known as “Marvelous Marv” in that distinctly sarcastic New York way. Marv had also experienced teenage fatherhood in high school, so the Throneberry brothers were clearly living their lives at a different velocity than the folks who stuck around for graduation ceremonies and college application essays.

    There was a time in American history when high school graduation was itself a very big deal. When fewer than one in five people had a diploma, completing high school meant something. It marked you as someone who’d stuck it out, who’d had the resources and determination and probably the economic room to finish. It was an achievement rather than an expectation.

    Image: Front and back of my 1952 Topps Faye Throneberry baseball card. The centering is heavily skewed top/bottom, so much so that a portion of the next card on the printing sheet can be seen encroaching on the back of the card.

    My 1952 Topps Faye Throneberry card sits in my collection as a memento of all of this. Someone at Topps apparently flunked their elementary school instruction on how to use scissors, miscutting it from top to bottom. The top border is almost missing in its entirety. The back is somehow more miscut than the front, capturing some of the red color block design elements of the next card down on the printing sheet, which was presumably card number 386 of the Cardinals’ Eddie Yuhas. The text on the back of the card mentions his callup from the minor leagues in July 1952, indicating the biographical text wasn’t prepared until most of the season had already passed. Aside from the centering issue, my card has VG condition corners and a little bit of oxidation toning on the lower right corner from sticking out of a tightly packed stack of cards for an extended period of time. It’s one of the true rookie cards in the high number series of 1952 Topps, with Throneberry having zero MLB experience prior to the beginning of the season.

    The card is imperfect, just like the player it depicts. Faye never became a star. He got held back twice in elementary school, dropped out of high school in tenth grade, had his first professional contract voided by a commissioner citing bureaucratic technicalities, managed a couple of positive WAR seasons in a largely forgettable career, and ended his time in the majors as a pinch hitter for an expansion team. By conventional metrics, this is not a success story. And yet he made it to the major leagues. He played alongside Ted Williams and Dom DiMaggio. He got his own baseball card, even if the person cutting it at the printing facility may have been drunk. In a world where sixty-seven percent of his peers hadn’t graduated high school in 1950, Faye Throneberry took the path that made sense to him. He chose the diamond over the diploma, and he got to spend a few years playing a game he loved at the highest level, even if his defensive metrics suggest he probably should have spent more time on fundamentals.

    Infographic: CardBoredom's 1952 Topps set completion status after the addition of the Faye Throneberry card. Overall completion stands at 64.9% of the entire set with 143 cards remaining.

  • A Unique Card Show

    A Unique Card Show

    You never know who you will meet at a baseball card show. Mike Cramer, who would go on to found Pacific Trading Cards and introduce the word “prism” to the hobby, once ran into Elvis Presley in an elevator on his way to his first show floor.

    Cramer went to his first baseball card show in Detroit back in 1970 when he was 17 years old. This was billed as the first national level event of its kind, attracting collectors who had previously been relegated to classified ads in Trader Speaks and The Sporting News and sending self-addressed stamped envelopes to strangers. Cramer took the phrase “card show” literally. He packed up a footlocker full of his best cards and hauled it to Detroit, figuring the whole point of the event was to show off your collection to other collectors and swap stories about the ones that had gotten away. He brought complete sets of 1930s Goudey cards, scores of Ramley tobacco cards, and a full 1952 Topps set, casually lugging around what would now require an armed escort.

    Cramer walked out of the elevator and opened up his trunk in front of the first dealers he met, Frank Nagy and Lloyd Thorpe. Wondering if they were about to spend their entire buying budget in the first hour of the show, the pair were surprised when the teenager simply told them the cards weren’t for sale. He just wanted to show them to somebody who would appreciate them.

    Nagy and Thorpe were floored. Possibly the best collection in the room had just been walked into the room under the mistaken belief that “card show” meant “show & tell.” Fearing that a lamb had just blundered into a livestock auction, the two men quickly disabused Cramer of the notion and warned him to close the trunk and get it locked away in his hotel room as soon as possible.

    When I read Cramer’s account, I thought to myself that I would actually love to go to the kind of show he thought he was attending. Just a bunch of collectors sitting around, showing off their cards, telling the stories about how they acquired them, and discussing the merits of various sets and players without the underlying adversarial negotiations of making a show hit your ROI metrics. It’s the difference between a book club and an antiquarian bookstore.

    I’ve entertained a fantasy of renting table space at a major show and setting up a pair of comfortable leather armchairs instead of the usual folding table with glass showcases. I’d put up a sign inviting show-goers to “tell me about your collection” and just spend the weekend listening to their stories. No buying, no selling, just conversation.

    This is not going to happen any time sign, at least as long as good shows continue to have waitlists for vendor space that require knowing a guy who knows a guy. I still like to think about it anyway. So, when I found out about a local venue hosting an actual “Show & Tell Card Show” where collectors set up but explicitly are not allowed to buy or sell, I signed up for a table immediately.

    The show was held in one of those nondescript buildings that exist in every town, the kind of place that hosts retirement parties, blood drives, or bingo games of dubious legality. Think Elks Lodge or Moose Lodge or some other civic organization named after a large woodland mammal. The space filled two rooms connected by open double doors. A flipchart sign read “Coffee” with an arrow directing traffic into the second room, which I appreciated even though I’ve historically been a soda guy. Coffee is one of those acquired tastes that crept up on me as I got older, kinda like caring about yard maintenance. I still prefer Pepsi when given the choice, and judging from the chilled red white and blue cans that had been set out on the collectors’ tables I wasn’t alone in this preference.

    I was in the first room with five other collectors. Each of us had been provided the standard 8′ folding table and a single showcase to display our cards. Most had brought extra boxes and miscellaneous items that were tucked behind their tables, ready to be produced if someone showed interest. The thing was, there were no other people in the room. No guys with backpacks browsing tables, no pelican case-wielding crowds milling about. Just the the six of us, standing behind our tables like actors in a play with no audience.

    With no formal announcement, we gravitated to the first table, manned by an eager 9 year old wearing his little league uniform. Behind his table stood piles of flimsy, beaten binders who Sharpie labels revealed past lives as repurposed elementary school supplies. Each binder represented a different MLB team and was overflowing with nine-pocket plastic sheets containing endless junk wax and base commons, all stacked in alphabetical order from Angels to Yankees.

    The marquee names, those any 9-year-old would recognize from ESPN highlights, were in a purpose built D-ring affair he simply referred to as “the good cards binder.” He took pride in explaining not only who was in it, but how he had arranged cards in the pages. All too often the cards in the column closest to the binder rings would get caught in the binder and warped. Those in the outer top and bottom spots were at risk of damage when carrying the thin binders in a backpack. This meant packing the best cards in the center column of each page, a tip he was adamant about passing on to the rest of us. When asked by an older kid if he had any vintage to show, he hit us with these:

    Image: Assorted junk wax baseball cards from the first table. Left to right: 1991 Score Bo Jackson Rifleman, 1990 Donruss Will Clark, 1989 Topps Big Jose Canseco, 1984 Topps League Leaders Wade Boggs, 1989 Donruss Ken Griffey Jr. Rated Rookie, 1992 Donruss Diamond Kings Cal Ripken, 1989 Topps All-Star Darryl Strawberry, 1991 Pacific Nolan Ryan "Bloody Lip", 1987 Topps Mark McGwire rookie, and 1991 Score Chipper Jones rookie.

    The voice looking for vintage cards then led us over to his setup. He was a couple years older than the aspiring outfielder with the binders and had two massive 5,500-count cardboard monster boxes anchoring one end of the table. One box had been decorated with lime green and purple markers to say “Danger! Monster Box” and had an oozing slime motif drawn around the edges, looking something akin to a tribute to the cover art of something written by R.L. Stine. Inside were thousands of base cards and low level inserts arranged by set, though a fraying grayish brown segment indicated the presence of some 1970s names in one row. He particularly enjoyed old checklists that prior owners had marked. These allowed him to look at someone else’s vintage collection through time and imagine what it must have been like to pull those cards from packs.

    What made this kid’s collection interesting was his type card collection, which was spread out in the glass showcase. He had an absolutely wrecked T-206 card with a Piedmont back and examples of every Topps issue from 1952 to the present. Several vintage cards had clearly captured his imagination, and he was most proud of a high grade 1972 Willie Mays and a ’75 Topps Nolan Ryan with a bit more wear (Look! He was on the Angels back then!). The young collector was relieved to learn from the older attendees that the black line on Ryan’s sleeve was a memorial ribbon for a fallen teammate and not a stray Sharpie mark.

    A few more rookie cards made their appearance, including Hall of Famer Ron Santo and the White Sox’ not quite Hall of Fame outfielder Michael Jordan. We had a good time figuring out why some type cards were specifically sought out and which ones were the result of availability and circumstance. The Mays card was stunning and was a purchase funded by his grandmother at a previous card show.

    Image: A sampling of the offerings of the second table. From left to right: 1952 Topps Ken Raffensberger, T-206 J.J. Clarke, 1974 Topps Hank Aaron, 1961 Topps Ron Santo rookie, 1963 Topps Gaylord Perry, 1972 Topps Willie Mays, 1975 Topps Nolan Ryan, 1990 Score Mo Vaughn rookie, 1993 Topps Derek Jeter rookie, 1994 Collector's Choice Michael Jordan rookie, and 1993 Donruss Mike Piazza Rated Rookie.
    The collector noted his Derek Jeter rookie was pack-pulled.

    The third table was a monster and manned by a 17 year old (not Mike Cramer). His focus was also on vintage cards, but he did so with much more focus than the younger crowd. He had assembled the biggest names of the 1950s and 1960s and called out constant reruns of Ken Burns’ Baseball as inspiration for this pursuit. He had read The Mick, Mickey Mantle’s memoir, and pointed out that he had a dozen Mantles from his playing days. The cards were almost uniformly very low grade, but they were authentic and very much little bits of handheld history. I repeatedly scanned rows of cards and saw the same names appearing over and over again: Mantle, Mays, Aaron, Williams, Koufax, Ford, Spahn, Snider, Hodges. Jackie Robinson. When I asked him how he’d managed to acquire so many fantastic cards, he looked at me like the answer was obvious. “I mowed a lot of lawns,” he said.

    Image: The vintage-obsessed teenager's showcase cards. From left to right: 1954 Bowman Mickey Mantle, 1956 Topps Jackie Robinson, 1971 Topps Nolan Ryan, 1959 Topps Mickey Mantle, 1955 Bowman Hank Aaron, 1948 Bowman Warren Spahn rookie, 1958 Topps World Series Batting Foes Mickey Mantle/Hank Aaron multiplayer card, 1957 Topps Ted Williams, 1965 Topps Mickey Mantle, 1964 Topps Sandy Koufax, and 1960 Topps Willie Mays.

    The next guy was a college freshman who obviously hadn’t gotten the memo that this was supposed to be a show and tell event rather than a place to sell cards. Everything on his table had a price tag made from brightly colored fluorescent posterboard. Bricks of hundred count lots of Frank Thomas and Jeff Bagwell were sitting unsold and he had literal cases of ’89 Donruss and ’89 Topps stacked like a homemade fort behind him. It was all cheap stuff he had picked up in bulk and was hoping to flip for a percentage of whatever the latest guides said. A small number of high dollar items were present, complete with notes stating they were cross listed on eBay and encouraging onlookers to act fast before they were gone. He kept looking around anxiously, probably wondering why nobody was buying anything and whether he’d made a terrible business decision to pay twenty bucks to set up at this “show.” He was clearly interested in hearing about the other collections, but it was clear he also had other things on his mind.

    Image: Unopened case of 1989 Donruss baseball wax boxes.

    The guy at the table next to mine was a 32 year old father of two. His showcase was almost empty compared to the others. He had just three cards set up on little plastic stands: a 1986 Donruss Jose Canseco Rated Rookie, a 1986 Topps Traded Barry Bonds, and an autographed 1989 Topps Cal Ripken that he had obtained when he met the shortstop at a speaking engagement. He mentioned once or twice that he also had an autographed Canseco baseball somewhere at home, but he hadn’t been able to find it before coming to the show.

    There was an apologetic quality to him, like he was acutely aware that his collection was no
    longer what it once was and felt the need to explain it to the collectors that had taken the time show so many inspiring cards. Perhaps it was just chronic exhaustion. I couldn’t blame him as he went through a Diet Pepsi and a coffee infused can of Monster in quick succession. He had a kid in preschool, another in diapers, and a mortgage, all while navigating a career pivot and wrapping up grad school in the evenings.

    Image: Baseball cards on the table of the fifth collector. Left to right they are 1986 Topps Traded Barry Bonds rookie, 1986 Donruss Rated Rookie Jose Canseco, and an autographed 1989 Topps Cal Ripken, Jr.

    We talked for a while before turning to my showcase, which had been filled with three rows of cards sampled from my set building projects. The ’49 Leaf Honus Wagner was there, complete the photo of his overstuffed bag of chewing tobacco in hand. My ’52 Mays was compared with the one offered for sale at the student’s table, as was a ’52 Topps Duke Snider in the hands of the vintage collecting teenager. I even heard the unsettling phrase “vintage refractor” when the overhead lighting caught the line of ’93 Finest All-Star cards arranged at the top of the showcase. At some point I pulled out my wallet cards, which generally elicited a mixture of bemusement and concern from the small audience. As a reader of my site, you’ve already seen these cards and heard the same stories I told the others. CardBoredom is my show & tell card show.

    Additional voices could be heard drifting from the next room, generated by people talking over tables that I couldn’t quite see. The room beyond the doorway was a litter dimmer, and I could only make out shadows amid the the fragments of conversation. It was an older crowd, from what I could tell, and they were generally clustered around the table distributing coffee. I’m in my early forties, though I am far enough away from 40 and self-conscious enough to leave it at that vague description rather than get more specific with an actual number.

    That’s when I realized what was happening. The five collectors sharing this part of the building with me were not random people. They were me. All of them. The 9 year old with his repurposed school binders, the 11 year old with the type cards in a decorated monster box, the teenager who turned mowed lawns into to the most beat up Mantle cards you have ever seen, the freshman trying to hustle cards to pay for tuition and dating, the father too tired to find a lost baseball, and me building sets I had previously considered impossible. Each table contained my exact collection as it stood at different points in my life. Standing behind those tables was myself, oblivious of the transformations taking me to the next table.

    The younger versions of myself didn’t seem aware of this revelation. They were too preoccupied with their own concerns. The 9 year old was lost in the joy of accumulation. The 11 year old was starting to develop taste and discerning which cards to chase. The teenager refined those preferences while developing patience. The college kid intuitively grasped the relative importance of cardboard among other competing demands for his attention, unemotionally making the appropriate trade-offs. The father continued this, recognizing there are seasons when cardboard takes a back seat to mortgages, grad school, and tiny humans who needed attention.

    Each collection reflected not just my interests at those ages, by my cumulative knowledge, resources, and responsibilities. My current cards exist in a space with some breathing room. The time felt right to allow myself to have such things, but owning these cards would have been completely irresponsible and outright detrimental at any other point in my history. I don’t know what my collection will look like in the future, whether my interests will change or continue to intensify, or I will always be in a position to keep playing with expensive cardboard.

    I walked over to the 19 year old version of myself and quietly slipped him a folded bill. “Take her somewhere nice,” I said. He looked confused but quickly pocketed the cash. I did the same to the guy in his 30s. “Get a babysitter,” I told him. He immediately understood the assignment and something like relief crossed his face.

    The next room contained my future. I nodded to the earlier versions of myself and decided to step through the doorway into the unknown. “I’m going to get some coffee,” I told them. The college student looked up and asked if I needed to lock up my cards.

    “I trust you,” I said, walking past the handwritten coffee sign and towards the door.

    When did I become a coffee guy?

  • 1949 Leaf Nicknames: Bucky’s Boy

    1949 Leaf Nicknames: Bucky’s Boy

    There’s a particular cruelty to baseball cards printed during a player’s decline. The 1949 leaf Sid Hudson card doesn’t dance around the subject. “At one time on the most feared pitchers,” it begins, and you can hear the grim author striking the typewriter keys as he continued to commit Hudson’s fall from grace to posterity in the past tense. “Had blazing fast ball — good curve. But arm suddenly went sore in 1947.”

    The rest reads like a coroner’s report: “Won 4, lost 16, gave up 128 runs for a 5.88 earned run average. Fanned 53 batters.” The card was printed in 1949, a year that would see Hudson rack up 17 losses. If you squint hard enough at the statistics, you can almost see his career dying in real time. Time of death: 6th inning with runners on the corners.

    Image: Front and back of 1949 Leaf baseball card of Sid Hudson.

    Here’s the thing about Sid Hudson that the overly honest Leaf editorial staff didn’t capture on the back of that card, probably because there wasn’t enough room between the funereal stats and the player vitals: Sid’s career had previously been declared dead on arrival and had successfully been revived.

    Enter Bucky Harris.

    Harris himself was forged in conditions that would have broken others. When his father abandoned the family at age thirteen, Harris had to drop out of school and become a coal colliery slate picker at twelve cents per hour. Twelve cents. Disposable kids like Bucky populated such roles with hands deft and small enough to reach into fast moving chutes that grown men couldn’t reach, all for coins that wouldn’t buy them a sandwich by modern standards. It was dangerous work, even for adults. My paternal grandfather died in an industrial accident in one of those Appalachian mines. Harris earned a promotion within a year, giving you some sort of idea of how he handled himself amid unforgiving conditions.

    His path from the coal mines to professional baseball sounds unbelievable. An undersized teenager, he was spotted playing in a local exhibition game against a group of barnstorming New York Yankees. He signed a minor league contract, was quickly released, and was then accidentally signed by the Reading Pretzels when the club mistook him for Merle Harris, his already established brother in Class D ball. The Pretzels had meant to sign one Harris and got the other.

    A Washington Senators scout eventually signed Harris after witnessing him play through a game with a broken hand. The Senators ownership had decided their current roster was lacking in work ethic and was actively seeking grittier players. Harris, no stranger to coal dust and playing ball with a fractured hand, certainly fit the bill. He was soon getting regular playing time and gaining attention for intelligence and leadership far beyond that of his teammates. At age 27, owner Clark Griffith promoted him to the role of full-time manager, making him the youngest in the sport’s history to hold the role on a permanent basis. Harris led the Senators to their first ever World Series championship the same year, easily surpassing the losing record of the prior season. His decision making was aided by high emotional intelligence that would eventually bring a call to Cooperstown in 1975.

    Image: 1940 Play Ball and 1951 Bowman baseball cards of Washington Senators manager Bucky Harris.

    By the time Sid Hudson arrived in the major leagues, Harris had refined his managerial philosophy into something approaching an art form. He looked at 24-year-old Hudson, fresh from the minor leagues, and decided the best way to break him into his new role was to not break him in at all. Harris gave the rookie pitcher a starting role and kept him on the mound until Hudson learned to pitch at the major league level, which is either brilliant foresight or criminal negligence depending on how it turned out.

    In Hudson’s case, it worked, but only a rocky transition period. Hudson’s hometown Chattanooga Daily Times noted that Harris had “always been Hudson’s Number One Rooter,” refusing to place him in a bullpen role despite an initially rough adjustment to the majors in 1941. He lasted. Hudson started 33 games that year and fully completed 19 of them. He pitched through the struggles, bad outings, and moments when conventional wisdom would have suggested giving the kid a break or moving him to lower leverage situations. Harris refused, backed by nods of approval from Griffith and coach Benny Bengough.

    Harris almost achieved baseball immortality that year when he held Joe DiMaggio hitless in 2 at-bats during DiMaggio’s 56 game hitting streak. DiMaggio, who batted .408 over the entirety of the run, faced reliever Red Anderson and looped the final hit of the streak to left field after Hudson was pulled for a pinch hitter.

    Harris may have seen something of himself in Hudson’s background. Sid’s father had died when he was seven years old, creating the same kind of family crisis that had defined Harris’ youth. Hudson eventually quit school to support the family as a bag boy in a local grocery store, trading education for the ability to keep food on the table and roof overhead. He played for amateur teams in his spare time, whatever spare time a working kid could scrape together, and was eventually signed to play first base for a Class D minor league team. He was a first baseman of middling ability in a league full of middling ability players when a new manager named Rodgers was hired. He brought his favorite first baseman along, and a dejected Hudson rode the bench until the new skipper decided to throw the surplus infielder into mop-up pitching duty during a blowout.

    “Raw Meat” Rodgers possessed an incredible nickname that offered a disturbing window into both his dietary preferences and his willingness to reduce new recruits to their most basic elements. He threw Hudson into a game that was already lost, and Hudson responded by striking out the side for two consecutive innings. With six up and six down on strikes, Rodgers realized he had a potential pitching prospect on his hands rather than a subpar Class D first baseman. The next morning Rodgers was teaching Hudson the mechanics of pitching on a bullpen mound. Hudson’s career pivoted on a blowout loss that nobody remembers, witnessed by dozens of people who have all long since died.

    By the time Hudson reached the majors and fell under Hudson’s protection, he had already experienced transformation and resurrection. Harris understood this instinctively as a journey he had made himself. The nickname “Bucky’s Boy” soon emerged in newsprint to describe the developmental grace allowed to Hudson and the manager’s stubborn refusal to demote a struggling rookie when giving up would have been the easier path. Five months into his MLB debut Hudson was sporting a losing record and an ERA north of 5.00.

    Hudson called Harris “the greatest in the business,” which coming from a player about his manager carries weight that generic weight praise never could. This wasn’t corporate speak or some diplomatic nicety. He knew what Harris had done for him, understood that his career might have died in 1940 if a different manager had made different decisions.

    The relationship between Harris and his players was widely known. Hudson’s former teammate Walt Masterson knew Harris’ style intimately, and years later when playing for the Red Sox, he learned that a trade was sending teammate Ken Wood to Washington. Masterson begged Wood to convince Harris to trade for him and to bring him back into the fold. Such tales of wanting to become one of “Bucky’s Boys” became a recurring theme among those who played for Harris. In a sport where players were routinely treated as interchangeable commodities, Harris had created something different.

    Hudson twice earned All-Star selections, validation that his manager’s faith had not been misplaced, that the struggling rookie of 1940 had become a genuine frontline starter by the summer of ’41. It was in this sophomore period that he earned one more nickname after an abrupt mid-season transformation from losing pitcher to one who dominated. Reporters called him “Cinderella” following a contest in which he outdueled Lefty Grove in a 13-inning, 1-0 shutout victory. Grove was heading toward the Hall of Fame as one of the greatest southpaws of all time, and Hudson beat him in a pitchers’ duel that lasted through hours of scoreless tension before the Senators could push across a single run. The Cinderella nickname captured the fairy tale quality of Hudson’s rise, the magical transformation from grocery bag boy to Class D benchwarmer to major league All-Star. The problem with Cinderella stories, of course, is that magic eventually wears off and you’re left standing in the dark with one glass slipper and a rodent infestation.

    World War II arrived and Hudson was drafted into the Army Air Force. He spent much of his service as a calisthenics instructor, leading repetitive exercises day after day, and by many accounts he wore out his arm through three years of constant use. It’s grimly ironic that his role, which spared him from combat but not from sacrifice, destroyed the very tool that set him apart. The war took four years from his career, removed from baseball during what should have been his prime, and returned a damaged version of what had been.

    The postwar years were brutal. Hudson tried to pitch through an arm that no longer cooperated, that had lost the blazing fastball and sharp curve that made him one of the top hurlers in the American League. His ’49 Leaf card captured this decline with almost documentary precision, stating facts in past tense like they were writing an obituary for a player who was still technically alive and employed. There’s no soft-pedaling in those statistics, no attempt to make the situation seem better than it was. At one time one of the most feared pitchers.

    Had a blazing fastball. Had. Past tense. Gone.

    Yet, somehow, this was only halftime. He had one more resurrection in him. Hudson had only made 51% of his total career appearances when this card rolled off the printing presses as something  that could have been a career sunset card. He stuck around through 1954 using the arsenal of assorted junk pitches learned by every aging veteran who no longer possesses their best stuff.

    After his playing career finally, mercifully ended, Hudson went into coaching and continued for decades, eventually retiring at the age of 77. He spent that lengthy coaching career mentoring struggling pitchers in much the same way Bucky Harris had mentored him, paying forward the patience and faith that had saved his own career. Harris had learned leadership in coal mines and minor league dugouts, had refined it through managing teams to championships, and had passed it on to Hudson. Hudson had received that gift and spent the next several decades giving it to others, teaching young pitchers not just how to throw a curveball (he invented a machine for that), but how to survive when things went wrong and refuse to quit even when doing so made logical sense.

    “Bucky’s Boy” might sound diminutive or even insulting on its surface, the implication that Hadson owed his success to favoritism rather than talent, but anyone who understood the relationship knew better. Hudson was Bucky’s boy the way all of us are shaped by the people who refuse to give up on us when we’re struggling and see potential when we don’t see it ourselves. Harris had been nobody’s boy, had clawed his way up from coal mines through broken hands and mistaken identities and sheer relentless determination. He could’ve managed with the same hard-edge ruthlessness that defined his own journey and could’ve treated players as disposable the way he had been labeled by his father. Instead, he chose patience, building people up rather than simply using them up.

    Infographic: CardBoredom's 1949 Leaf set is now 3% complete with the addition of this card. Average grade 3.67 out of 10.
    Infographic: Career baseball stats of Sid Hudson. 24.8 WAR. 3.95 FIP. 99.0 FIP-.

  • Filling in the Blanks with Johnny Kucab

    Filling in the Blanks with Johnny Kucab

    I picked up this card of a Philadelphia Athletics pitcher in the one of the REA Encore Sales a few years ago. REA is known for some astounding offerings in their big catalog auctions. A T-206 Wagner would be right at home among these offerings with the firm having moved at least ten examples of the card. The Encore Sales offer fare that is a bit tamer, typically comprised of items expected to bring lower prices than those in the big catalog events. “Tame” is used in a highly relative manner, as the items on offer in this sale included a Canadian Goudey Babe Ruth, an insanely rare candy card of Ty Cobb, and multiple rookies of Mickey Mantle and Jackie Robinson.

    Image: Front and back of 1952 Topps Johnny Kucab baseball card.

    This is where I find cards like this: The castoffs of high-end collections where the condition of memorable or generally tough to find cards isn’t quite up to the standards of the rest of the group. ’52 Topps high numbers appear with regularity in these sales in all grades and the lower level ones slot in handily to fill in missing spots in my set building project. The Johnny Kucab card highlighted above saw the least bidder interest of all the ’52s on offer and joined my collection for just a bit over the cost of whatever constitutes the latest blaster box of current year cards. Pick ups like this will always win that battle.

    Ignoring the giant tape stains and paper loss on the front of the card, the element that sticks out the most is the yawning chasm of blank space following Kucab’s biographical information on the back. Sy Berger put together a pretty good write-up of Kucab’s career, but appeared to run out of inspiration as he neared the finish line. There is room to put in one more fact, but Berger had nothing left in the tank to describe the Philadelphia reliever.

    Perhaps he could have ended with this highlight: “Johnny got the win in Connie Mack’s final game as A’s manager in ’50.” Kucab made it into four games as a rookie that season and was the starter for the final two of those contests. The latter of these starts was on the final day of the season in a game that coincided with the 87-year-old Connie Mack’s last day as the manager of the club. The always suit-attired Mack had been elected to the Hall of Fame as an active manager in 1939 and continued his daily oversight of the team for another 11 years. Until Kucab threw the final pitch of the 1950 season, every Athletics pitcher in history had received their orders from the man wearing a full suit in the Philadelphia dugout.

    [Infographic: Career pitching statistics of Johnny Kucab. 0.0 WAR; 4.42 FIP; and 108.4 FIP-. Kucab ranks 353 out 407 names in the 1952 Topps checklist and 6646th among all MLB ballplayers.]

    Like his legendary A’s manager, Johnny Kucab didn’t make much of an impact as a player on the field. Kucab only played in the majors for a little over two seasons, generating exactly zero wins above replacement. He made his debut at age 30, pitched in 59 games, and logged only three of those as starts. Batters hit .279 against him for his career.

    Kucab pitched his final MLB game on September 1, 1952, giving his ’52 Topps rookie card an overlap of only a few weeks between its issuance and the end of his big league career.

  • The Argument I’m Not Making (Except Maybe I Am)

    The Argument I’m Not Making (Except Maybe I Am)

    I’ve spent years much of the last 20 years returning over and over again to a particular essayist whose convictions have at times diverged sharply from my own, yet whose writing possessed such clarity and force that I emerged from each encounter refreshed, even exhilarated, regardless of whether he had persuaded me. The pleasure wasn’t in finding agreement but in the quality of the disagreement itself, in watching a skilled craftsman arrange evidence and construct an edifice of reasoning so sound that even those unconvinced must admire the architecture. I consider these literary arguments to be enjoyable sparring rather than a fist fight, and when executed by a true master they transition further to become an intellectual dance.

    This blog represents my own fumbling attempt to develop my writing skills. While much improved in the last five years, this is still something I would not want to go head to head with against a professional in the field of argument.

    There’s a famous Monty Python sketch in which a man enters a business offering arguments for sale, only to find himself embroiled in a dispute about whether he even has an appointment. The comedy lies in the the disagreement over the appointment actually being the purchased argument, though the confused customer doesn’t realize it until he is well underway. The whole joke operates on multiple levels, the greatest being that the customer believes he was involved in preliminary sparring before the real bout, when in fact he had been locked in genuine combat the entire time. I think about this sketch whenever I consider the case of Mike Garcia, a pitcher whose Hall of Fame credentials were never seriously debated for the simple reason that no one bothered to schedule the appointment.

    Baseball is built around arguments. The game unfolds slowly enough to permit constant second guessing of strategy, performance, and historical legacy. Statistics pile up in sedimentary layers, with each generation adding new strata of analytical complexity. Some players find their careers taking place in ideal conditions and are fossilized into our memories over time, while others are quickly buried and fade into the dusty backdrop.

    Mike Garcia provides ideal subject matter for such an exercise precisely because his case combines statistical clarity with institutional neglect. Born to Mexican immigrant parents in California, Garcia harbored childhood dreams of becoming a jockey, an ambition rendered comically absurd when he grew to 6′-1″ and filled out to 220 pounds. Baseball became the alternative, and by the early 1950s he had established himself as part of the Cleveland Indians’ fearsome starting rotation, a quartet of arms that contemporaries considered the finest collection of pitching talent ever assembled on a single roster. The other three were a still formidable Bob Feller, Bob Lemon, a converted outfielder with a devastating sinker; and Early Wynn, the glowering gruff who would knock down his own grandmother if she dug in at the plate. All three reside in Cooperstown, complete with plaques testifying to careers the baseball establishment deemed worthy of eternal commemoration.

    Garcia never appeared on a Hall of Fame ballot. Not once.

    He wasn’t voted down after years of consideration, narrowly missing the threshold like some borderline candidate whose statistical profile sparks endless debate. He simply wasn’t invited to the argument. Lesser pitchers received token votes: Morrie Martin garnered two, Bob Porterfield one. The Baseball Writers’ Association of America looked at Garcia’s career and decided it didn’t even merit the courtesy of preliminary consideration, the equivalent of the Argument Clinic’s receptionist informing you that you’re not in the book and should come back when you’ve scheduled properly.

    Now, you’re probably shrugging your shoulders about this. Of course Mike Garcia isn’t in the Hall of Fame. How often do you hear his name? Before proceeding further, I’d like to present a modest thought experiment. Below is a statistical comparison of four pitchers, identified only as Players A through D. I invite you to examine these numbers and form your own judgments about relative quality. Note particularly the color coding: the darkest green indicates the best performance in each category, graduating through lighter shades to yellow and ultimately to dark orange for the worst. Look at the distribution of colors and ask yourself which of these four pitchers demonstrated the highest level of sustained excellence.

    STATPLAYER APLAYER BPLAYER CPLAYER D
    Innings Pitched3,8272,174⅔2,8504,564
    Win Percentage62.1%59.4%61.8%55.1%
    Shutout Odds per Start9.1%9.6%8.9%8.0%
    Complete Games279111188290
    Strikeouts2,5811,1171,2772,334
    KO %16.0%12.1%10.6%12.0%
    Strikeout per 9IP6.074.624.034.60
    Walk %10.9%7.8%10.3%9.1%
    WHIP1.321.321.341.33
    HR per 9IP0.530.500.570.67
    ERA3.253.273.233.54
    FIP3.543.203.823.68
    FIP-89849997
    WAR61.440.132.258.5
    WAR per 40 Games4.33.72.83.4

    The patterns emerge with unmistakable clarity. Player B and Player A divide most of the green ink between them. Player C and Player D, meanwhile, swim in seas of yellow and orange, their numbers consistently trailing the others. If you were constructing a Hall of Fame based purely on these metrics, you’d select Players A and B without hesitation, perhaps debate the merits of Player D given his substantial innings total, and likely exclude Player C entirely. The reveal, of course, transforms this academic exercise into something more troubling.

    KEYFELLERGARCIALEMONWYNN
    Cooperstown?YESNOYESYES

    Garcia, who posted the second-best WAR per 40 games (3.7, trailing only Feller’s 4.3) and the lowest FIP (3.20, more than a third of a run better than Feller and substantially superior to both Lemon and Wynn) never received a single Hall of Fame vote. Despite playing across 14 seasons he never appeared as a choice on the ballot.

    Contemporary observers weren’t blind to his talent. Multiple sportswriters noted that Garcia possessed a fastball quicker than Feller’s, a remarkable claim considering Feller’s heater had achieved mythological status. The back of Garcia’s 1952 Topps card, in that wonderfully compressed biographical style Topps favored before statistics colonized all available cardboard real estate, notes he was “the fastest right-hander in the American League,” a designation carrying considerable weight when Bob Feller was still firing heat for the same ballclub.

    That 1952 Topps card, incidentally, resides in my collection with corners placing it in that ambiguous condition tier collectors classify as Good to Very Good, which actually means “worse than you’re imagining but better than terrible.” It was issued in the fifth out of six series, making it marginally scarcer than the earlier cards though not nearly as challenging as the infamous high numbers. Garcia shares the fifth series with Lemon and Wynn, whose cards are trumpeted as key names for collectors working on this series, while Garcia’s typically gets dumped into the common bin alongside forgettable middle relievers, backup catchers, and the single vote-getting Bob Portferfield. I acquired mine for common prices, which tells you everything about Garcia’s posthumous reputation.

    Image: Front and back of 1952 Topps Mike Garcia baseball card.

    The photograph on the front appears to have been taken at night, Garcia emerging from a black backdrop under sharp artificial lighting. He looks substantial, appearing more less like a jockey and more like a boxer awaiting the bell in a ring corner. The biographical text on the back notes that in the previous season he won seven games against just one loss in night contests, suggesting either a particular aptitude for pitching under the lights or a small sample size that the copywriter transformed into narrative. Baseball card backs from this era traffic in these minor mythologies, converting statistical noise into personality traits. Whether Garcia genuinely excelled at night or simply got lucky over a dozen starts matters less than the larger truth the card accidentally captures: this was an exceptionally good pitcher whose accomplishments have been systematically undervalued.

    [Infographic]: Mike Garcia's career pitching statistics. 40.1 WAR; 3.20 FIP, 83.7 FIP-. Ranks 20th among all 407 names in the 1952 Topps checklist and 283rd among all-time baseball players.

    The obvious objection concerns longevity. Garcia appeared in only 2,174⅔ innings across his career, a total that, among pitchers enshrined in Cooperstown, exceeds only representatives of the bullpen. He pitched effectively for roughly a decade before arm trouble curtailed his effectiveness and led to his exit. His strengths are most apparent through modern metrics, spotlighting his omission from the ballot as an even larger oversight the further removed we become from the voting of the 1960s. The argument for Garcia’s exclusion writes itself: Insufficient career length, inadequate counting stats, a peak too brief to offset the absence of longevity.

    But here’s where the argument grows thornier, where we venture beyond merely lamenting Garcia’s absence and begin questioning his teammates’ presence. If Garcia, with his superior FIP and WAR generating capacity, lacks the credentials for Cooperstown, by what logic do Lemon and Wynn qualify? Lemon pitched more innings (2,850) but posted an inferior FIP (3.82 versus 3.20), worse WAR per 40 games (2.8 versus 3.7), and a higher ERA (3.23 versus 3.27, admittedly negligible). His case rests almost entirely on accumulation: he lasted longer, therefore he belongs. Wynn accumulated the most innings (4,564) and reached the iconic 300-win threshold, but his rate stats trail Garcia’s across nearly every category. His FIP- of 97 indicates he was merely above average for his era; Garcia’s 83.7 puts him on par with Nolan Ryan, “Sudden Sam” McDowell, and Tom Seaver.

    The counterargument holds that Lemon and Wynn demonstrated the durability that separates great players from merely excellent ones, that staying healthy and effective constitutes its own form of achievement. Fair enough, and this is a point I generally agree with.

    I don’t want to overstate this case. I’m not convinced Garcia belongs in the Hall of Fame. The longevity argument carries weight. What troubles me is the absolute certainty with which Garcia has been excluded from even preliminary consideration while lesser pitchers received enshrinement. The Hall of Fame voting process resembles the Argument Clinic in reverse: Lemon and Wynn were waved through without serious debate, their appointments confirmed before anyone thought to question whether the dispute over their credentials merited scheduling in the first place. Garcia, meanwhile, never got past the receptionist, his case dismissed as so obviously insufficient that engaging with the evidence would constitute a waste of everyone’s time.

    The statistical record suggests otherwise. When you color-code the numbers, when you strip away the names and examine the performances blindly, Garcia emerges as arguably the second-best pitcher in that vaunted rotation, trailing only Feller and clearly superior to both Lemon and Wynn in rate stats and efficiency. His fastball was legendary among those who faced it. He pitched for a genuine dynasty, contributing meaningfully to one of the great teams in baseball history. He just didn’t do it long enough to accumulate the counting stats that provide the easiest path to Cooperstown, and once his window closed, the institution collectively decided his case wasn’t worth the bother of serious examination.

    I keep returning to those Hall of Fame ballots that found room for Morrie Martin (38-34, 4.29 ERA) and Bob Porterfield (87-97, 3.79 ERA) but not Mike Garcia, and the explanation that he simply wasn’t good enough starts to feel inadequate. Someone looked at Garcia’s career and decided it didn’t warrant even a single vote, a courtesy vote, an acknowledgment that here was a pitcher worth briefly considering before moving on to more serious candidates. That strikes me as less a judgment than a dismissal, less an argument than a refusal to schedule one.

    The beauty of baseball cards lies partly in their indifference to these institutional hierarchies. My ’52 Topps Mike Garcia occupies the same box between Lemon and Wynn, separated by less than 5 cards in either direction. The cardboard doesn’t know or care that two of these men have bronze plaques while the third was deemed unworthy of taking the trouble to print his name on a ballot. It presents their statistics and photographs with equal reverence, each player frozen in the same moment of the same season, preserved with the same cheap materials and garish color schemes. In the hermetically sealed universe of vintage cardboard, Mike Garcia is exactly as significant as his Hall of Fame teammates, which is to say he’s whatever significance I choose to assign him. The stats on the card back speak eloquently enough.

    The contemporary accounts of his fastball, the color-coded statistical comparisons, the simple fact that he held his own in a rotation with three future Hall of Famers, it all exists independent of Cooperstown’s blessing. The Hall of Fame serves an important function in baseball culture, providing a shared reference point for greatness and sparking exactly the sort of friendly arguments that make the sport endlessly fascinating. But it’s not infallible. It makes mistakes, both of inclusion and exclusion, and pretending otherwise grants the institution more authority than its track record warrants.

    Mike Garcia was very likely a better pitcher than Bob Lemon and possibly better than Early Wynn. He almost certainly deserved more Hall of Fame consideration than he received, which is to say he deserved any consideration whatsoever. Whether he merits induction remains genuinely debatable. What’s not debatable is that the case should have been heard, the appointment scheduled, the argument conducted. Instead, baseball’s institutional memory has consigned him to footnote status, the fourth name in discussions of the Big Four rotation, the odd man out when the hall calls for Cleveland’s pitching legends.

    I think of the Argument Clinic sketch’s final revelation, when the bell sounds and the participant realizes the preliminary dispute was the actual purchased argument all along. We’ve been having the wrong debate about Mike Garcia for decades. The question isn’t whether he belongs in the Hall of Fame, reasonable people can disagree, longevity matters, and lines must be drawn somewhere. The question is why his case never merited serious consideration in the first place, why we collectively decided this stocky right-hander with the heavy fastball and superior rate stats didn’t even warrant the courtesy of debate. That’s the argument we should be having, though, as seen by a lack of appearance on the 2025 Eras Committee docket, I suspect the appointment book remains stubbornly empty.

    For now, I’ll settle for my 1952 Topps card, with its nighttime photography and its note about Garcia’s dominance under the lights, and the casual assertion that he was the fastest right-hander in the league. The cardboard tells a story that Cooperstown refuses to acknowledge, preserving a moment when Mike Garcia stood as an equal partner in baseball’s greatest rotation. I don’t want to argue anymore. I just want to look at my baseball card and wonder what might have been if someone had bothered to schedule the appointment.

  • Prince Charlie and the Sacking of Syracuse

    Prince Charlie and the Sacking of Syracuse

    It all started when Del Webb, owner of the New York Yankees, decided he wanted to show off his ballclub to his friends out west. He was a fixture in Phoenix, where he had built his fortune as a construction contractor and was rapidly expanding into other interests. He purchased the New York Yankees with Larry MacPhail in 1945 and would go on to develop iconic western institutions such as Sun City and the Sahara Casino in Las Vegas. He pulled off an unusual real estate swap in 1951.

    Since the war ended, a few ballclubs had been setting up for Spring Training in Arizona. The Yankees had a long established presence in St. Petersburg, going as far as building a new stadium in 1947 and building an entire economy around their Florida outpost that they shared with the St. Louis Cardinals. Webb wanted to bring the Yankees out to Phoenix for a one-time experience in which his social circle could experience his ballclub that had carried three of the last four World Series titles. He convinced New York Giants owner Horace Stoneham to swap Spring Training facilities for the upcoming ’51 season. Joe DiMaggio and the Yankees would go to Arizona, and the Giants’ Durochermen would set up camp overlooking Tampa Bay.

    That is how Leo Durocher came to find himself on the opposite side of the Florida Peninsula from his previous haunt managing the Brooklyn Dodgers in Vero Beach. Having decisively put down an internal rebellion over Jackie Robinson, he was now tasked with integrating Hank Thompson, Monte Irvin, and Willie Mays into the roster. Durocher wasn’t worried about the Giants’ offense. Bobby Thomson could be counted on for a couple dozen home runs. The team had picked up Al Dark and Eddie Stanky, players Durocher approved of, from the Braves the prior season. Combined with the skills of Thompson, Irvin, and Mays the lineup had been remade into a scoring machine.

    What was concerning him was pitching. His plan for 1951 was to carry fewer offensive players than most teams with the extra roster space used to bulk up pitching options. Here he had two capable aces with Sal Maglie and Larry Jansen already taking two rotation spots. The rest was, in the parlance of Durocher’s hobby, a crapshoot.

    That was the true reason for Spring Training. He was here to gather together the top rungs of the Giants’ farm system and pit them against major league bats. Trains had brought pitchers by the literal carload from the organization’s AAA teams in Minneapolis and Jersey City. Frank Shellenback, the pitching coach, may as well have been the most in demand person in the entire camp.

    Durocher leaned his back against the railing and surveyed the scene before him. A pair of pitchers were throwing from bullpen mounds in the Florida heat, Shellenback standing beside them with arms crossed. They were both minor leaguers, the last of a half dozen hopefuls vying for the last open spot in the club’s 1951 rotation.

    One of those arms belonged to Charlie Bishop, a tall Georgian who had been discovered by “Tubby,” a scout who newspaper accounts claimed hadn’t seen his feet since the onset of The Depression. Tubby arranged for the wide eyed teenager to suit up and sit in the dugout for a week with the champion ’42 St. Louis Cardinals. Bishop had eagerly signed and was promptly fed into Class D assignments in the Cardinals’ labyrinthine farm system. Service in the Navy intervened and he had spent the ensuing years working his way up the ladder, culminating with an invitation to the Cardinals’ spring training camp in ’49.

    Commissioner Happy Chandler had smashed open the farm system just over a year ago, allowing stockpiled players who would otherwise never throw a Major League pitch to be claimed by teams that wanted to use them. The newly instituted Minor League Draft had seen the Giants pick up Bishop’s contract in December 1949, sending him to play for their Class A club in Sioux City. Having put up a 16-9 record, he was the sole Class A representative auditioning for Durocher and was doing so from the same mound from which he had tried to make the Cardinals’ roster.

    Durocher was watching Bishop alternate throws with George Bamberger, whose 17-13 record made him the sole pitching invitee from the Pacific Coast League. At Durocher’s side was Hall of Fame pitcher Carl Hubbell, now employed as the director of the Giants’ farm system, giving him the backstory and development notes on the pitchers before them.

    Bishop stole glances at the two as he waited for the return throw from his catcher. He couldn’t join the conversation happening to his left, or the non-verbal one happening between the looks exchanged by Shellenback and Durocher. All he could do to have a say is throw the ball hard enough to make an audible pop in the catcher’s mitt. He gripped the seams harder and fired. *POP!* He proved his velocity while the catcher proved his acrobatic skill.

    Had Durocher seen that? He couldn’t tell. The manager’s head was turned, greeting some men who had ambled to the railing behind him. Who were these guys? Reporters? Celebrities? Bishop had seen Durocher’s wife, LaRaine Day, wearing a polka dot dress in the stands a few moments ago. She always had an entourage of photographers following her. Were these Durocher’s personal friends, underworld figures, or perhaps some combination of the two? Everyone in his orbit seemed to share some sort of inside joke that Bishop couldn’t read. Durocher was an enigma and Bishop was finding himself constantly 60 feet-6 inches away.

    Bishop threw another fastball, sending the catcher out of his crouch to make the grab. One of the mystery figures quipped something about “practicing his brushback” to some chuckles. Durocher didn’t laugh. Bishop threw another one closer to the plate. He just needed to rear back and throw, and he was blowing it. He had a no-hitter in ’47, and lost another on the final out. Had Hubbell told him that? Or had he read from more than one minor league reporter about how he was just as likely to throw a ball over the backstop as strikeout a batter. Durocher stepped away from the wall and began dismissing his onlookers with a series of handshakes and “see ya laters.” Shellenback held up his hands for the catchers to keep their baseballs and dismissed the two pitchers. “Alright guys. That’s enough for now.”

    Bishop was intercepted by a group of reporters on his way back to the clubhouse. As a newcomer, they wanted his impressions of the colorful manager. He hadn’t know what to expect given the news coverage of the last five years and confessed to the press that he had very different expectations for the man he encountered. “I had read a lot and figured he might be more dynamic and probably impatient, but I found Leo a grand fellow.” He went on to describe Durocher as very patient, helpful, and more than anything else, “businesslike” and very nice to deal with.

    Seeing a rookie speaking with the press, Hubbell made his way over as Bishop made his exit from the reporters recording his words. He added a postscript about Bishop for their stories. “There’s a boy who should do you some good. He’s a little wild, but he’s not essentially wild. It comes and patches and bothers him. But he has a good chance yet and should get over it.”

    Bishop’s next chance came in an intrasquad game between Giants players. He pitched the final three innings and secured the statistical credit for a 10-8 victory. This was a mixed result, as he came into the game with a 7-6 lead and promptly gave up home runs to Bobby Hofman and Monte Irvin. In some spectacular foreshadowing of the season that was to come, Bobby Thomson saved the game for Bishop with a 3-run homer.

    Just over a week later the Grapefruit League was in full swing. Rookie arms were thrown into the live fire exercises of pitching to established major leaguers from other teams. The Philadelphia Phillies visited for a game and Bishop was once again given the ball for three frames with the Giants up by a score of 6-2. Eddie Waitkus and Richie Ashburn both sent misplaced pitches over the outfield wall, hitting him for 5 runs and the loss in a 7-6 decision. The decision was made that evening to give him a minor league assignment for the upcoming season.

    Bishop wasn’t just being shipped out of Florida, he was being sent to another country. Expanding television ownership was curtailing attendance within the range of broadcast towers in New York. The Giants found their Jersey City attendance falling in lockstep with this development and took the decision to relocate their AAA club to Ottawa, outside the reach of the signals emanating from New York.

    Bishop’s assignment to the newly reconstituted Ottawa club wasn’t widely known until the teams broke camp. As late as March 31 Durocher was telling reporters, “From among George Bamberger, Charlie Bishop, Roger Bowman, Frank Fanovich, Norman Fox, and George Spencer I out to get two more pretty good hurlers. If I don’t come up with at least one good starter I’m going to be badly fooled.” It may have been a prepared line, if the alphabetical ordering of player names is any indication. Hubbell assured Bishop this was a promotion, with the Giants wanting to keep an eye on him while moving him several rungs ahead of his prior year role in Single A.

    If Bishop’s job interview on the mound had the hiccups, his 1951 season had the plague. Before the end of his first inning with Ottawa he threw a wild pitch, committed a fielding error, and gave up 5 runs. Three games later he was sporting an 0-3 record and driving to Oakland. He was farmed out to the Acorns of Pacific Coast League in exchange for Raoul Lopez, an equally wild fastballer from Havana who had played Cuban ball with Ray Noble for Cienfuegas and in the Negro Leagues for the New York Cubans. Lopez had begun the year on a missing persons list and wouldn’t arrive for a month. Bishop had been traded for a ghost.

    A change of time zones did little to help the faltering pitcher. Now 27 years old, he went 2-8 while watching his ERA spiral to 5.88. Hubbell sent him down to A-ball with the Jacksonville Tars in the South Atlantic League. Bishop, as one reporter diplomatically put it, was “very unhappy” about the move.

    Bishop’s ’51 season had been nothing short of a disaster from start to finish, but it was the intersection of multiple other disasters that would create his next opening. Horace Stoneham was one of small number of owners with no material sources of income beyond their sports teams. One year of gate receipts had shown Ottawa to be uneconomical for the Giants. Specifically, the weekend homestands that Stoneham had counted on were unable to be played due to entrenched local ordinances preventing Sunday baseball. The Giants consolidated their AAA affiliates down to the Minneapolis Millers and sought out a buyer for the Ottawa club, eventually reaching a deal with the perpetually cash-strapped Philadelphia Athletics.

    Prior to this the organization had no minor league affiliate above Single-A. The A’s had spent the past two decades borrowing money to paper over internal ownership disputes instead of building out a farm system. Connie Mack’s Athletics paid $75,000 for the Ottawa franchise, which was swiftly renamed the Ottawa Athletics. The terms of sale allowed the A’s to seed the empty roster with five Ottawa players of their choosing, and it was one of those selections that saved Bishop from the subtle nods and headshakes of Durocher and Shellenback.

    While Bishop toiled away in obscurity at Jacksonville in August 1951, the Ottawa Giants were busy calling the police. Starting pitcher Walter Cox was missing.

    He didn’t show up for a road game in Syracuse and a search of his hotel room revealed packed luggage but no sign of the pitcher. Calls to Cox’s wife and his mother revealed no knowledge of his whereabouts, and local police were called in to search. Cox, who reportedly did not drink or show any other prior signs of potential danger, surfaced four days later at a ballpark for an Ottawa away game in Springfield and refused to give an account of where he had been. Between the recent disappearance of Cox and that of Lopez earlier in the year, it was just par for the course in Giants’ minor league baseball.

    News of the disbanding of the Ottawa Giants and their subsequent sale to the A’s for parts was announced in early February 1952. Bishop was once again crossing the country, this time heading to Phoenix for the Giants’ training camp at Hubbell’s invitation. Walter Cox, the disappearing pitcher and a former Sioux City pitcher alongside Bishop, was also slated to appear but was told instead to change plans and report to the A’s camp in Melbourne, Florida.

    Newspaper reports began to surface on March 11 that Cox had not reported to the Athletics and that his whereabouts were unknown. Two more weeks elapsed with no sign of the Athletics’ newest arm. While Connie Mack was perfectly fine with not having to pay a player’s salary during Spring Training, he needed his player to be ready for the fast approaching opening day in Ottawa. A frantic search revealed that Cox had been institutionalized for his safety in a mental hospital for the past several months with no indication of when he would be released.

    Elmer Burkart, the Philadelphia representative tasked with building out the A’s minor league roster, contacted Hubbell to inquire about a remedy for their damaged player. Hubbell agreed to take back Cox, but to do so Burkhart would need to select a name from a list he provided right then and there. “How about Charlie Bishop?”

    Burkhart had been involved in minor league scouting for several years. He remembered Bishop’s name as the strikeout leader of the Western League in 1947 and, with the assurance that Bishop was indeed physically in the Giants camp and with absolutely zero additional information to go on, he agreed to the swap. With that phone call, Charlie Bishop had been traded for a guy locked away in a mental asylum.

    The season started out surprisingly well for the newest member of the Athletics. He had some victories under his belt. His ERA was respectable, and while his pitching was at times wild, a new grip learned after a blistered finger had it under control on most days. He even managed a few extra base hits at the plate, including a 5 RBI performance in early May.

    A decent, if unremarkable, season coalesced into something special on May 24. The Athletics were scheduled to play against the Syracuse Chiefs in a double header. Facing off in the first game would be Bishop and the league leader in wins, Bobo Holloman. Capitalizing on the promotional potential of the day was the Syracuse Chamber of Commerce, whose members had loaded up a truck with prizes to be awarded to the best overall player of the night and anyone who performs a “first.” The hitter of the first single would receive a prize, as would the first player to score, steal a base, strikeout an opposing batter, and the like.

    The stage set, Bishop proceeded to mow down the starting nine of Syracuse in order. He recalled becoming aware of having a potential no-hitter when the leadoff man came up for the second time, this time thriving on the pressure. At the conclusion of the game he had struck out one, walked three, and importantly, not allowed a single hit in a 1-0 victory. The game was the first no-hitter of 1952 at any level of professional baseball, one that generated the headline “STAR HURLER TWIRLS NO-HITTER” from an Oakland newspaper that just months earlier had noted his ineffectiveness for the Acorns.

    The Syracuse business contingent had no choice but to name Bishop the night’s MVP. Since he had negated the ability of so many firsts, he was awarded the spoils of every unclaimed prize on hand. He had single handedly sacked Syracuse. In the clubhouse that evening he looked like royalty in an elaborate smoking jacket that had been presented. Standing astride a newly acquired Persian rug, he doled out loot to teammates who quickly adopted the nickname “Prince Charlie” for their conquering hero. He had boxes of cigars and coupons for steak dinners. There was a bushel basket containing a breakfast service for four, as well as a silver tray. He had leisure shirts and sports jackets at his disposal. An elaborate clock was kept for himself. There was even what was described as a set of ladies’ travel luggage designated for “a wife.”

    Bishop wasn’t celebrated only on the mound in Lansdowne Park. He was sought after in the candy aisle. The newfound popularity of the International League led to the creation of baseball cards for the Canadian Market. Parkhurst introduced the first postwar hockey cards in 1951 and followed up that effort in 1952 with a set focused on the three Canadian outposts of the International League. Bishop and his Ottawa Athletics comprised two dozen slots in the checklist, giving the newly revived pitcher his first baseball card after a decade of professional action.

    Image: Front and back of 1952 Parkhurst Frostade Charlie Bishop baseball card.

    Decades later, collectors would recognize a similarity between these cards and the chaotic revival of Bishop’s career. New to manufacturing trading cards, Parkhurst looked for a readily available method of mechanically randomizing inventory for insertion into their five card packs. The solution was the wholesale dumping of cards into a rotary cement mixer, which did wonders for creating condition scarcities. Even in cardboard effigy he could not escape the turbulent absurdity of his career.

    By late August Bishop was sporting a respectable 3.64 ERA. His 12-10 record reflected the fact that Ottawa would not be competing for the International League title that season. This opened up the intriguing possibility of an expanded roster push for the Big A’s, who were just six games out of first place in Philadelphia. Bishop was called up to Shibe Park, where his first two appearances saw him earn two wins across 15⅔ innings while striking out 12 batters.

    The call to the Big A’s had required immediate travel. Upon arrival in Philadelphia, the abdicating prince wrote farewell letters to the editors of Ottawa newspapers expressing his gratitude to his supporters.

    I didn’t get a chance to see or call any of the people in Ottawa who were so nice to us so, if you should have the opportunity, I would appreciate it if you would mention that we enjoyed Ottawa, the understanding fans, and friends and neighbors. I wish I could have seen them all before we left, but just didn’t have the time.

  • The Attic Find

    The Attic Find

    You absolutely have to know that my sister can throw a punch.

    As a teenager she was walking to school, carrying a backpack and a lunchbox. A neighborhood boy snuck up behind her and grabbed her behind. She whirled around and, letting the centrifugal force add weight to her already bulky metal lunch box, clocked him in the face with it. She left him unconscious on the sidewalk.

    When she was younger, she played in a youth hockey league entirely populated by boys. She played left wing and was no stranger to throwing elbows and mixing it up chasing pucks into the corners. Her teammates knew her as “Clark,” a name borrowed for her hockey career from one of our male cousins.

    The deception worked almost too well. Another boy once made fun of her and started a fight, an encounter she ended by bloodying his nose. The kid’s dad came looking for “Clark,” only to discover when he encountered our parents that this was only her criminal alias. The target of his wrath switched immediately to his sniffling son, who was soon berated for “getting beat up by a girl.”

    Despite the presence of selective evidence, my sister wasn’t entirely some fourth line goon. She knew her hockey and had more prosaic interests. There was middle school theater club and waiting in line for the latest David Bowie or Talking Heads record to be released. A 7-Eleven had been built a few blocks away just as she learned to ride a bike, providing the perfect nearby destination for two-wheeled travel.

    She had made this journey many times before and could be counted on to pick up a pack of bubble gum whenever hockey cards were present on the shelf. The last time she pedaled to the store for a card run was 1979, right around the time she was packing away her hockey gear into the garage.

    Image: The 7-Eleven where my sister purchased her hockey cards in 1979.
    Above: The spot where my sister shopped for cards.

    She cleaned out the store’s inventory of Topps cards, carrying home an entire wax box with one arm on her bike. There, she consumed all the gum while sifting through the latest Topps design. The cards had bright blue borders, and most importantly, featured Gordie Howe, Bobby Hull, and the WHA teams she had been missing from prior year packs. She looked through the cards, putting each pack’s contents back in the wrapper, and tucked the box into a closet for closer inspection later. She had theater practice to attend to.

    Theater practice turned into 20 years of life happening. Drama Club led to production work at a low-powered UHF television station, marriage to an art teacher, two young sons, and the purchase of a “fixer-upper” house that had been inhabited for an extended period by ill-tempered squatters. Every free moment was spent wrestling with repairs to punched out drywall and tearing out (hopefully) animal stained carpets. The well system needed replacing and there was the occasional bounty hunter, intent on finding a previous resident, to fend off.

    Sometime around 2001, her husband left and she found herself an under-employed single mom. There was no child support, an arrangement that she quickly agreed to in exchange for no contest as to who would keep the kids and the house. While this would certainly generate headshaking from attorneys, it was a plan hatched by two broke people with hardly anything else left to fight over. Times were tight, and even when she managed to get enough to pay the mortgage there was always something waiting to go wrong with the car, the dog, or a medical bill.

    One overcast day with no work to go to, she was going through her belongings in the attic. Amongst too many holiday decorations and old cans of paint was a white cardboard box with “HOCKEY” in red block letters. She opened it and discovered her old blue bordered hockey cards, just as pack fresh as when she opened them two decades earlier. She put them in order, finding nearly enough for a full set. The Hull and two Howe cards were present, but it was another name that now took precedence over the rest: Gretzky.

    Image: Front and back of a near-mint 1979-80 Topps Wayne Gretzky rookie card.

    Her packs had yielded a Wayne Gretzky rookie card. She called my brother, who had some price guides and at the time was the only one of us still actively collecting any kind of sports cards. She wanted to know if this was actually a rookie card and it so, was it as valuable as a hockey fan thought it might be. After a brief discussion, my brother added her card to a stack of cards going off for grading at PSA. Shortly thereafter, a return package arrived bearing her newly slabbed card. Having basically been handled more by the grader than its original owner, the card came back assessed as a pack fresh Near Mint PSA 7.

    The Gretzky card was listed on eBay within an hour of its arrival. Heavy bidding ensued, with the buyer asking to have the shipping upgraded to overnight FedEx in exchange for an even higher amount. She cleared more than $700 after all was said and done. A nice last second stick save for someone struggling. Today the kids are grown, she just became a grandmother, and has emerged from the long fog of the last 20 years. There is no need to keep throwing lunch box haymakers.

    The Gretzky card is long gone, traded away to keep the heat on. The fighter who pulled it from a wax pack at 7-Eleven is still here. Undefeated.





    Postscript for Modern Collectors

    I can hear an audience of collectors groaning that such an iconic (and expensive) card was thrown overboard to save the ship. The last PSA 7 Gretzky rookie sold on eBay went well beyond $3,000, an increase of more than 300%.

    Keep in mind what was going on. That $700 kept the heat on in the winter for a mom and her two elementary school age children. It allowed them stay current on the mortgage, something they never would have been able to dig out from under had they fallen behind. When you’re drowning, you don’t get to come up for air again when your head goes underwater.

    There were credit cards involved in plugging other holes. An extra $700 balance compounded by 20% interest is well over $38k in saved interest if carried to the present day, far more than the few grand generated by 7% annual price appreciation on a piece of inert cardboard. She already maximized the financial return by selling it when it wasn’t the time in life to own hockey cards.

  • Gallows Humor in the Bullpen

    Gallows Humor in the Bullpen

    I’ve never seen the movie Fargo, but I have seen a guy in a wood chipper.

    It was one of those spring days where the air felt hot in direct sunlight and just perfect in the shade. I came around the corner and there they were, the familiar fleet of landscaping trucks taking up the empty side of a wooded residential street. The workers had vanished. Their leaf blowers and mowers sat in silence after hours of announcing their presence throughout the subdivision. A big dump truck squatted at the curb, its bed weighed down with mulch and covered by a blue tarp. Behind it: a wood chipper. I walked past without thinking much of it.

    Then I saw the legs.

    Denim. Work boots. Silence.

    I stared while my brain did that thing where it tries to use logic to explain away what the senses are clearly showing. I approached slowly, each step feeling like I was wading through mud, not knowing what grisly scene awaited me on the other side of those heavy-duty rubber deflector strips hanging down over the chute. The rest of the body was completely obscured.

    I steeled myself—because obviously this thing hadn’t been running for a while. I would have heard it. Nobody was around. It was fine. Everything was going to be fine.

    I pulled back the rubber flap. A very much alive landscaper blinked back at me, shielding his eyes from the sudden intrusion of sunlight.

    “Are you okay?” I managed. A torrent of confused Spanish poured out in response.

    This apparently served as some kind of signal, because the tarp on the mulch truck suddenly rolled back like a theater curtain. What I had assumed was an empty mulch truck was actually shielding the rest of the work crew, all of them sprawled across the mulch like it was a giant bean bag chair, scrolling through their phones in the shade.

    After some back-and-forth, my broken Spanish and their amused English, I learned that everyone was just on break. The wood chipper, they assured me with the confidence of people who do this every day, couldn’t even operate without engaging a safety key.

    I walked away shaking my head at the idea of napping inside a machine that could literally eat you in seconds, safety key or not.

    They thought it was hilarious.

    Dark Humor

    I think I know of a 1950s ballplayer that would have appreciated the moment far more than I did. Frank Smith, a mainstay of the 1950s Cincinnati Reds bullpen, did this as a prank during his single year with the 1955 St. Louis Cardinals:

    [Image: Frank Smith is seen standing on his tip toes with a noose from the ceiling around his neck, grinning through mock agony at teammate Stan Musial who is checking on his safety. Another Cardinal player is approaching the scene from behind with a genuine look of concern. Image captured by Francis Miller, used under personal non-commercial terms.]
    Photographer Francis Miller, who would later become famous for his civil rights coverage, was in on the gag.

    The image was captured on July 1 after Smith gave up 3 runs in an 11-7 road loss to the Chicago Cubs, a game in which he received no decision. Smith and teammate Stan Musial are seen grinning at each other, but a concerned Cardinals player approaching from behind appears to be trying to mentally work out the severity of the situation. That background player and I have definitely been on the same emotional path.

    Photo Not Available

    This image is the kind you joke about with people who share a similar sense of humor. As a public figure it is not the kind you want put into circulation as your publicity still. Luckily, us baseball card collectors came to the rescue.

    [Image: Front and back of 1952 Topps Frank Smith baseball card.]

    The back of my 1952 Topps Frank Smith card reveals that he is from Watertown, New York. I’ve seen that address before. That’s where Greg the Night Owl lives!

    For anyone unaware, Greg is a professional sports editor with a rather expansive card collection. He documents this all on his blog, which has featured two separate pieces focused on the exploits of the hometown pitcher [You will want to read Brush With Greatness: Frank Smith and The Final Chapter?]. He extensively interviewed Smith and his family and, when the it was discovered that no photos of the former pitcher were available for a story, delved into his personal collection to provide baseball cards as a means to illustrate the story.

    Using baseball cards appears to be a bit a recurring theme with Smith. Greg tells us of attending the dedication ceremony for the LaFargeville High School baseball field dedicated to the pitcher. A plaque was installed on the backstop in memory of Smith and, taking up more than one third of the plaque’s real estate, is an enlarged version of his 1952 Topps rookie card.

    I suppose such a recognizable card was necessary to prove Smith’s baseball bona fides. “Frank Smith” sounds like a generic name Captain Jack Sparrow would provide to the authorities after getting caught hitting fungoes after hours on a high school baseball field.

    Pioneering the Closer Role

    Frank Smith is almost always written about as one of the pioneers of baseball’s closer role. He appeared in 264 of his 271 career games in relief, and was on the mound for the final out of 173 of the contests. In 1952 he had 110 innings of relief work (as well as a bizarre complete game spot start). His teams’ reliance on his arm for closing out games and a sidearm fastball that held batters to a .226 lifetime batting average provided obvious comparisons to this hallmark of the modern game.

    That said, in an era far ahead of Aroldis Chapman or The Nasty Boys, the Cincinnati Reds and St. Louis Cardinals had yet to figure out how to effectively use a closer. Smith racked up 43 saves over the course of 7 seasons. In 1955, the season in which he was scaring teammates with a noose in the locker room, he was credited with just a solitary save. This wasn’t for a lack of trying. The same month as his infamous photo, Smith made 6 no-decision relief appearances with his team losing each contest.

    This leads to one conclusion: These early attempts to establish a closer role didn’t envision his role as a way to nail down a game in the win column. They were attempts to stop the bleeding when a starter’s arm had already put the team behind. Smith and his low opposing batting average where seen as a tool to buy time for his team’s offense to try and figure out a plan.

    I’ve looked and looked for a term that describes the opposite of a save, which requires a team to be winning when the closer makes his appearance. These weren’t blown saves (the Reds were generally already behind) and they weren’t holds (nobody else was getting the save either). By the traditional definition of a closer who makes his appearance in high leverage situations, Smith was not a “fireman.” He was something else.

    There is a guy I sometimes see driving a decommissioned hearse around Richmond. This vehicle has a bumper sticker identifying the car as belonging to a “last responder.” I feel like Frank Smith would have laughed at that.

    [Image: Infographic showing Frank Smith's career statistical performance. 0.1 WAR, 4.39 FIP, and 106.5 FIP-. Smith ranks 6375th in CardBoredom's all time player rankings and 344th out of 407 in the 1952 Topps checklist.]

    [Image: Infographic showing CardBoredom's 1952 Topps set completion status. The addition of this Frank Smith card takes overall completion to 64.1 percent, leaving 146 cards needed to complete the set.]