The book Electric October came out in 2017, and I think I've seen at least a couple of cardblog posts about it. A friend gifted me a copy for my birthday either last year or maybe the year before, and in our lockdown (or maybe a bit after lockdown was relaxed) I found the time to read it. The book focuses on 6 lives, at it says. What it calls the most exciting World Series, that of 1947, came down to some key moments from some less famous, or not famous at all, baseball folks.
1940 Play Ball Bucky Harris.
Bucky Harris card back.
It's hard to make the case that the 6 lives are all people who otherwise wouldn't be known for much, as the book tries to make out, since one of them is a Hall-of-Famer. Bucky Harris certainly isn't the most famous Hall-of-Famer, but still people may well have heard of him. He won the World Series twice as manager, bringing the Washington Senators their first title in 1924, and then winning the 1947 series with the Yankees. His Senators also lost the World Series to the Pirates in 1925. I mentioned the other day when I showed my 1940 Play Ball Hans Lobert card that I would be showing another from that set soon, and here it is. This is my third card from the set with one more (Carl Hubbell) on the way. I'm tempted to get more as I think it's a beautiful set, but it's surely an extremely foolish endeavor to think about getting all of them. I might stop at the four I have.
The Wiz Snuffy Stirnweiss.
The Wiz Snuffy Stirnweiss card back.
Another of the main players was 1945 AL batting champ Snuffy Stirnweiss. According to the book, Stirnweiss had a chip on his shoulder about having won the batting title when many players were doing military service. I chose to represent him with this The Wiz Yankees of the 50s card; I have a couple other of these Wiz cards, both of John Candelaria (for his time with the Mets and with the Yankees in the 80s). Stirnweiss died in a tragic train accident in the late 50s.
1970 Fleer Laughlin World Series Al Gionfriddo.
Fleer Laughlin card back.
Another of the players was "little guy" Al Gionfriddo of the Dodgers. He is best known for a catch which may have robbed Joe DiMaggio of a home run in the World Series. Gionfriddo never played in the majors again after that World Series. This is my first Laughlin card, although I do have some later Fleer Laughlin sticker backs (I guess they can be considered cards, but to me they're stickers); it's a welcome addition to my collection.
1960 Topps Cookie Lavagetto.
Cookie Lavagetto card back.
Another of the prominent figures in the story of the 1947 World Series is Brooklyn player Cookie Lavagetto. Part of the story of the book is how some players are welcome to stay around after their playing days are over while others aren't. Lavagetto was a popular guy and went on to be a big-league manager, shown here with the Senators.
Of the six main characters of the book, I haven't mentioned Yankees pitcher Bill Bevens yet. I didn't find any cards I liked of him (some of the cards had his name misspelled, which I don't like). Bevens is shown as a contrast to Lavagetto in that he would have liked to keep working in baseball but was never offered anything after that 1947 World Series. The final character is Dodgers manager Burt Shotton. I bought a card of him from the Target All-Time Dodgers set, but it's in my COMC shipment that won't be arriving until at least October. I'm happy to get the Target Dodgers represented in my collection.
Overall, while I enjoyed the book I also don't especially recommend it. It's quite well-written and the author makes a good narrative crafted around Harris, Shotton, Lavagetto, Gionfriddo, Stirnweiss, and Bevens, but in the end it's just a story of a World Series between two teams that I don't especially care for. The later Dodger championship teams would be of much more interest to me, and some Yankee losses might be more up my alley. But a story about the Yankees winning yet another World Series can only be made so compelling to me.
Thanks for reading! I'm really on a roll, having made three posts in three days after 4+ months off from blogging.
Today's a bit of a special post; today is the 6th anniversary of my dad's death. Dad died on his and Mom's wedding anniversary, and today would have been their 50th, if he had lived. This post is about Bobby Shantz, but we'll get there by starting with some background on my dad.
Dad was born in 1945 in Wilmington, Delaware, which is quite close to Philadelphia. His father died in 1951 when he was five years old, almost six. He went to live in Philadelphia at a boarding school for "orphans," which in practice at the time meant fatherless boys. His mother had a home near Wilmington and he only saw her occasionally, until she died when he was 13, making him a true orphan. Her home passed on to one of Dad's aunts. That aunt lived there for about thirty years, until she got sick and moved in with her daughter circa 1990. When that happened, Dad was invited over to go through some of the things in the basement. He brought home some stuff, I think including an old model train set, but mainly a few boxes of his father's books. He bought some bookshelves and put his father's books in the living room. They stayed there, largely untouched I think, for a couple of decades, I would say.
Now that Dad is gone, Mom is staying in the house but has in mind that she might sell eventually. She wants to be ready if she does sell, and has been getting rid of some old things. She gave most of Dad's father's books away, but saved one for me: The Story of Bobby Shantz. But it couldn't have been his father's book since his father died in 1951 and the book was published in 1953. I think this must have actually been Dad's book when he was little, and even though he lived at the orphanage/boarding school, maybe his mother gave it to him when he was home sometime. Anyway, so much is lost to history. But for sure Bobby Shantz was a Philadelphia star, Dad was a little kid in and near Philadelphia back then, and this book came out of his mother's house and eventually made its way to me many years later.
Front cover.
Back cover.
Night Owl had a great post on Bobby Shantz earlier this month. He featured the 1956 Topps card, which I've since gone and picked up in my COMC account. This book, the Story of Bobby Shantz, was published just a bit earlier, in 1953, coming off Shantz's big 1952 year for the A's. In 1952 Shantz was the AL MVP (there was no Cy Young award yet) and the AL wins leader with a record of 24-7, with a 2.48 ERA and 152 strikeouts. The back cover summarizes the chapters, my favorite of which is Chapter 12, about the FBI investigating when he was threatened not to pitch against Boston.
Title page, and stats table.
Some pictures including being weighed.
Opposite the title page there's a table of Bobby Shantz's stats. Of course everyone's always interested in his size; in Chapter 1, he says that's a big reason to write the book, to tell his story of how the little guy can be successful. The stats table lists him as 5 feet, 6 and 1/4 inches, and 139 pounds, 12 ounces. Night Owl went through the weights listed on his Topps cards, and found that they were either 138 pounds or 150+. So the book comes in on the side of the sub-140 weights. There are many pictures in the book, and I've shown one page here. The picture in the upper left is of him weighing in on Bobby Shantz night at the ballpark -- everyone was always interested in his weight, it seems. Then the top right is of him meeting with FBI agents after receiving those threats about pitching against Boston. In the bottom picture, a trainer checks him out after being hit by a pitch.
1975 Topps Mini 1952 MVPs, Bobby Shantz and Hank Sauer.
Then, since this is a baseball card blog, I will feature some baseball cards. I picked up this 1975 Topps Mini of the 1952 MVPs for two reasons: to have Bobby Shantz in my main binder, and to have another 1975 Topps mini in my main binder. I don't remember ever knowing about the 1975 minis when I was collecting in the 80s and 90s, but now that I know about them, I wanted a couple. I didn't really realize before, but I think the card serves a third purpose in that binder: I think it's the only representation of the Philadelphia Athletics there. That won't be true for long -- last night I picked up 4 old Philadelphia Athletics cards on COMC, and when they arrive I'll make room for them.
Hygrade All-Time Greats Bobby Shantz.
Pacific Legends Bobby Shantz.
Then I have these other two nostalgia cards of Shantz, the Hygrade All-Time Greats, and the Pacific Legends. The Pacific card features him with the Yankees, with whom he won the 1958 World Series. Shantz also pitched in three games in the wild 1960 World Series against the Pirates, who famously pulled it out in the end.
Finally, I'll mention connections to another player I've featured recently, Curt Simmons. I've shown the 1955 Bowman and the 1956 Topps cards of Simmons recently. Simmons was one of the 1950 Phillies Whiz Kids. Shantz and Simmons were both important pitchers of the 1950s, both in Philadelphia and further afield, both won World Series with other teams, both were multiple-time All-Stars, and both are on the Philadelphia Baseball Wall of Fame. Both are also from the Philadelphia region originally. And both are also still alive. They did an interview together a few years ago and it's available on YouTube. I'll close out this post with that YouTube video; thanks for reading.
My son and I visited my mom today, and I took the opportunity to search through my old room for any remaining baseball card items. I have removed essentially all of my collection, but there are a few odds and ends left there.
Bob Horner, Charlie Hough, and Dale Murphy.
I had to really look for them, but I am glad to have found my old Fun Foods Buttons. I only have three of the them -- I must have only opened one pack. These are from 1984, but I am sure I bought them at a show, let's say circa 1990. I wish I had bought more than one pack, since as far as I can tell, you can't find them unopened anymore. I'd love to have a few unopened packs of these. I haven't yet reclaimed my old wrapper collection from mom's house, but I will do that at some point. I'd love it if the Fun Foods Buttons wrapper is in there, but it's hard to say if it actually is.
Button backs.
I have bought a few more Fun Foods Buttons from COMC, and I'll receive them around the end of the year, when I get my Black Friday haul. For now, Dale Murphy, Bob Horner, and Charlie Hough constitute my Fun Foods collection. (Like most people, I think, I know nothing about these buttons, but there's a good post from earlier this year at Wax Pack Hero about them.)
1987 Topps Surf Pirates book.
1988 Topps Surf Phillies book.
Remember these Topps Surf books? They attempted to show all the Topps cards of that team, up until that point in time. I think they gave these away at games. I didn't make it to Three Rivers until 1993, my first year in college, so I'm sure I bought this Pirates book secondhand. The Phillies book, though, I may well have gotten at the Vet. The Pirates book shows Topps cards of the Pirates from 1952 through 1986, and the Phillies book shows cards from 1952 through 1987.
A page from the Pirates book.
A page from the Phillies book.
The books aren't very complete, I would say. They only feature cards that are really all of the Phillies or Pirates; for example, the Mike Schmidt rookie card, which also has Ron Cey and John Hilton on it (who are not Phillies), isn't there. Similarly with league leader cards. But it's still a nice effort. Surf laundry detergent appears to still exist, but it's not the brand we use, and I can't swear that it's even in our local stores.
Classic Baseball Cards, a book of reprints.
A page from the book.
I picked up another couple of books, too. This one, Classic Baseball Cards, is a Dover reprint book. It features several pages of copies of old tobacco and gum cards, perforated along the edges. I didn't take any of them apart, so the book is all intact. A friend and trading partner from my childhood had a bunch of cards like this, and I appear to still have one I got from him back in the day; it's a Dover reprint of Leo Durocher, which I posted with my other Durocher cards a while ago. I'm fond of Dover because in my career as a math professor, I own many, many other books by Dover, which are all, like this, new editions of old things.
Most Valuable Baseball Cards.
Finally, I had another old book at Mom's which I brought home with me. Most Valuable Baseball Cards, it's called. The price tag indicates that I bought it at the University of Delaware bookstore. Since I'm from the town that U of D is in, I did sometimes hang out at the university library, and I guess I went to the bookstore every now and then. As the title and cover indicate, this book features pictures of valuable baseball cards, with some short descriptions of the cards and why they might be valuable.
That's everything from my youth that I picked up at my mom's house today. So, thanks again for reading!
Minor correction: in my post on 1987 Kraft Home Plate Heroes Cut-Out cards, I said that I also had a couple of Kraft cards from the 60s. There were no Kraft cards in the 60s, as far as I can tell. I had mixed up Kraft with Nabisco. I have two cards from the 1969 Nabisco Team Flakes set. Team Flakes was a cereal with which I have no familiarity; according to Cereal Graveyard, it was produced from 1963 until the 1990s, changing the name to just Team at some point; I don't remember it at all.
Lou Brock and Willie Mays.
I believe that I bought these at the consigment shop, Partners, at which I also bought my 1972 Frank Robinson Traded card. I think I barely paid anything for these -- as I said in the Frank Robinson post, I think the owner had one or two boxes of baseball cards, and they were all the same price, like 50 cents or something. Later, instead of having a consignment shop, the owner must have realized there was money in baseball cards, and she moved her store to a better location as just a card shop. I think she had a good feel for the market -- I remember my last interaction with her, too, when I was in college and barely collecting anymore. She told me she thought new cards weren't going to be worth anything, since they were making so many and everyone was stockpiling them. I told her that my collection focused heavily on the 70s, and said she thought that was a good idea. I don't know when her shop went away, like almost all the other card shops in town.
I have a couple of other Lou Brock cards from when he was playing, from the end of his career. As I've said before, finding cards from Hall-of-Famers at the end of their careers was a strategy I had to get some of those players into my collection in an affordable way. It didn't work for every Hall-of-Famer, though, and this is my only Willie Mays card from when he was playing. I will seek to remedy that -- there is a Willie Mays card (1960 Topps) on the PSA-graded part of my want list. Other than this, the other Willie Mays cards I have are what I would call nostalgia cards, like Pacific Legends, or Hygrade All-Time Greats, or Baseball Immortals.
I really like these cards despite the roughness of the cutting, the lack of logos, and the many creases. That's partly because of the relative obscurity of the set, and also because I got a good deal on them. As for the obscurity, I really had no idea for quite some time what these cards were. Eventually, I got a book, the Great Book of Baseball Cards. I looked and looked, and eventually I found a couple of pictures and a description of the black frame with yellow border in the 1969 Nabisco Team Flakes page of the book. This was what research was like in the old days.
The Great Book of Baseball Cards.
The Great Book on the 1969 Nabisco Team Flakes set.
