Gambo and T_Wil1 Photopack

[Amazin69]

From the same Mexico City game. RMY has no idea who this is; a note on the back of the photo (added later) calls him Cecil Jones, but no Cecil Jones entered OB until 1923. It's obviously not Fielder Jones, but perhaps was originally mislabeled such because Jones was the Hitless Wonders' manager.



(Once again, my usual treatments.)

ETA: That might be Fielder Jones sitting on the bench, though.

[Amazin69]

Again from RMY. Big Ed was also in Mexico City, wearing a big grin because, hey, you don't win the World Series every year.

(Especially if you're the White Sox, it eventuated.)



(De-browned and such, as usual.)

[RUKen]

Originally Posted by Amazin69

From the same Mexico City game. RMY has no idea who this is; a note on the back of the photo (added later) calls him Cecil Jones, but no Cecil Jones entered OB until 1923. It's obviously not Fielder Jones, but perhaps was originally mislabeled such because Jones was the Hitless Wonders' manager.

ETA: That might be Fielder Jones sitting on the bench, though.

Cecil Jones was on the trip to Mexico. He was the son of Fielder Jones, and was five or six years old at the time. I agree that the pictured gentleman is obviously not Cecil.

I've attached a roster of the traveling White Sox party in Mexico from the Chicago Inter Ocean, March 5th, 1907. I believe the player mislabeled as Cecil is actually his father, who was a right-handed thrower. A head shot from 1908 is attached along with a closeup from the RMY image. I think the person on the bench may be Lee Tannehill.

[Amazin69]

Ooh, cool. The head-on shots I saw of Fielder (including his St. Louis Terriers pic on Wikipedia and Chicago digital collection pic) seemed to show his ears protruding more, but I can't argue with the matching angle. Thanks!

Here are the last two RMY Mexico pics, from a different day. Hub Hart and Lee Quillin.



Had to work the sliders and tweak the contrast so that the shadows didn't obscure Quillin's features.

[Patsy Tebeau]

He was drafted by the A's in 2003 and traded to the Dodgers in late 2005 for Milton Bradley and Antonio Perez.

[Patsy Tebeau]

this picture is from the 1930s

[rlumpkin1@tampabay.rr.com]

Are there any known photos of Armstrong in a Devil Rays uni? He signed with them March 02, 1997. Thank you in advance.

[Patsy Tebeau]

Originally Posted by rlumpkin1@tampabay.rr.com

Are there any known photos of Armstrong in a Devil Rays uni? He signed with them March 02, 1997. Thank you in advance.

Well here is an attempt if nothing else

[rlumpkin1@tampabay.rr.com]

Originally Posted by Patsy Tebeau

Well here is an attempt if nothing else

Thank you.

[Amazin69]

RMY is rather full of it on this one; they claim that this is "the only image of Otis we have ever seen in the hobby", completely ignoring the multiple shots of Otis at Hilltop Park in New York from later in September of 1909 that tnfoto posted earlier in the thread.

Still, this picture (taken by the Cleveland Plain Dealer on September 2nd 1909, before the Naps went on their season-ending 24-game circuit of the other seven ballparks) is nice and is probably the only one of Otis in the Cleveland home uniform, so there's that.



(usual debrowning and tweaking and such)

[Patsy Tebeau]

I bet most people didn't know he was originally signed by the Mariners in 1992, so if you thought Big Papi in a Twins uniform was weird then you'll certainly think so about this one too.

[Terry D]

Well, you never can tell. Periodically I type in the name of a player I've been looking for for years, and what do you know, he comes up after all. Case in point: Kevin Blankenship, my most recent discovery. Blankenship was a right hander out of the University of Arizona. He was having a career best season at AA Greenville in 1988 (2.34 ERA, 127 K) when the pitching-short Braves called him up and gave him two starts. Blankenship didn't pitch badly (0-1, 3.38 ERA) but in September the Braves traded him and fellow hurler Kevin Coffman to the Cubs for catcher Jody Davis. Oops. Davis was a horrible bust for the Braves, while neither Coffman nor Blankenship ever got much of a shot in Chicago. Blankenship got into a grand total of eight major league games between 1988 and 1990, finishing with a career won-lost of 1-3 with a 4.59 ERA. Blankenship is not hard to find as a Cub, but the attached watermarked image is the first and so far only one I have seen of him in an Atlanta uniform. The shot comes from the Jim Rowe Archive courtesy of ebay selller bbcemporium.

[Merkle923]

Everybody knows the '62 Mets as the most infamous, if not literally, the worst team since the 1899 Spiders. But the '65 edition would've given them a run for their money.

If you look at their page at Baseball Reference, you'll notice the list and photos of the top 10 '65 Mets by WAR:

Johnny Lewis 2.5
Jack Fisher 2.2
Charley Smith 2.0
Ron Swoboda 1.6
Darrell Sutherland 1.2
Chris Cannizzaro 1.0
Frank Lary 0.9
Tug McGraw 0.8
Jim Hickman 0.7
Dennis Musgraves 0.6

Dennis...Musgraves? He was on the active Mets' roster for just 35 days, from July 6 to August 10, pitched 16 innings over five games, whiffed 11, had an 0.56 ERA, got one start - during which he blew out his elbow. The Mets had given him a $100,000 bonus after he starred at the University of Missouri. He pitched in their system through 1970, then with the Royals' farm at Omaha in '71 and he was done at 27.

And he was, by this measure, the tenth best player on the '65 Mets.

This begins a few more obscurities from that Brace collection I mentioned a few weeks ago. Musgraves is in the Fritsch One-Year Winners set, in a Topps pose shot in Spring Training 1966. In my various inspections of the old Topps Vault, Musgraves' file was missing, meaning Fritsch probably did not return it to Bill Haber at Topps (or Bill mis-filed it).

Regardless, there are only two color shots of him online: the OYW image, and from the TCMA '60s Sets (which were photos shot for Fleer as they tried to stock up in hopes of breaking the Topps monopoly in court). Here's Musgraves at Wrigley in '65 and unfortunately the owner decided to embellish the color on the "NY" on his hat, which offends purists like me but probably doesn't really subtract from the usefulness of the image.

[Merkle923]

I knew Bobby Cox well enough that we would sit on the Braves' bench at Shea and CitiField every time Atlanta came to town, and talk about almost everything but baseball. But he asked me once how long I'd been a fan and I made him laugh so loud he turned red by answering "Since December 7, 1967, the day of the history-making trade of Bob Tillman and Dale Roberts by the Yankees to the Braves for Bobby Cox."

Tillman came to the Yankees in August, 1967, as part of the swap of Elston Howard to backstop the Impossible Dream Red Sox to the pennant. He started just 15 games behind the plate for the Yankees then went to Atlanta in the Cox Swap.

Topps did get Tillman in a Yankee uniform (they even had chosen and prepared a nice shot of him, traditional Topps crouching/catching pose, for use on card 174 in 1968. Then came the trade and it was replaced by a hapless headshot from Tillman's years in Boston.

The Brace collection includes TWO shots of Tillman with the Yankees. They are attached here, as is a screen of an obscured version of the pulled Topps image inside its case - and I think this is the complete set of known color shots of this player with this team.

[Merkle923]

You could fill the internet with justifiable complaints about George Brace's photography but never about his comprehensiveness. The Topps photographic archive of 1956-90 is best compared to the ancient Library of Alexandria, but Topps always had at least two photographers in at least two different cities working all season (plus at every spring training camp).

Bill Short wound up pitching in just 73 games spread across six seasons but George managed to photograph him in each of his big league uniforms. In a couple of cases this was quite the feat. This is Short's itinerary between the day he broke in with the Yankees in April, 1960:

1960: Richmond (Until April 23), Yankees (April 23-June 4), back to Richmond with elbow woes (June 5-July 30), Yankees (July 31-August 12), back to Richmond

1961: Richmond, and disabled list, all season. To the Orioles in the Rule V Draft

1962: Orioles (April 15-May 6), Rochester (balance of season)

1963, 1964, 1965: Rochester

1966: Rochester (Until June 30), Orioles (July 1-August 15) including a six-hit shutout over the Twins, sold to his childhood favorite team, Boston (August 15) appeared only eight times in relief, sold to the Pirates (October 7)

1967: Pirates (Until cutdown day, May 15), Columbus, sold to the Mets (October 2)

1968: Mets (his only full major league season), selected by the Reds in the Rule V Draft

1969: Indianapolis (to May 31), Reds (June 1-June 13), back to Indianapolis, retired at season's end.

George Brace got short in every uniform except the '62 Orioles whose first visit to Chicago was just after he was sent to Rochester. Those cameos with the O's, Red Sox, Pirates, Mets, and Cubs, all contained in the 35 months ending June 13, 1969? George got them all.

And Bill gave him the same look each time: as if he'd suddenly realized he'd left his car running in the players' parking lot at Comiskey.

[Merkle923]

The newly-obtained Brace collection is like this - it's full of every one of the stops of the pitcher Dave Roberts and things like Hank Fischer's 1965-1966 odyssey from Milwaukee to Atlanta to Cincinnati to Boston.

Anyway, here's the rest of Bill courtesy George Brace (and J.D. McCarthy, who got him in Spring Training 1972 as the Pirates' minor league pitching instructor. He looks more serene)

[Merkle923]

As I recall there is only one color image of former Rangers' slugger Pat Putnam in his swan song with the Twins in late August and September of 1984. Fleer got him somewhere on the road (Texas?)

Well, George Brace got him too. It was clearly a hazy September night and he backlight it. But it counts.

Brace also often took spring training trips and got Putnam at the Royals' camp in 1985 (he spent the year at Omaha) but his career was already over by then - as clearly his long curly hair days were.

[Merkle923]

One of the two Bob Millers on the '62 Mets (a third Bob Miller, a veteran of the Phillies, was also active in that era but the three of them were not all in the majors simultaneously).

I've never seen this nice portrait of him before.

The shot of him in a Giants uniform, I have seen before, but I still haven't found an explanation. This print in the Brace mega-collection just adds to the confusion. Miller was a Tigers' bonus baby, was still in their system until dealt to the Reds and finally to the Mets in '62, and then out of the game. No indication anywhere he was ever with the Giants.

The back of the SF print refers to "George doesn't remember what year this is from or what Miller was doing there" which suggests a certain official quality to this collection. My guess would be something pretty standard for the '60s. Teams often tried out free agents by having them pitch batting practice on the road. Miller, a lefty, was from Chicago. Its 2 + 2 but I can't confirm the 4.

[Merkle923]

These, I hope, will be a real pleasure for some collectors. I recall there were always hopes Topps Vault would produce one of these - the first draft choice of the expansion Mariners, but in his original Royals' uniform.

Well naturally Brace got him (but his files said he didn't). These were terribly backlit but I suppose they'll do the job for anybody hunting Ruppert Jones/Royals, given that a google search produces exactly zero color images!

[Merkle923]

Again seems to me shots of my late friend Farmio during his cameos with the 1978 Brewers and 1983 A's were much desired.

The Brewers shot is clearly not a Brace but was included in this collection and I'll be darned if I know why or who took it. The background is obviously Anaheim Stadium. Ed did not pitch there as a Brewer but the team played its next-to-last series there in September. The photo has also been taped to cardboard, hence the filmy qualities. I'm going to have a crack at repairing the original and will then re-post if I get anywhere.

But the A's shot, in his final stop, that's a Brace, certainly. And once again, not on any of his lists. The green jacket shot is at Comiskey from 1983; the hands-on-knee is from Spring Training 1984.

Ed knew as much about baseball history as any player or ex-player I ever knew, and delighted in the twists and turns of broadcasts (he was, after all, a singular and compelling White Sox announcer for decades) and photography. He would've loved these late, late discoveries.