Yearbooks : This Other Collecting Life

 

I’m never sure how far I really want to go into the realm of other sports ephemera.

            I think I’ve established here that I’m not much of an autograph guy. Although a few of you on Twitter showing of autos from old Pirates have got me thinking about changing my ways.

            I have two signed balls.

            They’re rather important to me.

            I don’t keep an unsigned game-used ball around. I don’t keep bats, batting gloves, jerseys, game worn anything etc.

            I’ve been cards and strictly cards since getting back into collecting in 2019.

            But….

            …yearbooks.

             Let me back up a little bit. Two things happened over the last year or so that really got me into collecting yearbooks, specifically Pittsburgh Pirates yearbooks.

            One. I went home to Pittsburgh and my mom dumped these on me.

            I’m missing 1991 (Bobby Bonilla’s last with the Pirates), but that pretty much covered my yearbook collection from 1987-1992, which was the last year that I think I bought a yearbook at a game. From 1985 on, buying a yearbook at the first Pirates game of the year had been a tradition for me. I loved the big glossy photos of the players. The trivia. The stats. Having the season schedule available to me (no internet and finding pocket ones before attending my first game was pretty hard to do unless I hung around beer distributors). As a kid, having the promotional schedule available to me was a big deal.

            I even liked all of the beer ads.

            The 1987 yearbook is a favorite of mine. The franchise turned 100 in 1987, and that was the focus of the season. The yearbook itself has a nice gatefold cover and about thirty pages dedicated to Pittsburgh Pirates history.

            There’re even a few pages on the history of the team’s uniforms.

            For me, the 1987 season was the beginning of things getting better for the Pirates. The 1987 team contained the nucleus for the teams that would go on to win three consecutive NL East Pennants.

            You know, these guys.

            So, having these yearbooks in my possession again was…well, it was pretty damned cool. Even though I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do with them.

            Then the second things happened.

            A buddy of mine, the poet Scott Silsbe, sent me these in the mail.

    

        Scott knows that I collect. He sometimes sends me Facebook messages featuring some of his old card collection. I guess he thought a guy like me would enjoy these bits of 1970s ephemera.

            And boy do I!

            The 1973 Pirates yearbook is obviously a bittersweet keepsake. It’s the first seasonal yearbook released after Roberto Clemente died. There’s a small tribute to him in the beginning of the book.

            I’m either guessing we didn’t make a bigger deal of things back then, or else the yearbook was pretty well put together by the time his plane crashed on December 31, 1972. In fact, Clemente is featured in action at the top of the cover of the yearbook. In tribute? Or, again, because the cover had been designed months before his tragic death. The scorecard is from 1972. I know this is a post about yearbooks, and I’m not ready to go down the rabbit hole of collecting scorecards, but this one is pretty damned special considering it is from the 1972 season. Roberto Clemente’s last.

            The scorecard was even filled in.

            While this was another pastime for my brother, my old man, and I at Pirates games, I haven’t kept a scorecard in decades. And I no longer remember how.  But I know that Willie Stargell had a pretty crappy game that day.

            Taking these two instances into account, I started thinking that it would be an interesting endeavor collecting Pirates yearbooks. Collecting sports ephemera is akin to collecting history. Or it actually is collecting history. It’s how I feel when I put sets together, or when I buy a bunch of Pirates team sets. History. And I like history. My non-fiction reading is infused with books on history. Mostly cultural or biography.  I just thought it would be fun to collect yearbooks.

            Over the Christmas holiday I was able to go to a few antique stores in the suburban Pittsburgh area. At one of them I came across a dealer selling baseball cards and other ephemera. He had two comic book boxes full of Pirates and Steelers yearbooks. I ended up grabbing some Pirates yearbook from the early to mid-1980s. 1981 to 1985 to be exact.

            One of the first things I did was open the 1982 yearbook.

            Because it is the last yearbook to feature Willie Stargell in it as a member of the Pittsburgh Pirates.

            Now, there’s some history for you.

            I never owned that yearbook. And the yearbooks from 1982-1984 were new to me as well. But when I went flipping through those comic book boxes, I was looking for one yearbook specifically. The one yearbook that started it all for me.

            The 1985 Pittsburgh Pirates yearbook.

            Sure, the 25^th anniversary celebration of the 1960 World Series was a nice addition.

            But, for me, the yearbook brough back another memory.

            These.

            Yes, the first yearbook I ever bought had a team set for the 1985 Pittsburgh Pirates. I was eleven back then and as nuts for cards as a kid could get. I might’ve bought the yearbook because of the cards. I can’t honestly remember. And I was so happy to see that the team set was still intact. It was obviously owned by an adult, because I know 11-year-old me went right home after that came and separated all of those cards from their perforation.

            Not too shabby for inserts circa 1985.

            The backs are a little bit plain.

            I always found the set interesting because it features a card for Tim Foli, one of the stars of the 1979 World Series team. 

            Tim was traded from the Pirates in winter 1981 for Brian Harper, a guy you Twins fans out there might remember. Foli was traded back to the Pirates before the 1985 season, but his second tenure with the team would be short lived. Foli only played in 19 games that year, batting .189, before he was released in June.

            This set is interesting too because it features my old buddy “Joggin’” George Hendrick. 

 

  George wasn’t very happy in Pittsburgh after his trade from St. Louis for, you guessed it, Brian Harper. I don’t blame Joggin’ George for being unhappy in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh was a miserable place to play ball in 1985. The team stunk. The baseball drug trails were going on. The last vestiges of the Fam-I-Lee wanted out. St. Louis ended up in the World Series in 1985. Not a good scene. But I liked this card because it was his first in Pirates uniform that I’d seen, and Hendrick always seemed like a solid player to me.

            As the season wore on, and it wore on, as the Pirates limped to a 57-104 record, Joggin’ George got his wish and was traded to the California  Angels along with disgruntled (rightfully so) former 20-game winner John Candelaria.

            But not before Topps immortalized Joggin’ George’s time in The Burgh with a card in their 1985 Topps Traded set.      

That said, the desire to perforate and binder that 1985 set still looms large in me almost forty years later.

 Thank for reading! Happy collecting!

NEXT FRIDAY:  Rickey