Rambo, Walkie and getting that Autograph

 

I found myself thinking about autographs the other day.

            Which was nice.

            I’m currently reading books about the Marquis de Sade (if you don’t know him, look him up), so it was good to stray from some of the lascivious images and ideas that have been jammed into my head lately, and back into something a touch more innocent.

            Autographs.

            I’m not a current autograph collector, although I have some from Hobby boxes I’ve bought. At least not as an adult, I’m not. That’s not a judgment or some kind of superior statement. I know a good many autograph collectors in The Hobby, and I think it’s great. I love seeing their returns (especially if its of the Pittsburgh Pirates variety) and I enjoy seeing collectors enjoy, well, their Hobby. That’s what we do it for…despite what my Twitter feed looks like on certain days.

            ENJOYMENT.

            I just don’t seek autographs out.

            There’s always been a timidity there for me. It started when I was a kid in Pittsburgh. Back then, I really wanted autographs. Even though we always sat in Peanut Heaven, the ushers at Three Rivers Stadium allowed us kids to come down the box seats before the game, and hang around waiting for players to sign autographs after they were done warming up. A good many did back then. Even Barry Bonds did it from time to time, although I could never get my kid arm deep into that kind of fray to pull his autograph. I wasn’t bold enough to push my way into the crowd.

            We got some of our autographs waiting for the players after the game. Again, I wasn’t great at that either. When a player came out of the gate and into the parking lot, I was usually too afraid to approach him along with the shouting hoard, and shove my baseballs, cards, etc at him. Timidity can be a strong feeling. Or maybe I was too self-aware. Too worried that said player would be a jerk to me.

            And no one wants to find out that your hero is an asshole.

            The one I remember was getting an autograph from Pirates reliever Bill Landrum on the game day program.

            Of course, I don’t have it anymore.

            The only autographs that I have from my youth, are these.

            The Aaron I got at a card show in the early 90s and it came with a certificate of authenticity. I really wish that I’d had the chance to meet Mr. Aaron.

            The Stargell…I got that in person at the Monroeville Mall. I don’t know the why or reason, but he was at the mall signing autographs in the middle of the day. Willie Stargell. The man, the myth, the legend. And none of us knew he was going to be there that day. It was happenstance. The finest of coincidence that Pops Stargell and myself were at the Monroeville Mall on the same date and same time. Whatever walking around money I had that day…it went to a National League issue baseball that I bought at Keonig Sports, and promptly raced back to have Willie sign on the sweet spot.

            I’ve lost a lot of ephemera from my youth.

            The Stargell ball?

            I’m taking it with me when I go.

            Getting back to my thoughts on autographs, I suppose what I was really thinking about was firsts. The first time I’d ever gotten a player’s autograph. That turned my thoughts to these guys.

            I’m sure a good many of you know Bob Walk. Pitched in the 1981 Word Series, was a big part of those early 90s Pirates NL Eastern Division Championships. Still broadcasts for the Pittsburgh Pirates during home games.

Walkie is a favorite of mine

The other guy, Mike Diaz. He played parts of three seasons with the Pirates (1986-1988). Diaz was one of those slugging bench guys. Good to slug 12-20 home runs a year, and could play the outfield, first base, and made a pretty decent third-string catcher.

He was a bit of a cult hero in Pittsburgh.

We called him Rambo because of his build and supposed (I still don't see it) resemblance to Sylvester Stallone.

He even had his own charity poster.

It is my belief that Bob Walk and Mike Diaz were the first autographs that I ever got as a kid.

You see, in Pittsburgh (and maybe this happened where you were from) we used to have these youth baseball clinics hosted by the Pirates. They took place at youth ballparks in the city and suburbs during the day before a Pirates game, or when they had a day off. The clinics usually had someone from the pitching staff, a position player, and a coach, giving instruction on pitching, hitting, and baserunning fundamentals. Then there was an autograph session at the end. Nothing heavy. Just something fun for the kids and a way to connect the Pittsburgh Baseball Club to its city, and get up close and personal with a couple of players.

The clinic I went to was hosted by Bob Walk, Mike ‘Rambo” Diaz and coach Rich Donnelly.

The autos would’ve been on Pirates promotional material that looked as such.

Of course, I no longer have them.

But I do have a Bob Walk autograph today.

My brother pulled it out of a box of Archives a few years back, and was kind enough to send it to this fan.

Be cool to get a Mike Diaz autograph too.  The most I was able to find on him is that he’s a retired coach living in Hawaii.

Throughout my childhood and into my late teens, I got to collect a lot of autographs from card shows and from working as a sales clerk at the Pirates Clubhouse store. I’ve stood before Willie Mays. I’ve meet so many Pirates from autograph sessions. I’ve had Andy Van Slyke destroy my image of Pittsburgh Pirates unity. Bobby Bonilla talk about himself in third person. Barry Bonds NOT sign on the sweet spot. If I’m honest, I’ll say the kindest former player that I ever got an autograph from was Brooks Robinson. Even my old man was liking a gushing child in front of him.

And all of those autographs are lost to history.

One last anecdote.

It seems I’ve carried some of my timidity into adulthood. About a decade ago, I was home visiting in Pittsburgh and we went to a Pirates game. There were all of these festivities going on along Federal Street outside of PNC Park. Kiddie rides, food stands, that kind of thing. It was in this chaos that I noticed a man walk outside of a door at the ballpark and just kind of stand there taking it all in. It took me a second to realize that it was Bob Walk. Walkie himself! The way I wanted to grab whatever shard of paper that I had, run over, get his autograph, and tell him how he was my favorite Pitcher and how much I loved those teams in the late 80s/early 90s…was overwhelming.

So was my fear that my hero would turn out to be an asshole.

And I didn’t cross that street.

Thanks for reading! Happy Collecting! Happy AUTOGRAPH collecting!

 

GREETINGS FROM…RICKWOOD FIELD by Russell Steur

GREETINGS FROM…RICKWOOD FIELD

By Russell Streur

 

 

Rickwood Field is one of the old ones.  Older than Wrigley.  Older than Fenway.  Old enough that Connie Mack, the grand old man of the game himself, paced off the infield in the Alabama spring of 1910 with a young Birmingham industrialist, Allen Harvey Woodward.

 

Woodward, born in 1876 in Wheeling, West Virginia, was the son of an iron company magnate.  Somewhere along the line, the younger Woodward acquired the nickname Rick and a passion for the game of baseball.  The father tolerated the nickname but disapproved of the game, especially when his son devoted more study behind the plate as the catcher on the University of the South’s baseball team than to his textbooks.  The elder Woodward yanked his son off the collegiate diamond and enrolled him at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  Rick survived the northern exile and the subsequent induction into the family business with his love for the game intact.  In 1909, at the age of 33, he purchased a controlling interest in Birmingham’s entry in the Southern Association, the Coal Barons.

 

The team had possibilities; their diamond, known with more accuracy than affection as the Slag Pile, did not.  Woodward’s first job was to build a home for his club.  He aimed for nothing less than to construct the finest park in the South.  Woodward didn’t waste any time, visiting Philadelphia’s Shibe Park in early 1910 and extracting a promise from Mack to help design the place.  Mack kept a promise to visit Birmingham shortly before the major league season began.

 

Blueprints for the stadium were completed a few days after Mack and Woodward walked the grounds.  The design placed the left field line 470 feet from home plate, center at 500 feet, and the right field line at 335 feet.  The outfield dimensions were not unusual for the dead ball era of the game.  Home runs were disdained at the time; doubles and triples were considered more exciting.  The 90 feet behind home plate to the grandstands was a different matter.  One catcher complained he needed a taxi to chase down a wild pitch.  Construction was completed within months and the steel and concrete stadium opened on August 10, 1910, with an estimated crowd of 10,000 fans in attendance.

 

 

Rickwood Field, Opening Day 1910.

 

 

Negro League baseball came to Rickwood before the decade was out.  A Labor Day doubleheader in 1919 between the Birmingham Black Barons and the Montgomery Grey Sox drew a crowd of 12,000.  The Black Barons club was a charter member when the Negro Southern League was founded the following year. 

 

Rotating between the Southern League and the Negro National and American Leagues, the Black Barons played at Rickwood for forty years. 

 

The team found its first success in 1927 behind the right arm of a youngster named Satchel Paige.  A year earlier, after a semi-pro stint with the Mobile Tigers, Paige had broken into the full-time game with the Chattanooga Black Lookouts, earning a salary of $50 a month.  The legendary hurler wasn’t a pitcher yet, just a thrower.  The Black Barons saw something the Lookouts didn’t and hired him away at a cost of $250 a month.  

 

It took time for Paige to find some control on the mound.  Jelly Gardner of the Chicago American Giants described facing Paige in those early days.  “One time [the ball came} at you, one time behind you, the next time at your feet. . . You had to be an acrobat to hit against him.”

 

Paige learned enough on the mound to lead the Barons into the 1927 Negro National League playoffs against the Chicago American Giants.  The Windy City team dispatched the Barons in a four-game sweep.

 

By the time he left the Barons in 1930, Paige was a star.

 

The Black Barons returned to prominence in the 1940s, winning wartime pennants in the Negro American League in 1943 and 1944, and again in 1948 with a teenage Willie Mays taking the first steps on his journey to Cooperstown.

 

Black Barons, The Negro League Baseball Players Association, Lackawanna County Stadium Give-Away, 1992.  Lester Lockett Card 3, Tommy Sampson Card 15, Artie Wilson Card 9.  

 

Third baseman Lester Lockett played in three East West All Star games and batted a league leading .408 in 1943.  Tommy Sampson was a four-time all-star from 1940 through 1943.  His career was cut short in 1945 when both of his legs were broken in an automobile accident.  Shortstop Artie Wilson played in four East West All Star games and won the Negro American League batting title in 1948 with a .402 average.  The next year, Wilson became the first Black player on the roster of the Oakland Oaks of the Pacific Coast League.  He batted .348 to win the league’s batting crown and also led the league with 51 stolen bases.

 

The white Barons played in the Southern Association from the organization’s beginning in 1901 for sixty seasons.   Along the way, they captured 10 pennants.

 

The Southern Association was no backwater.  Tobacco cards featured many players from the league.  Ted Breitenstein (left) tossed a no-hitter in his first major league start, with the St. Louis Browns in 1891, and repeated the feat seven seasons later with the Cincinnati Reds.  A three-time 20-game winner (and once a 30-game loser) in the majors, the pitcher had enough left in his arm to win 21 games with the New Orleans Pelicans in 1905 and 1906.

 

Hub Perdue (center) notched a 12-2 record for New Orleans in the war-shortened 1918 season and won the ERA title the following season with 1.56 mark in a 17-2 campaign. Courtesy of Grantland Rice, Perdue owns one of the most delightful monikers in the history of the game, The Gallatin Squash—Gallatin for his home in Tennessee, and Squash for reporting out-of-shape to training camp one spring.   Perdue reveled in the attention. 

 

The Barons were represented by Carlton Molesworth (right), an All-Star centerfielder for the pennant winning Barons in 1906 who later managed the club to pennants in 1912 and 1914.

 

While Black and white teams shared the field at Rickwood, fans were strictly segregated.  Separated by chicken wire from the rest of the seats, the right field bleachers were reserved for Black fans during white contests.  Arrangements were reversed when the Black Barons played.

 

Suffering from the fatal effects of major league integration, the Negro American League dissolved after the 1960 season. 

 

The Southern Association expired of racial animosity the following year, when segregation laws in Birmingham and New Orleans prohibited teams with Black players from taking the field.

 

The vision of Blacks and whites playing together on city sports fields had long terrified Birmingham’s bigoted leaders. 

 

Originally enacted in 1944, Section 597 of Birmingham’s City Code explicitly banned Blacks and whites from playing together in games of cards, dice, dominoes or checkers.  The act was amended in 1950 to extend the ban to “baseball, softball, football, basketball or similar games” as well.  Owners and operators who allowed Blacks and whites to play together were subject to fines, imprisonment or injunction.

 

In the fall of 1961, a federal court declared that Birmingham’s segregation of parks, playgrounds and golf courses was unconstitutional.  In response, City Mayor Art Hanes and Police Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor ordered all of Birmingham’s parks, swimming pools and other places of public recreation to close.   The order applied to Rickwood Field.  Ironically, Connor had been a radio announcer for the white Barons in the 1930s before embarking on a political career increasingly based on racial hatred and police brutality.  Under the reasoning that it was better for nobody to have a picnic lunch at a city park than for Blacks and whites to mingle on a baseball diamond, the closure remained in effect for two years. 

 

The ban would have lasted longer, except the voters of Birmingham chose otherwise.  Despite the endorsement of Governor George C. Wallace, Connor lost a run for mayor in April of 1963 to a less defiant opponent of integration.  A month later, city and civil rights leaders agreed on a plan to desegregate lunch counters, fitting rooms and other facilities at downtown department stores, to improve hiring and promotion of black employees, and to release still-jailed civil rights protestors.  But Ku Klux Klan bombings on Black churches and homes tolerated under Connor’s watch continued, including the horrific attack on the 16th Street Baptist Church which killed four young girls preparing for Sunday services on September 15, 1963.  Other murders and bombings received less national publicity. 

 

Racial tensions still ran high when Charlie Finley brought the Barons back to Rickwood Field in 1964 as a member of the integrated South Atlantic League.  Section 597 remained on the books but was ignored by city, team and league.  

 

Blue Moon Odom (Topps 1967, Card 282), Bert Campaneris (Topps 1969, Card 423) and Tommie Reynolds (Topps 1965, Card 333) were all members of the groundbreaking 1964 Birmingham A’s.

 

Poor attendance forced the Barons off the field after the 1965 season.  Rebranded as the A’s, the team returned in 1967 before moving up the road to Chattanooga after the 1975 season.  The Barons name returned to Rickwood in 1980 when Birmingham poached the Rebels from Montgomery.  Age finally caught up to the stadium and the Barons moved to a suburban park in 1988.  There, the Rickwood story might have ended.  Instead, no one saw how to make a dollar by tearing the place down, and plenty of fans wanted to keep the place standing. 

 

In 1992, civic leaders and businessmen including Rick Woodward’s grandson began managing the filed as a living baseball museum under the name Friends of Rickwood.  Millions of dollars spent for maintenance and restoration through the years have allowed the park to be used for high school and college games, baseball camps, special exhibitions and the Rickwood Classic, when the Barons return to the field for a festive turn-back-the-clock game.

 

 

All of which is why, now, in the early Southern spring, a fan of the game can walk past the ticket windows beneath the park’s Spanish Mission facade, up 2^nd Avenue West, through a third base gate, and watch the Miles College Golden Bears take on the Albany State University Golden Rams in a Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference tilt between HBCU schools. 

 

And there, beneath the enormous cantilevered light standards first erected when Franklin Roosevelt was President and with the freshly-painted Budweiser and elegantly-scripted Tutwiler Hotel signs on the outfield walls, the visitor can hear the long strides of every runner on the basepaths, a century of echoes,  and a Saturday afternoon at the country’s oldest ballpark brings something new to the game.

 

 

Tuff Stuff Magazine, Classic Baseball Stadiums, Card 30 (August 1992)

 

 

Photographs by the author.  All other images from the author’s collections.   

 

1988 Topps Big Baseball: Part 2

 

I remember first seeing them in big round bins near the cash register at G.C. Murphy’s in the Monroeville Mall.

            Or at least that’s how I remember it.

            Topps Big Baseball, thrown into the bins with an assortment of other baseball card packs. All individually labeled with a price tag.

            (God, what unfortunately part-timer, high school kid got stuck with that job).

            Shiny cellophane packages gleaming off the discount department store’s lights. The word BIG emblazoned in a bright color. Cellophane wrappers! I know, I know, Topps had messed with using cellophane wrappers in their 1986 and 1987 Leaders release (and probably something else I’m missing) …but those cards were mini. I’ve never been into mini cards in The Hobby. Just not my style to go mini. Or micro. I was a kid in the 1980s, who wanted cards from the 1970s, who felt like he made the score of a lifetime when he got cards from the 1960s…who…daydreamed cards from the 1950s.

            The 1950s made their cards BIG.

            At least for a few years.

            I wanted cards that looked like that.

            That I could afford.

            It stands to reason that me and my pocket change/couch change/paper route change/whatever mall walking around money that I had on me that day…we were going to be taking a chance on Topps Big Baseball.

            And the set didn’t disappoint.

            It’s that perfect blend of 1950s nostalgia meets 1980s flash. Something the folks in Hollywood had been trying to push on us for almost the whole decade back then. I know I’ve soured on Heritage and kind of consider them to be imitative rather than a unique product, despite the number of inserts that end up in the sets. And maybe a more skeptical eye, one whose childhood memories aren’t seeped into the product, would look at Topps Big Baseball (at least the 1988 Set, the less said about 1989 and, especially 1990, the better) as being imitative as well.

            But I’d beg to differ, regardless of my bias.

            I know that Topps today are the standard bearer of stoking our baseball card nostalgia, but back then it still felt (hindsight being 20/20) that they were throwing product out there to see what stuck. At least by the time the Junk Wax Era was in full steam, they were. And despite its winks at the 1950s, Topps Big Baseball feel very much of its era.

            At least the front of the cards do.

            Splashy borders.

            That colorful paint splatter of a player’s name.

            More Sonny Crockett than Ralph Kramden.

            If I remember correctly, in 1988, Topps Big Baseball was marketed as being for kids, in the way they rather sheepishly did with Opening Day and do with Big League. If that’s the case then, in 1988, that’s pretty telling for where The Hobby was headed. That there was no longer the assumption that kids were the primary collectors of base sports cards. That maybe older collectors were taking over that market. That Topps needed to release a product to be specifically marketed to children.

            I mean, Upper Deck would be released the following year.

            And we all know where The Hobby headed after that.

            But 1988 Topps Big Baseball is a fun set to collect.

            It’s also awkward set.

            First, there’s the size. Not your standard (Since 1957 anyway) 2 ½ x 3 ½ inches, Topps Big Baseball measures 2 5/8 x 3 ¾. In 1988, a kid my age had a hard enough time finding card sleeves and binder sheets that I could put my standard cards in, let alone an oversized product that hadn’t been produced in size for about thirty-two years. The set is parsed strangely too. It’s the first set that I ever remember coming out in series form. Series 1 (#1-88). Series 2 (#89-176). Series 3 (#177-264). Why not make it a 300-card set and have the series go #1-100, #101-200, and #201-300? I guess you’d have to ask guys working in corporate in the late 1980s, and seek out your answers searching for the ghost of Sy Berger.

            Tragedy aside, I managed to get ahold of a box of Series 3 1988 Topps Big Baseball cards. And while it’s the last series in the set, Topps still held back a little bit of star power to make it worth the purchase.

            Even some rookies you might''ve been chasing.

             And the boxes are still very reasonably priced. I’ve seen them anywhere from $14.95 a wax box to $20 per box. And if you’re buying a box, you’re pretty much putting a set together, considering how few cards there are per series, and Topps penchant for including a lot of doubles back in the 1980s.

            I know I’m putting a set together.

            …provided my mail doesn’t get stolen again.

 

Thanks for Reading! Happy Collecting!

Next Friday: Russell Streur is going to be back…and he’s taking us to Rickwood Field. And if you don’t know what that is, stop by on May 12^th to find out.