#1 At Goudey

When you were a kid and bought your first pack of baseball cards when they came out for that next season, one of the things that struck you was the #1 card. Who would win the honor of being the first in the deck for this coming season?

Too often it was a struggle getting the #1 card as pack after pack contained journeymen players. Trades were hard to come by unless you had a Cub fan next door. They would trade for a beloved Cubbie. Lucky us. Bye bye,Dee Fondy. Hello Jackie robinson.

Historically, baseball sets belonged to the top players in the game. For instance, in 1940, the Play Ball set had Joe DiMaggio as the #1 card. In 1941, the famed pastel Play Ball set produced Eddie Miller of the Boston Braves as the #1 card. An All-Star in 1940 & 1941, he had a 276 batting average with 79 RBIs for the Bees the previous year. In 1943, the M.P. & Co. put out a set with Hall of Famer, Jimmy Foxx as the #1 card.

After the war, Leaf Candy Company of Chicago came out with a set (marked on the back of some of the cards as printed in 1948 but were produced jun 1949. It is marked as the 1948 Leaf set. It is an iconic set and is the first color printed baseball card set after World War II. The #1 card was Joe DiMaggio. This set had more stars than MGM, including the then recently deceased Babe Ruth as the #2 card. Bowman’s 1948 set had Bob Elliott of the Boston Braves as #1 after a .313 batting average and driving in 113 runs in 1947. In 1949, Vern Bickford gained the #1 position after a great rookie season and became the first pitcher to be so honored after winning 11 games for the National League Champion Boston Braves. In 1950, Mel Parnell, a sensational 25 game winner the year before for the Boston Red Sox, was #1 on the Bowman set. In 1951, Whitey Ford, with his rookie card, was #1 on the Bowman set that year. On the initial Topps 1951 Red Back set, his battery mate, Yogi Berra was the #1 card while on the Blue Back set, Eddie Yost of the Washiongton Senators was on the #1 card. In 1952 Bowman honored Yogi while Andy Pafko was #1 on the famed 1952 Topps series while Jackie Robinson was #1 on the 1953 Topps edition. Over at Bowman, they put out two sets. On the 1953 Black & White set, Cincinnati Redlegs great, Gus Bell, who hit .300 that season was #1 and on the 1953 Color set, Davey Williams, an All-Star second baseman that season was the #1 card. It is one of the most interesting cards ever produced as he is in a fielding position, eyes off the ball in front of him, with an empty Polo Grounds stands behind him. while Phil Rizzuto of the New York Yankees was #1 on the Bowman set, Ted Williams grabbed the #1 card in the 1954 Topps collection. In the 1955 and last of the great Bowman sets, Hoyt Wilhelm, the New York Giants pitcher who had a great 2.11 ERA in 1954 Championship season, held the honor of being the #1 card in the final Bowman baseball set. The 1955 Topps set was led off with Dusty Rhodes, the hero of the 1954 World Series for the Giants. You  get the idea. It was usually one of the stars of the game during the previous season.

But in the ‘modern’ era of baseball, the first hereat set that landed smack in the middle of the Great Depression, was the 1933 Goudey baseball set. Enos Goudey was proclaimed as the ‘Penney Gum King In America’ by none other than William Wrigley, Jr. In 1933, the Goudey Gum Company brought out the very first baseball card set with a stick of gum included in every pack. This set produced one of the greatest baseball cards of all-time,  #106 Napoleon Lajoie. It actually wasn’t in the original set but was a premium that you had to get through the mail after the season. This 240 card set is considered one of the Big Three in the history of baseball cards along with the famed T206 (Honus Wagner card) and the 1952 set (Mickey Mantle’s famed #311).

So who was honored as the #1 card on arguably the #1 set in modern baseball? It as a basketball and baseball star, Benny Bengough of the St. Louis Browns. Benny Bengough? St. Louis Browns? Born in Niagara Falls, NY, Bengough attended Niagara University. In 1923 he joined the New York Yankees and played with them in three World Series before Bill Dickey joined the team. Benny was released in 1930 and joined the Milwaukee Brewers of the American Association (Triple A franchise of the Boston Braves). In 1931, he was bought by the St. Louis Browns and played with them until his last major league game on September 24, 1932. He batted .252 in his Big League career and did not hit a single home run. So why was Benny Bengough of the St. Louis Browns the #1 card on the #1baseball card set in modern baseball?

He was one of Babe Ruth’s best friends on and off the field. One of the best defensive catchers in the game, he had a fielding percentage of .988 for his career 10 points above the average catcher in that era. But it was his friendship with one of the games greets players…the man who brought baseball out of the darkest period in its existence, the Black Sox scandal of 1919.

Benny Bengough. #1 at Goudey, the first of baseball cards in the modern era.

Play Ball!

The Pasteboard Era of Legendary Charlie Silvera

It was a nice day. Sun was shining. Temperature wasn’t too bad. I was examining the yard when a neighbor asked if I would come over to their house in a day or two to look at some baseball cards he and his wife had collected. The neighbor was wondering what to do with them and how to sell them. As one who has collected the ‘poor man’s stock market’ material for years, I said I would. The day came and I dropped over.

When I sat down and began taking them out of their containers, the anxious rush of childhood enveloped me once again, full of anticipation that the next card would be that of the ‘big one’, Mickey himself. Naturally I want through the 1952 Topps first. And there it was.

The one card that nobody ever wanted to see in their pack, the pack that cost them a nickel which was everything in the world at that time, was that of one Charles Anthony Ryan Silvera, better know as Charlie Silvera. On this card was a brilliant yellow background behind the portrait of the back up catcher for Yogi Berra of the famed New York Yankees. For much of that summer of my youth, to avoid the Silvera card was the task. Every pack that was bought would be carefully peeled away at the back, slowly removing the folded wax paper wrapper to make sure we did not tear the wrapper, damage any of the cards and get the flat wide stick of sugary bubble gum and make sure it didn’t leave a stain on the card.

Then we would look at the first card.

Invariably it would be someone whom few had ever heard about except for his family and friends. This is where Charlie Silvera usually came into our lives. During the course of a year you could end up with five, six or seven Charlie Silvera’s which had absolutely no value in ‘kiddom’. You could only hope that there was a newbie who would move into the neighborhood and not know a thing about the value of these pasteboard wonders. Or, you hoped that a kid would come along and want to trade a card, any card, for a Silvera which he would usually put in the spokes of his bike, secured by a clothes pin to the front bike fork, and create a loud mechanical sound that represented a mad drummer banging at a  faster and faster rhythm against a metal drum the faster the kid peddled his bike.

Silvera was omnipresent. Two kids could go to the corner store and buy two packs of Topps. When they came out and unwrapped their packs, you had a very good chance of each pulling the dreaded Silvera yellow background card from their packs. Ugh……..

Silvera killed us that summer. Topps must have printed 10 Silvera’s for every star player card.

But it wasn’t the first summer he had done that. The 1950 Bowman packs contained the first sighting of Charlie Silvera. Card #96 was his true rookie card. In the 1951 Bowman set, he was missing. But the 1952 Bowman set contained a horizontal beauty. On #197, there he was in a throwing position, ball in his right hand cocked and ready to throw while his big pillow glove on his left hand sighted the way. With his cap on backwards and a stern, square-jawed portrait, it is one of the better looking cards of that era. But, it was a Charlie Silvera card and not that of Mickey, or Yogi or Whitey or ‘The Scooter’, ‘Willie’ or ‘Duke’.

That same year he made his way into one of the two greatest baseball card sets of all time…the 1952 Topps. (Along with the ’52 Topps, the 1957 Topps is one of the most popular Topps sets ever produced.) In fact, he was in every early Topps set from 1952 (#168), 1953 (#242), 1954 (#96), 1955 (188) to 1957 (#255) with the exception of the 1956 set.

Charlie Silvera played for part of 10 season in the Major Leagues hitting .282. However, he only played in 227 games. But he has two things he can tell his grandchildren: he hit one home run. And, although he was on six World Series teams, he only played in the 1949 classic and faced Preacher Roe of the Brooklyn Dodgers twice without a hit. But, he played in the Classic.

So there I was, once again flipping through memories of youthful dreams past, spouting off various statistics to my neighbors about the cards that I knew so well as I was flipping them over and WHAM!

There it was again, Charlie Silvera’s 1957 card, his last. Will this dreaded curse of Silvera never end?

It was a different place in a different time. Here’s to you, Charlie. Hope today in San Francisco you experience nothing but pleasure. I can only say that now. When I came across your image in those glorious days on the front steps of Lincoln Avenue unwrapping that treasured pack of baseball cards with Snookie, my next door baseball friend, seeing you was a dreaded reminder that we were all another pack away from collecting a quiniela of Silvera cards.

Play Ball!