Gary Cieradkowski has designed and illustrated a baseball card for Dave Brown, which he has graciously allowed me to post. He is a fantastic artist—check out his site, where you can see more of his baseball-related work, including a Camden Yards logo and Orioles season tickets. He’s also writing a book on the Baltimore Elite Giants. (I am guessing he is from Baltimore.)
This may look like an April Fool’s joke, but it isn’t. This cartoon really did appear in the Indianapolis Freeman on May 23, 1914. The only context I can provide is that the Indianapolis A. B. C.’s had just been taken over by C. I. Taylor, who brought along his brothers and other players from the West Baden Sprudels to remake the A. B. C.’s into a powerhouse on the black and independent baseball circuits.
The same issue contains box scores for two recent victories by the A. B. C.’s over the Sprudels, so I suppose the cartoon might refer to Taylor beating up on his old team. Other than that, I’m clueless.
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...by the Scottish cartoonist Tom Gauld:
Here, courtesy of the Padrón family, is an article from a Grand Rapids newspaper, circa 1959 or 1960, about Juan Padrón, with some very intriguing information about his career.
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Thanks to Nancy Padrón and her son Andre for a lot of great materials about their uncle (great uncle and great-great uncle), which I’ll be posting the next couple of days.
From the Pittsburgh Courier, October 11, 1924:
Sayonara Home Run! The Art of the Japanese Baseball Card
By John Gall and Gary Engel (Chronicle Books)
This is a truly beautiful book that introduces a world of baseball art only rarely glimpsed in the United States. Japanese baseball cards mostly evolved out of cards manufactured for a children’s game called menko (the name has become attached to the cards themselves, also). Colorful, sometimes crude, other times finely detailed and nuanced, drawn in styles ranging from the cartoonish to the realistic, these cards came in different sizes and shapes (some are round, some in the shapes of airplanes, some are masks). Cards from the pre-World War II era and from the 1950s and 60s evoke a technicolor alternate universe of baseball superheroes; after that, Japanese cards unfortunately began to imitate their blander American counterparts.
Most pre-war cards seem to have depicted the popular university teams like Waseda and Keio, but there were amateur clubs, too, like the Mita Club, a team made up of Keio University graduates (shown in the round menko below). In 1922 Mita won a famous 9 to 3 victory over a touring team of American professionals that included Casey Stengel, George Kelly, Luke Sewell, and Waite Hoyt on the mound. Lefthander Michimaro Ono gave up only five hits for Mita, and his battery mate Zensuke Shimada hit a key home run off Hoyt to seal the victory.
On the subject of Japanese baseball: I’m always interested in origins and obscure prehistories, so I was interested to discover (not in this book, actually) that professional baseball in Japan actually predates the 1934 founding of the team that became the Yomiuri Giants. I scoured the paltry information on Japanese baseball history available in English on the web, and came up with the following, combining several different sources:
In 1920, Kiyoshi Oshikawa founded the Nihon Undo Kyokai, a.k.a. Shibaura Undo Kyokai (Shibaura Association), with the help of Atsushi Kono, a former pitcher at Waseda University who had captained that team on a tour of the U.S. in 1905. (Shibaura is a district in Tokyo.) By 1921, according to one source, there were four professional clubs in Japan. I’ve only found the name of one other professional club for certain, Tensho Yakyudan. Apparently most of them disbanded in the aftermath of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, the Shibaura club’s ballpark being confiscated by the government to use for relief efforts. After this, the club moved to the Takarazuka prefecture in the west, where it became the Takarazuka Undo Kyokai. It lasted until 1929, when it disbanded due to the Depression. One source says there was actually a professional league that played, off and on, from 1920 to 1929.
Some useful links:
Thanks!
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