u/Leading_Pay_4138

I was 7 years old when I opened a pack of Nu-Scoops Baseball Cards and read about Fred Merkle’s boner.
 
Obviously, the headline made no sense to me. For some reason I kept the card instead of losing it a schoolyard game of topsies, farthies, or flips
 
Merkle’s mistake was cruelly summarized in 1956 by his New York Times obituary headline - a 16-year career in a single sentence: "Fred Merkle, 68, Dies; Ball Player Eluded by Fame After '08 Blunder."
 
The "blunder" occurred on September 23, 1908. As a 19-year-old rookie for the New York Giants, Merkle ran toward the clubhouse instead of touching second base after a game-winning hit. The Chicago Cubs appealed, Merkle was called out, and the game ended in a tie. The Giants ultimately lost the pennant in a makeup game.
 
The public backlash was brutal, but Merkle’s mother, Anna Merkle, defended her son fiercely, publicly blaming the fans who swarmed the field and chaotic conditions for distracting him.
 
Decades later, Lawrence Ritter’s masterpiece oral history, The Glory of Their Times, contextually redeemed him. While Merkle himself famously refused to be interviewed—preferring to keep his silence—his peers spoke volumes on his behalf.
 
Teammates and opponents alike used their chapters to describe the play from their own perspectives, universally defending Merkle. They emphasized that his action was standard baseball practice at the time, completely exonerating him.
 
Their defense underscored Merkle's remarkable lack of bitterness. He never struck back at detractors, choosing instead to handle the lifelong ridicule with quiet grace and dignity.
 
The rest of his career proved his talent. He played 1,638 major league games, finishing with a .273 batting average, 1,580 hits, and six pennant-winning teams. Though baseball immortalized his mistake, Merkle remained a highly respected, resilient professional.
 
Following his retirement from baseball in 1926, Fred Merkle sought a quiet life away from the public eye, largely shunning sports journalists who only wanted to interrogate him about his infamous 1908 blunder.
 
His post-baseball life began with farming in Florida where Merkle used his baseball savings to buy a farm and successfully raise fruit crops in Daytona Beach.
 
The Great Depression hit Merkle hard, wiping out much of his savings. To support himself during these lean years, he took a job working on a local county bridge project funded by the Works Progress Administration (WPA).
 
After World War II, Merkle's financial fortunes rebounded. He became a partner in a manufacturing firm that produced balsa-wood fishing floats and artificial bait, operating a factory in Daytona Beach.
 
Away from work, Merkle became a highly proficient golfer.
 
While he avoided national reporters and major league events for decades, he couldn't completely walk away from the sport. He was a regular fixture at local Daytona Beach Islanders minor league games and routinely volunteered his time at youth baseball clinics.
 
Merkle finally stepped back into the major league spotlight in 1950, when he courageously attended a Giants old-timers' game. Expecting boos, he was instead moved to tears when the fans gave him a massive, therapeutic standing ovation, offering a late-life moment of closure before his death in 1956.
 
Merkle reminds all of us that we are never as bad as our worst moment.  

The Current Designs Extreme sea kayak measures 18 feet 10 inches in length, 21.25 inches in width, and 13.375 inches in depth.

Key Specifications
Length: 18′ 10″
Width: 21.25″
Depth: 13 3/8″
Weight: ~53 lbs (fiberglass)
Cockpit Size: 29″ x 16″
Total Volume: 95 gallons

Replaced it with

Stellar 16' Touring Kayak (S16 G2)
Length:
16’ 3
Beam:
21.9
Cockpit W:
17.3”
Cockpit L:
33.36
Weight: 39.6 lbs / c18 kg

I have a soft spot for odd-ball baseball stories. Charles "Gabby" Street secured his place in baseball lore through jaw-dropping stunts, defensive mastery, and a delightfully eccentric career.
 
On August 21, 1908, he stood at the base of the 555-foot Washington Monument to catch a baseball dropped from the very top. Clad in civilian clothes, Street endured fourteen failed attempts before cleanly snaring the fifteenth ball. The baseball accelerated to roughly 95 miles per hour, striking his glove with 300 pounds of force. The viral stunt—originally born from a mere $500 wager between fans—became so famous and inspired so many dangerous copycats that authorities permanently barred the monument's observation windows.
 
On the diamond, Street was defined by his elite defensive skills and a paradoxically quiet rookie demeanor, which earned him the ironic nickname "Gabby" before he eventually grew into a non-stop talker. These traits cemented his deep relationship with Hall of Fame pitcher Walter Johnson. As Johnson's preferred personal catcher for the Washington Senators, Street’s steady glove and sharp tactical mind perfectly complemented the "Big Train’s" legendary fastball. Their exceptional chemistry formed the backbone of Washington's defense.
 
Street’s career later took bizarre turns. While managing the St. Louis Cardinals in 1931, the 48-year-old inserted himself into a game for a single at-bat, striking out nearly twenty years after his previous Major League appearance.
 
 Decades later, this mix of talent and eccentricity earned him modern pop-culture immortality in the 1992 The Simpsons episode "Homer at the Bat". When Mr. Burns draws up a wish list of historical baseball ringers for his softball team, he confidently requests Street to be his catcher, forcing Smithers to awkwardly point out that the old sergeant had been dead for forty years. From monument catcher to cartoon cameo, Street remains a uniquely captivating figure in sports history.

It’s funny how one card gets you going on a player. Many years ago, when my son was collecting cards, I purchased the John “Hans” Lobert 1915 Cracker Jack card. I knew nothing about Lobert, but I thought it would be nice to own an example of a Cracker Jack card.
As time passed, I developed a fascination (my wife would call it an obsession) with Hans. I am officially “Hooked on Hans.”
Despite working in Major League Baseball for over 50 years, Lobert did not escape the harsh financial realities common to old-timers of the pre-union era. In his acclaimed 1966 book The Glory of Their Times, author Lawrence Ritter revealed that by his eighties, a widowed Lobert was living in physical pain and poverty inside a bleak Philadelphia "fleabag hotel." Yet, as Ritter beautifully noted, the moment Lobert began reminiscing about his baseball days, the misery vanished and a vibrant joy returned to the old speedster's voice.
 
An audio recording of Ritter’s interview with Hans is a great listen - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4L8CwTg-yg
 
Lobert was one of the fastest men of the Deadball Era, a hard-nosed third baseman whose big-league career carried him through the Pittsburgh Pirates, Chicago Cubs, Cincinnati Reds, Philadelphia Phillies, and New York Giants. He broke in with Pittsburgh in 1903, where the great Honus Wagner took a liking to the stocky, bow-legged rookie who shared his German roots and dubbed him “Hans No. 2” — a nickname that stuck for the rest of his life. With my recent addition of Lobert’s T206 I now hold the poor man’s Honus.
A lifetime .274 hitter, Lobert topped .300 four times and stole thirty or more bases in seven seasons, later coaching at West Point, serving as a Giants, coach, and scout and for a brief period with the Phillies.
His speed was the stuff of legend. He once circled the bases in 13.8 seconds and, in a 100-yard match at the Polo Grounds, outran Olympic champion Jim Thorpe. That renown earned him a place on the celebrated 1913–14 Giants–White Sox World Tour, the round-the-world barnstorming spectacle organized by John McGraw and Charles Comiskey and blessed by President Wilson. The teams sailed from Vancouver and played their way through Japan, China, the Philippines, Australia, Ceylon, Egypt, and Europe.
Before the overseas leg, during a stop in Oxnard, California, the town’s mayor challenged Lobert to race a horse around the base paths. Hans bolted to a big early lead — up by ten feet at first and twenty at second — only to have the horse cut sharply across his path rounding second, forcing him to break stride and dodge. He recovered but couldn’t quite make it up, and Hall of Fame umpire Bill Klem ruled that the horse had won by a nose. It was a defeat Lobert protested with a grin for the rest of his life: “No horse could beat me by a nose.”
The voyage itself nearly ended in tragedy. Crossing the Pacific aboard the R.M.S. Empress of Japan, the tour steamed straight into the worst typhoon the North Pacific had seen in twenty years. For some sixteen harrowing hours on November 29–30, 1913, hurricane-force winds, driving snow, and sixty-foot seas battered the liner — smashing a lifeboat, clawing at the boat booms, and heeling the ship so far over that the captain weighed ordering her abandoned. When the storm finally broke, the Empress had been blown more than two hundred miles off course, and the ballplayers counted themselves lucky to be alive.
McGraw admired Lobert enough to pay a steep price to bring him to the Giants in 1915 and kept him close for decades as a coach and scout.
Late in life, Lobert sat for one of the warmest interviews in Lawrence Ritter’s classic The Glory of Their Times, where his gentle humor shone through even as Ritter found him ailing and living in near-poverty. Kindness, it seemed, had outlasted the fame. Despite his lifelong dedication, he fell short of qualifying for a Major League pension. He died in 1968 at age 86.
** **
Historic Photos
https://picryl.com/amp/topics/lobert
** **
World Baseball Tour
https://chicagology.com/baseball/worldtour/
** **
My Hans Lobert Collection
 
• 1909 T206 White Border: Features variations with Sovereign, El Principe de Gales, and other tobacco backs
• 1909 Dockman
• 1911 S74 Silk
• 1911 T205 Gold Border: Tobacco card featuring a gold-bordered portrait.
• 1911 Mecca Double Folders (T201): Features John Lobert paired with E. Moore on the front panel.
• 1911  Hassan Triple Folder (T202) Features John Lobertin center photo
• 1912 Hassan Triple Folder (T202): Features Lobert with the Phillies/Giants context.
• 1915 Cracker Jack (#170): One of his most iconic and condition-sensitive color issues.
• 1940 Play Ball (#160): Late-career vintage cardboard inclusion.
• Hans Lobert Autograph
 
Still seeking
 
• 1908 Rose Company Postcards: Early photographic postcard issue.
• 1908 American Caramel (E102): Rare caramel card set.
• 1909 Croft's Candy (E92): Regional caramel/candy issue.
** **
The Tour Route and Historic Stops
The tour began right after the 1913 World Series with a domestic train trek across the United States. Starting in Cincinnati, the teams played exhibition games through the Midwest, Texas, Arizona, California, and Oregon before crossing into Vancouver, Canada to board a luxury ocean liner.
 
The international itinerary spanned five continents:
• Japan: Playing highly popular games in Tokyo against local collegiate clubs.
• China & The Philippines: Stopping in Shanghai and Manila.
• Australia: Making major stops in Brisbane, Sydney, and Melbourne.
• Ceylon (Sri Lanka): A brief island stopover en route to Africa.
• Egypt: Playing a famous game near Cairo, where players famously threw baseballs over the Great Sphinx.
• Europe: Traveling through Italy (Naples and Rome), France (Nice and Paris), and concluding in London, United Kingdom, where they played before King George V.
 
Famous Rosters on the Trip
Because the grueling tour took months, McGraw and Comiskey supplemented their team rosters with top-tier superstars from across the major leagues. Alongside Lobert, six of the most legendary figures on the trip included:
• Jim Thorpe: The world-famous "World's Greatest Athlete" and Olympic gold medalist who played outfield for the Giants.
• Christy Mathewson: The legendary Giants pitcher, widely considered one of the greatest and most dominant right-handers in baseball history.
• Tris Speaker: The future Hall of Fame center fielder borrowed from the Boston Red Sox.
• "Wahoo" Sam Crawford: The Detroit Tigers' powerhouse outfielder and future Hall of Famer renowned for his prolific triple-hitting.
• Buck Weaver: The brilliant Chicago White Sox shortstop who would later become infamous as part of the 1919 Black Sox scandal.
• Urban "Red" Faber: The future Hall of Fame pitcher for the White Sox who anchored their rotation during the global games.
 
The McGraw Relationship and Later Years
The global tour highlighted Lobert's complex relationship with Giants manager John McGraw. McGraw deeply respected Lobert’s fiery, aggressive style—the epitome of "Inside Baseball." While Lobert thrived under McGraw's intense leadership on the world stage, he famously clashed with the skipper's strict, demanding nature. Despite their fiery arguments, McGraw viewed Lobert as a model ballplayer, and Lobert credited McGraw with sharpening his baseball mind, a foundation that later helped Loberttransition into a big-league manager and respected scout.  

Many years ago, I became fascinated with the 1909 S74 Silks. My collection is small, only 11, but four are in the HOF (Chief Bender, Clark Griffith, John McGraw, and Rube Marquard). In addition, I have Fred Merkle and Fred Snodgrass from my collection of "ballplayers who had one bad day" in a good career — Snodgrass dropped a fly ball and we all know of Merkle's boner. Finally, I recently acquired Hans Lobert — "Hooked on Hans" will be a later post.

Given how delicate they are, I am surprised that so many of them still exist. Produced by the American Tobacco Company around 1909–1911, these miniature portraits were printed on fabric rather than cardboard and inserted into packages of popular tobacco brands including Helmar, Old Mill, Red Sun, and Turkey Red.

Measuring roughly 2 by 3 inches, each silk was hand-cut, so sizes and margins vary from piece to piece — part of their handmade charm. The imagery was adapted from the iconic T205 "Gold Border" card set, rendering each player in a single ink color against the woven silk background.

Each piece was originally issued with a small paper advertising label affixed to the reverse, promoting the tobacco brand that carried it — most often Old Mill, Red Sun, or Turkey Red Cigarettes. Because that flimsy paper was so easily peeled, soiled, or lost, it's absent from the great majority of surviving silks, and an example that still retains its original advertising back is a scarce and especially desirable find for collectors.

Only one of my cards has a backing. The photo is included.

There's a social dimension to these silks that's easy to overlook: they were aimed in large part at women. Some historians believe the fabric inserts were a deliberate marketing strategy meant to draw women toward the tobacco brands — and perhaps, in time, toward smoking itself — in an era when it was not yet socially acceptable for a woman to smoke openly.

In the near term the approach was indirect: women were encouraged to gather the silks from husbands, brothers, and friends who used tobacco, building brand loyalty across the whole household. And the companies didn't leave it to chance — they distributed literature suggesting what to do with a growing pile of silks. Rather than let them languish in a drawer, women stitched them into decorative goods for the home: quilts, throws, pillow tops, table covers, purses, even curtains.

One Lorillard premium envelope promised the silks could be made into "beautiful table covers, pillow tops, bed spreads, and many other useful and ornamental articles for home decorations."

Tobacco-silk quilts from this period survive in museum collections today — a reminder that these little fabrics led a domestic second life the ballplayers pictured on them never imagined.

The issue is cataloged in two forms: white silks and the scarcer colored silks, comprising just over 200 subjects in all. The checklist reads like a Hall of Fame roll call, featuring Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson, Cy Young, and other legends of the Deadball Era.  

Many years ago, I became fascinated with the 1909 S74 Silks. My collection is small, only 11, but four are in the HOF (Chief Bender, Clark Griffith, John McGraw, and Rube Marquard). In addition, I have Fred Merkle and Fred Snodgrass from my collection of "ballplayers who had one bad day" in a good career — Snodgrass dropped a fly ball and we all know of Merkle's boner. Finally, I recently acquired Hans Lobert — "Hooked on Hans" will be a later post.

Given how delicate they are, I am surprised that so many of them still exist. Produced by the American Tobacco Company around 1909–1911, these miniature portraits were printed on fabric rather than cardboard and inserted into packages of popular tobacco brands including Helmar, Old Mill, Red Sun, and Turkey Red.

Measuring roughly 2 by 3 inches, each silk was hand-cut, so sizes and margins vary from piece to piece — part of their handmade charm. The imagery was adapted from the iconic T205 "Gold Border" card set, rendering each player in a single ink color against the woven silk background.

Each piece was originally issued with a small paper advertising label affixed to the reverse, promoting the tobacco brand that carried it — most often Old Mill, Red Sun, or Turkey Red Cigarettes. Because that flimsy paper was so easily peeled, soiled, or lost, it's absent from the great majority of surviving silks, and an example that still retains its original advertising back is a scarce and especially desirable find for collectors.

Only one of my cards has a backing. The photo is included.

There's a social dimension to these silks that's easy to overlook: they were aimed in large part at women. Some historians believe the fabric inserts were a deliberate marketing strategy meant to draw women toward the tobacco brands — and perhaps, in time, toward smoking itself — in an era when it was not yet socially acceptable for a woman to smoke openly.

In the near term the approach was indirect: women were encouraged to gather the silks from husbands, brothers, and friends who used tobacco, building brand loyalty across the whole household. And the companies didn't leave it to chance — they distributed literature suggesting what to do with a growing pile of silks. Rather than let them languish in a drawer, women stitched them into decorative goods for the home: quilts, throws, pillow tops, table covers, purses, even curtains.

One Lorillard premium envelope promised the silks could be made into "beautiful table covers, pillow tops, bed spreads, and many other useful and ornamental articles for home decorations."

Tobacco-silk quilts from this period survive in museum collections today — a reminder that these little fabrics led a domestic second life the ballplayers pictured on them never imagined.

The issue is cataloged in two forms: white silks and the scarcer colored silks, comprising just over 200 subjects in all. The checklist reads like a Hall of Fame roll call, featuring Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson, Cy Young, and other legends of the Deadball Era.  

They didn’t laugh but had almost nothing. Literally almost nothing.

To preserve my two B18 Blankets, I decided to have them slabbed.

Fred Snodgrass is remembered for one of the most famous fielding blunders in baseball history, the "$30,000 Muff" of the 1912 World Series. I collect memorabilia of players who had one bad moment in an otherwise good career, and he fits perfectly.

These felts are among the charming oddities of the pre-war baseball hobby. The small flannel squares, roughly 5¼ inches, picture a player framed by pennants, bats, mitt, and mask, and were tucked folded inside packs of Egyptienne Straights Cigarettes, a brand of the American Tobacco Company. Hall of Famers like Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, and Shoeless Joe Jackson are, as you'd expect, valuable, but commons can be found under $40. They're a nice piece of nostalgia — and they were only produced for one year, 1914.

Read on if you'd like to hear more about the quilt craze that produced them.

Starting around 1905 and peaking between roughly 1910 and 1916, tobacco companies competing for a crowded cigarette and cigar market began tucking printed textile novelties into their packages, or offering larger ones through coupon-redemption catalogs. These came in several forms: "silks" (finely printed satin squares showing flowers, flags, national seals, actresses, Native American portraits, college pennants, and athletes), "flannels" or "felts" (the same idea in soft cotton or wool, ranging from tiny 3½-inch inserts up to table-cover and even rug sizes), and cigar "ribbons," the narrow silk bands that had bundled cigars since the 1860s.

The baseball felts of 1914 were simply the sports-themed corner of this flood of collectible cloth. Brands driving it included Egyptienne Straights, Liggett & Myers' Fatima, P. Lorillard's Stag, and Murad Turkish Cigarettes, and the outlay was enormous — one large company reportedly spent up to $300,000 a year on these giveaways.

It became a genuine domestic craze rather than just packaging clutter because the premiums were designed to be made into things. Companies actively encouraged customers to gather and sew the pieces into quilts, throws, pillow tops, table covers, purses, and curtains, so a household would keep buying a brand to complete a set or fill out a pattern.

That turned needlework hobbyists — overwhelmingly women — into repeat drivers of tobacco sales, and it's here that the "enticing women" angle lived: the strategy folded tobacco brands into the fabric of the home and, marketers openly reasoned, softened the ground for drawing women toward smoking itself, even though the explicit female-targeted cigarette campaigns (Lucky Strike's "reach for a Lucky" and the like) came a decade or so later. Tobacco-premium quilts from this window survive in real numbers today and are collected and exhibited in their own right, with examples held by the International Quilt Museum in Lincoln, Nebraska, and several university museums.

The fad faded quickly once the United States entered World War I, when material shortages and shifting advertising made the fabric giveaways impractical; a few European firms kept issuing them into the 1920s–40s, but the American heyday was over by 1917. That short, intense window is why the 1914 baseball felts feel like such a time capsule: they're a single-season artifact of a marketing craze that briefly turned cigarette packs into raw material for the American quilting frame

To preserve my two B18 Blankets, I decided to have them slabbed.

Fred Snodgrass is remembered for one of the most famous fielding blunders in baseball history, the "$30,000 Muff" of the 1912 World Series. I collect memorabilia of players who had one bad moment in an otherwise good career, and he fits perfectly.

These felts are among the charming oddities of the pre-war baseball hobby. The small flannel squares, roughly 5¼ inches, picture a player framed by pennants, bats, mitt, and mask, and were tucked folded inside packs of Egyptienne Straights Cigarettes, a brand of the American Tobacco Company. Hall of Famers like Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, and Shoeless Joe Jackson are, as you'd expect, valuable, but commons can be found under $40. They're a nice piece of nostalgia — and they were only produced for one year, 1914.

Read on if you'd like to hear more about the quilt craze that produced them.

Starting around 1905 and peaking between roughly 1910 and 1916, tobacco companies competing for a crowded cigarette and cigar market began tucking printed textile novelties into their packages, or offering larger ones through coupon-redemption catalogs. These came in several forms: "silks" (finely printed satin squares showing flowers, flags, national seals, actresses, Native American portraits, college pennants, and athletes), "flannels" or "felts" (the same idea in soft cotton or wool, ranging from tiny 3½-inch inserts up to table-cover and even rug sizes), and cigar "ribbons," the narrow silk bands that had bundled cigars since the 1860s.

The baseball felts of 1914 were simply the sports-themed corner of this flood of collectible cloth. Brands driving it included Egyptienne Straights, Liggett & Myers' Fatima, P. Lorillard's Stag, and Murad Turkish Cigarettes, and the outlay was enormous — one large company reportedly spent up to $300,000 a year on these giveaways.

It became a genuine domestic craze rather than just packaging clutter because the premiums were designed to be made into things. Companies actively encouraged customers to gather and sew the pieces into quilts, throws, pillow tops, table covers, purses, and curtains, so a household would keep buying a brand to complete a set or fill out a pattern.

That turned needlework hobbyists — overwhelmingly women — into repeat drivers of tobacco sales, and it's here that the "enticing women" angle lived: the strategy folded tobacco brands into the fabric of the home and, marketers openly reasoned, softened the ground for drawing women toward smoking itself, even though the explicit female-targeted cigarette campaigns (Lucky Strike's "reach for a Lucky" and the like) came a decade or so later. Tobacco-premium quilts from this window survive in real numbers today and are collected and exhibited in their own right, with examples held by the International Quilt Museum in Lincoln, Nebraska, and several university museums.

The fad faded quickly once the United States entered World War I, when material shortages and shifting advertising made the fabric giveaways impractical; a few European firms kept issuing them into the 1920s–40s, but the American heyday was over by 1917. That short, intense window is why the 1914 baseball felts feel like such a time capsule: they're a single-season artifact of a marketing craze that briefly turned cigarette packs into raw material for the American quilting frame