Project Durham Bulls #51 - Clint Courtney

1962 -1963 Durham Bulls

Background- 

Clint Courtney spent the better part of a decade playing in the Majors as a backup catcher, appearing in games for the Yankees, Browns, Orioles, Senators, White Sox, and A's. Seems like a pretty good player off the bench, but I really like that he was nicknamed  "Scrap Iron" while playing for the St. Louis Browns over two fights he incited with the Yankees.  During one incident he spiked Billy Martin, and then proceeded to punch him when the Yankees infielder protested being spiked.  The following season Courtney spiked Phil Rizzuto, while trying to stretch a single into a double, which resulted in Billy Martin jumping on him during a fight that ensued.  For years, the fight held the American League record for fines.   

Clint Courtney played his last game in the Majors in 1961 for the Baltimore Orioles.  He would spend the next three seasons in the Houston Colts Minor League system working with younger players.  Courtney was 35 and 36 years old for his two seasons with the Durham Bulls.  The Bulls were an Astros affiliate at that time, and they had some good Major League quality talent on the roster.  By the mid 1960s, the Astros used Clint Courtney as their bullpen coach.  He had been considered for several managing jobs along the way.  

After leaving the Astros in 1970, Clint Courtney spent the rest of his life working as a coach in the Minor Leagues.  He managed the Richmond Braves on several different occasions during the 1970s, before he passed away playing ping pong against some of the team's players on a road trip in 1975.  

Card- 

There are not a ton of Clint Courtney cards, but they are all from really good sets.  It was honestly sort of a hard decision to choose which card I should add to my collection.  I ended up narrowing it down to trying to find a St. Louis Browns card, and then after that I decided to go with his 1953 Bowman card.  There are far too few St. Louis Browns cards in my collection.  

Art Deco Garbage*

I am not a big fan of the 2010 National Chicle set.  I know plenty of collectors who love the set.  I know a lot of collectors who hate it.  It has always been really low on my list.  There have been plenty of painting/sketch/art sets produced over the last two decades that it's not really hard to find a few favorites.  I spent a chunk of the past year working on one of the Topps Gallery Heritage sets.....

which is one of the best art sets in my opinion.  Plenty of others that I could post here too.  There are some decent art cards in the National Chicle set, if you pick and chose single cards, you can find some winners.  Sort of.  One of my favorite Cardinals cards.....

the painting of Brock is nice, but is that a Venezuelan flag in the background?  Cool if this were a Dave Concepcion card.  Miguel Cabrera is also an acceptable player for a Venezuelan flag background.  

Beyond the odd touches, again Lou Brock with a Venezuelan flag, my reasons for not liking the National Chicle set are pretty short.  Mainly, I despise the revisionist cards in this product where players are drawn into other uniforms.  I couldn't find my Lou Gehrig soul patch card, but there are still other really bad cards to show as examples.

As a Cardinals fan, this one is downright terrible.......

Pujols as a Brown?  Sigh.  So many things are wrong with this card.  There are worse though, with this Babe Ruth card being the crown jewel of awful in this set.  

I guess Babe Ruth was at least on the Braves for a season at the very end of his career.  Better than Pujols as a Brown considering he has no connection to the Orioles or Browns.  If you are going to make a Babe Ruth card on the Braves, then why is he still standing in Yankee Stadium?  

The wrist bands half way up the forearms, turtleneck looking thing.  This is a Chipper Jones card with a Babe Ruth head with the facade of Yankee Stadium in the background.  

These cards are sort of like the revisionist history quotes that people post all over the internet.  One of my biggest pet peeves in life.  I hate made up history.....

Abe said this in a movie.  Right?  

So, what card could possibly make me want to touch such a terrible set?

Imagine that Topps made a card in this set, of a younger player at the time, whose card had a pleasing background that matched the team's color scheme.  Picture that this same card actually pictured the player in their uniform, not of another nearby team, or some other weird connection to the past or future.

The card is also autographed and I am willing to overlook the rest of the set for this card.....

It's not a rookie autograph, rookie card, or anything overly special, but it's just a nice card with a good player's autograph.  Bumgarner has been a really good player to this point in his career, a few World Series, a whole bunch of home runs, and a lot of snot rockets.  

                                    

I actually had this card a few years ago, traded it to a Giants fan, and I sort of regretted it a short time later.  I have a few other nice Bumgarner autographs, so at the time it did not feel like much of a loss.  The Giants have had a rough last year and I feel like there have been a few more nice cards of Bumgarner floating around and they seem to have come down a bit too.  

Could not pass this one by.  The asterisk?  

*While the National Chicle set is generally art deco garbage in my opinion, this card is an art deco gem,

The Original Bow Wow

I traded for a few cards a week or two back, trying to close out a few sets, and my trading partner threw in a few a pair of 1950s cards.  One of the cards was a 1956 Topps Roy Sievers.  

Kind of a cool action shot with the long time outfielder leaning backwards over a fence to catch a ball.  Sievers is actually from St. Louis and spent the first few years of his career on the Browns.  Welcome addition to the card collection.  The other throw in card just seemed like a random St. Louis Browns card.  Here is the front.....

At first glance I thought this was just going to be a nice 1951 Bowman common.  Definitely generous for a throw in when you put it together with the Sievers card.  Then I flipped the card over to the back and a few things stood out....

First, Arft's nickname is Bow Wow.  That's a pretty incredible nickname.  He should probably get some royalties from the "Like Mike" movies or some of the albums that the other Bow Wow has put out.....

since Arft appears to be the original namesake.  Curious as to how Arft gained that nickname, here is a quick explaination from his biography on the SABR site....

"On July 27 at Sportsman’s Park, the seventh-place Browns took the field with a record of 32-53, 19½ games behind the first-place Boston Red Sox and Philadelphia Athletics. Arft made his major-league debut, playing first and batting seventh. He recalled, “We were playing the Yankees and the first time up I flied out to Joe DiMaggio. The next time up I struck out, but my third time at bat I hit a triple to drive in two runs off Tommy Byrne. My last time up I hit a home run off Frank Hiller! We shut out New York 4-0. That was a great feeling.” The next day “cheers of ‘Arft, Arft’ were bestowed upon Hank the nickname he will embrace forever – that of ‘Bow Wow.’

Beyond the nickname, Arft is also from Manchester, Missouri.  He is the only Major League player to list that town as his place of birth, which is also the town where I lived while I was growing up outside of St. Louis.  Since there is not a hospital in that town anymore, just a shopping mall with a giant dove in the parking lot.....

he will likely remain the only player with that distinction for the foreseeable future.   In fact, I was trying to find players who have Manchester listed on a baseball card as a hometown.  There are several who are from bordering towns like Ryan Howard, Max Scherzer, and David Freese. 

I thought it was a pretty cool find, so I actually ended up picking up another Hank Arft card for under $5.  It's a 1952 Topps card with an out of focus picture......

and the centering is really off, but I might have to pick up the few other cards that Arft had during the late 1940s and early 1950s.  

Quite Possibly A Perfect Card

I spent the majority of my childhood and early adult years living around the St. Louis area.  I still love the Cardinals and still really enjoy following all of the sports teams from the area.  I mean the Cardinals are the clear number one, but I still dig the Rams and Blues.  I still watch Mizzou games.  I moved to North Carolina in my late twenties and have enjoyed the sports scene in the Raleigh-Durham area.  It's a college heavy town, especially for basketball, but there is still plenty of good baseball, college football, pro football in Charlotte along with a heavy mixture of Skins fans, soccer, lacrosse, and even a hockey team with a Stanley Cup banner.

Every once in awhile the North Carolina and Missouri worlds of my life collide.  Last year Mizzou played, and won, a basketball game at NC State.  The Blues tangle with the Hurricanes, the Rams play the Panthers and the Redskins, and I get to see my fair share of former Cardinals players floating around in the minors attending Bulls games.

There are also a fair number of pro baseball players from North Carolina who have connections to St. Louis.  Cardinals outfielder Enos Slaughter is from Roxboro (The Rox), Cardinals pitcher Seth Maness went to East Carolina, former Cardinals/Rockies/Rays outfielder Quinton McCracken played football at Duke,  and former Cardinals second baseman Mike Tyson is from Rocky Mount.  I could spend hours talking about the connections.  New players, old players, good players, bad players, mediocre players........

My newest connection is one of the best baseball players to ever come out of Greensboro.  Rick Farrell played 18 years in the Majors from 1929 through 1945.  He had two stops in St. Louis, both with the Browns, but his best years were spent as a Red Sox.  The 7 time All-Star posted a career .281/.378/.363 line and was elected to the Hall of Fame by the Veterans Committee in 1984.

Topps included Ferrell in their 2013 Gypsy Queen product as a St Louis Browns player.  The set included a base card of Ferrell along with a cool coin card.  Here is the front and the back of the Farrell coin card which I picked up last week:

I love the coin cards, but have never found one out of Gypsy Queen that I really like enough to add to my collection.  First, they are limited to a print run of just 5 copies which makes them pretty pricey.  Earlier coin card sets, such as the Topps Gallery versions, featured no serial numbers and were much more affordable.  This card has been on my Ebay watch list for months, but was sitting at $50.  I made an offer or two, but never budged the seller.  Finally another copy of the card appeared and I managed to talk down the price.  I love that Ferrell is in a Browns uni on the card, but the North Carolina quarter is an added bonus.  A great connection between my childhood home and current home and a great and welcome addition to my collection.  

More Goodness from the Topps Vault

Last night I shared a cool proof card of former Cardinals outfielder Ray Lankford which had been picked up originally from the Topps Vault.  If you are not familiar with the Topps Vault, it's basically an Ebay store that Topps uses to sell off its old pictures, proofs, and player contracts.  Some of the items are really fun to look at and every once in while I will pick up a card or something else from the store.

Most of my purchases from the Topps Vault would be best described as unique baseball cards I do shop the store for unique items too.  Mainly I am looking for cool items, which fit into my collection, and would look cool displayed in my man cave.

A few years back I picked up a set of photo proofs from the 2003 Topps Gallery Hall of Fame set from the Topps Vault:

2003 Topps Gallery Hall of Fame George Sisler Photo Proof 

2003 Topps Gallery Hall of Fame Jim Bottomley Photo Proof 

2003 Topps Gallery Hall of Fame Frankie Frisch Photo Proof 

 


There a pretty cool item that I decided to buy, for less than $10 each, after reading the descriptions of the photo proofs.  Each photo proof is roughly 4 x 5 and is a piece of transparency with a color picture printed on top of the clear material with a heavy piece of white cardboard dropped in behind.  I am not sure what the transparency paper is exactly, but as a teacher, it is stiffer than the transparencies you might have seen around a school back in the day.  The top of each plastic piece has a label which reads Kodak EPY which is a Tungsten based film used for slides.

Again, I am not sure what steps Topps takes in making their cards, so I am not sure where these cards fit into the process, but the cards do have labels underneath the pictures that are curious.  The labels identify the card year, player, team, and card number.  The last line is the curious part of these proofs which is the artist line.  Each artist line is dated, but the last two cards have a date listed in 2006, which is after production.  The Sisler card has a 2002 date.  I am not sure what to make of the dates on the last two cards, but it is certainly been a detail I have always found curious about those two proofs.

I have really enjoyed having these three items in my collection and have each of the proofs framed and hanging up in my man cave.  I put each in a nice black frame and have them hanging on a small wall right inside the door to the room.

This Week's Trades Part I

I have made several trades this week, but haven't had a chance to post any of them on my blog, so I am going to spend this evening and tomorrow showing off my trades from the past week.  Sunday I will show off a few collection pieces I have put together over the years involving a lot of cards I picked up in a trade earlier this week.  

This evening I am going to focus on three different trades that I made earlier in the week.  The first trade involved a dealer from St. Louis.  Living and collecting baseball cards in St. Louis for most of my life I've noticed that the market for Browns cards is non-existint at times.  It's true that the Browns were a terribly run franchise and were unpopular for a good reason, but they did have a few good players during their history.  George Sisler might have been the best of all the St. Louis Browns.  In fact, he owned the American League hits record until 2004 when Ichiro Suzuki broke it.  In the process of breaking the record, Ichiro studied up on Sisler and grew to appreciate the Hall of Famer so much that he visited his gravesite outside of St. Louis during the 2009 All-Star Game.  I snagged this card for a pair of Pujols and Holliday relic cards.  

2010 Topps Sterling George Sislger Bat Card 

The second trade was completed on Facebook.  I traded a few Red Sox and a Matt Moore autograph for these two awesome cards.  The first card is more of a curiosity and I've always wanted this card.  It's a 2006 Topps Alex Gordon cut out card.  This card came in the pack this way.  The long story short is that Topps had some sort of contractual problem and printed these cards too soon.  They needed to get Alex Gordon off the cards and this was the solution.    The other card I received in this trade was a 2011 Topps Ozzie Smith bat card.  Always great to get some Ozzies.  

2006 Topps Alex Gordon Cut-Out

 2011 Topps Ozzie Smith 60 Bat

Last trade for tonight.  A local one.  Josh Hamilton cards are really easy to trade in these parts.  There are many people that have stories about how they saw Josh Hamilton play in high school, or Legion, or their uncle's backyard.  I believe Athens High in Raleigh might have outdrawn the Pirates, and perhaps the Reds, while Hamilton was in high school.  I pull out a few Hamiltons, listen to some stories, and walk away with some sweet cards in the end.  A few Hamilton jerseys and a pair of Hamilton Heritage Chromes and I got.....

2012 Topps Museum Collection Matt Moore Autograph

 2012 Topps Museum Collection Allen Craig Triple Jersey Auto