34. Victor Starffin

Back in the summer of 1987 I was fortunate enough to have been selected to attend the New Jersey Governors School of the Arts, a summer-long program in Trenton that picked the 20 best artists, 20 best writers, 20 best dancers, etc. Besides being a great experience, being immersed with like-minded peers for the first time in my life, the other great thing about that summer was the access I had to a huge college library. I spent so many hours in there finding all the books I always wanted read, history, fiction... and baseball. Their baseball section was spectacular to a poor 16 year-old starved for knowledge. One of the great books I pulled off the shelf was "You Gotta Have Wah" by Robert Whiting about Japanese baseball. It was mostly about the post-1950 game and I was more interested in prewar baseball, but it exposed me to a whole part of the game I only had vague knowledge of.

One of the most unique players in all of baseball history has got to be Victor Starffin. The son of Tsarist Russian refugees who fled the old country with only their lives, Victor Constantinovich Starffin grew up in the northern Japanese town of Asahikawa in a perilous situation as a stateless person - a man without a country. At 6'-2" he was huge compared to the native Japanese and was encouraged to take up the game of baseball that was sweeping the country at the time. He excelled as a pitcher in high school and was a legend around the island of Hokkaido. In 1933 Victor's father was convicted of killing a young Russian girl who he employed at his tea room. The circumstances of the killing was murky, his father first admitting to the murder due to "sexual jealousy" and later claiming it was because she was a Soviet agent. He was sentenced to 8 years in jail and the family, already in a precarious position as refugees were now confronted with the threat of deportation back to Russia and a sure trip to the gulag.

At this time the Japanese government was putting together a National Team to play against the Major League All-Star team that was due to arrive on the islands in the fall of 1934. What better addition to the team than the 6 foot Russian fireballer from Hokkaido? Problem was Victor was thoroughly devoted to his home area team and the faithful fans rallied around their hero. The pressure from the government was such that the locals provided bodyguards to protect him from being kidnapped! Ultimately Japan threatened deportation and Starffin reluctantly went to Tokyo to join the National Team. His father's sentence was reduced to 2 years.

Starffin pitched against the All-Stars once in relief and rated a mention in the New York Times as a standout on the Japanese team. After the Major League Team left the island the National Team stayed together and toured the United States and Canada in 1935 and 1936. As the lone Caucasian on the team, North Americans automatically assumed he spoke English, leading to a few funny situations.

Japan started its first professional league in 1937 and the National Team formed the nucleus for the great Tokyo Giants team. Along with teenage sensation Eiji Sawamura, Starffin was at the forefront of it winning an average of 30 games each season from 1937 to 1942. In 1939 he won a staggering 42 games and in 1940 he won 38. He simply dominated the league and with the onset of the war and the military draft taking the better players from the league his record got better and better. But times were turning against him. English names and numbers were banned from the team uniforms and replaced by Japanese characters. Because he was a foreigner he was placed under surveillance as a prospective spy and to try to fit in to his adapted homeland he changed his name to Hiroshi Suda. But it wasn't enough. In 1944 the Tokyo Giants fired their best pitcher and he was sent to a detention camp where he contracted pleurisy. Weak and psychologically wounded after his wife left him, Starffin turned to drinking. After the war he turned down an offer from his old team and instead signed with the new Pacific team. He pitched until 1955 but he never was the same dominant pitcher as before the war. Starffin compiled 303 wins, the first in Japan to do so and died in a car accident in 1957 while driving drunk, a sad end to a truly unique player from baseball's past.

33. "Chief" Johnson

Back before television, radio and expansion teams brought baseball to pretty much everyone in the country, small travelling teams criss-crossed the nation playing local town teams. There were negro teams, Chinese teams, teams representing shoe companies, all-sibling teams, bearded religious sect teams and of course, Native-American ball clubs.

The Nebraska Indians were among the best known of these travelling teams and from 1897 to 1917 they brought quality baseball to many small towns across the United States. They were formed by Guy W. Green who recruited native players from the Omaha and Winnebago Reservations and vocational schools in the area. Besides great baseball the Indians, like Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show provided an element of the wild west to the places they visited at a time when nostalgia for the old west was just beginning. They performed on-field tricks and gags like featuring the identical twin Keeler Brothers and their base-running antics and a pitcher dressed as a clown. For a time the team even wore uniforms with Indian buck-skin fringe on it. Like Buffalo Bill's show, the team set up an "Indian village" at the ballparks they played at which not only entertained the fans but served as cheap lodgings for the players and circumvented racial laws which often prevented Native Americans from sleeping in all-white hotels. There was always an element underhanded racial prejudice from fans and writers at the time which manifested itself in war-whoops and newspapers describing a Nebraska Indian victory as a "scalping" of the local team but despite this, the Nebraska Indians brought a high level of baseball to a country starved for professional ball. Some of the Indian's players moved on to better things, George Howard Johnson being one of the more colorful.

After bouncing from one boarding school to another, Johnson started pitching for Guy W. Green’s Nebraska Indians barnstorming team. In his second year with the Indians he pitched 38 games and won 32 of them. Besides gruelling traveling conditions, the well-read Johnson had to endure endless racial epitaphs while playing with the Indians. He eventually moved up to the minor leagues and in 1913 was signed by Cincinnati. Now nick-names "Chief" as was the custom of the day, he had trouble with the manager who apparently did not like Native Americans and he jumped to Kansas City of the Federal League in 1914. While pitching in the first ever game at Weeghman Park (now called Wrigley Field), Johnson was removed in the 2nd inning because of a court injunction brought by the Cincinnati Reds who still owned his contract. After 1915 he pitched in the Pacific Coast League and tossed a no-hitter for the Vernon team in 1917. Johnson was murdered in Des Moines in 1922 in a dispute over alcohol.

Special thanks goes to Nebraska Indians expert Dan Bretta for helping me with the background on George Johnson and The Nebraska Indians. In the future I hope to feature more players from this unique and interesting team.

32. Bump Baily

Like many baseball fans, I was fascinated by the 1984 movie "The Natural" when it came out. The story was pretty mediocre and in fact it took me a few watches to realize that Glen Close's son was actually Roy Hobbs' son also. Maybe I was too busy paying attention to Kim Basinger at the time to fully comprehend such a slow curve of a plot twist. But anyway, the one thing that truly stands out is the great portrayal of baseball in 1939. I mean everything looked good, the uniforms, the outfield wall advertising, the stadiums, the way the ball players looked and talked, even the newspaper articles they showed close-ups of. It all looked absolutely fantastic. As a designer, I have to tip my hat to the artist that developed the uniforms for the fictional New York Knights because they looked like they would have been around in 1939. As someone who does graphic props for Hollywood, one of the hardest things for a movie designer to do is to get the right feel and look for a particular time period. So many details can throw the piece off like typeface, color, phrasing or style. So many movie sets fail to get the details right and it ruins the whole movie for nit-wits like me who spent way too many hours studying such minutia as typography and design history and wonder why the stupid artist couldn't do the same. But that's enough about films that didn't do it right because "The Natural" did.

I mentioned earlier about the mediocre plot. When I found out the movie was based on a book by Bernard Malamud I dug up a copy and read it expecting to read the same story as the movie. What a big shock, but it wasn't the same story. Not even close. The beginning was basically the same, young phenomenon on his way to a sure-thing tryout with the Chicago Cubs gets shot by a deranged psychopathic nymphomaniac. But now Malamud's Roy Hobbs becomes a dark, mean spirited jerk. He had a dishonest streak perhaps driven into him by the hard road he travelled after being shot and now that he has crawled his way back to the majors after 16 years he will let no one stop him in his quest to become the best there ever was. Robert Redford's Hobbs seemed like a nice guy, humbled by his experiences. Malamud's Hobbs is the opposite. He is just out for himself. Guy doesn't even like kids who ask him for his autograph. I won't spoil the rest of the book, because it will make a good, fast summer read for anyone who hasn't read it, but I will say the ending sure ain't like the movie!

Now back to the cards. I have been wanting to do a card of a New York Knights player and settled on one of Bump Baily. He was the Knights' star outfielder who died when he crashed through the outfield wall, paving the way for Roy Hobbs to get into the lineup. Bump was also a thug, womanizer and crooked. He was being bribed by the Knights owner to throw games so the team did not win the pennant. In the movie tough guy Michael Madsen portrayed Bump rather well. He had a rough voice and the proper thuggish attitude that the book described. When I decided to do a Bump Baily card, I made my depiction a hybrid of Madsen and another great slugger of the late 1930's - Joe Medwick. I leaned heavily on Medwick because he was exactly as I would picture Baily - a rough, mean and a powerful slugger. He was cocky because he was that good, he even won the Triple Crown in 1937. He was quick with is fists to the point of KOing his own pitcher during a game when he dared to criticize Medwick's error in fielding a ball. Teammate Dizzy Dean said of Medwick "Dawgonnit. That Medwick don't fight fair at all. You argue with him for a bit and then he beats you before you've even had a chance to speak your piece." (To set the record strait, Medwick was all these things BUT not a dishonest ballplayer.) For the fictional 1939 statistics on the card I went through some old newspapers and figured out what Medwick was batting in mid-May of '39, the time when Bump Baily met his demise in the outfield of Knights Field. The drawing leans heavily on the facial features of Michael Madsen combined with the scowl and slouching, cock-sure body language of Joe Medwick. The last thing was how to spell his name. In the book Malamud spells it "Baily" and in the movie it is spelled "Bailey". I like the story in the book better so I stuck with the original. Malamud must have had his reasons and who the heck am I to change it. So here you have it, Batholomew "Bump" Baily on his first and only baseball card.

31. Jimmy Claxton

This is one of those strange and fascinating stories that makes baseball research so much fun. Everyone knows that Jackie Robinson broke the color line back in 1947. And some even know that for years some managers and owners flirted with the idea of sneaking a light skinned black man into the majors. John McGraw was famous for this. In 1901 as the Baltimore Orioles manager he passed infielder Charlie Grant off as Native American “Chief Tokahoma." Although the other Oriole players kept up the ruse, the press and other teams didn't buy it and a tearful McGraw (imagine THAT!) had to release Grant. That's probably the most famous attempt to break the color line but there were others as well, none perhaps so unique as Jimmy Claxton.

The Canadian born Claxton was a pitcher for various semi-pro teams up and down the west coast. In 1916 he was starring for a team in Oakland when he was presented to the pitching-poor Oakland Oaks. Assured he was a full-blooded Native-American and not a negro, Claxton made the team and on May 29, 1916 he took the mound in the first game of a double header against Los Angeles. Wild and nervous, he was knocked out of the box in the third inning. He came back in the 9th inning of the second game retiring the side but his overall performance was weak. His totals for the day was 2-1/3 innings pitched, four hits, three runs, four walks, and no strikeouts. Shortly afterwards Claxton was released by the Oaks, the reason given being his poor showing, but the prevalent belief was that it was discovered that Jimmy was actually of African decent. Some say it was all a publicity stunt. Claxton was fairly well known in west coast baseball circles as a black man and the Oaks were in desperate need of boosting attendance. No one will ever really know what the actual circumstances were.

What is unique about his short stint in white organized ball is Jimmy Claxton was the first black player to appear on a baseball card! That's right, in the short span of time he was with the Oaks, a photographer from the Zee-Nut Candy Company snapped a picture of Claxton and included it in their popular trading card set that featured Pacific Coast League players. The card was withdrawn shortly after his release and the few examples that survived go for a huge price at auction. But, despite this brief bending of the color line and Claxton's cardboard fame, it would be nearly thirty more years before another black man played in an organized white baseball league.

Anatomy of a card

From time to time I have had people commission me to make cards for their relatives who played ball but never had a baseball card of their own or from people who thought it would be really neat to have a card with themselves on it picturing them playing for the Homestead Grays, New York Knights or some other old-time team. Here is one such request I recently did and got permission to show the process...

Gary,
I love your cards, the stories and drawings are great. I was wondering if you do custom cards, because I would really like to have one made of my grandfather Eddie. He played for a few Navy teams during the war and I'd really like a card of him back in his playing days. Would you be able to create a card of him, in the style of your card set and have some printed? We don't have any pictures of him playing baseball, but do have a few pictures of him when he was in the Navy.
Thanks and keep up the great work,
-Jay

Jay,
Yes, I can do custom cards. If you send me one or more photographs of your grandfather when he was young I can find a suitable ball playing pose that would work. I will send you a sketch of the card and when you approve it I will color it and add a background. Let me know if you would like a stadium, fence with trees, buildings, etc. I'd probably suggest a fence with trees because it would be more appropriate for a military base back during the war. Let me know what teams he played for and I will try to find out what the uniforms looked like. Once you ok the finished card, I can get 500 of them printed just like my cards and will also give you an 4" x 6" print of the card you can frame for a price of $200. Let me know if this is what you'd like to do.
-Gary C.

Gary,
Yes that would be great! I am attaching a scan of my grandfather taken during the war as well as a file with the story I'd like on the back of the card. Can you have him play for the Sampson Naval Training Station? I don't know what the uniforms looked like. He threw and batted right and played 2nd base.
Let me know if you need any more to work with,
-Jay

Jay,
Here is the sketch of your grandfather. I posed him with his hand in his glove. I could not locate a photograph showing the Sampson baseball team but I found a good uniform type that will be visually interesting and I attached it to this email. I will place an "S" on it for "Sampson". It is the second one from the left with the star on the sleeve. I think the story you wrote will work fine for the card. Please let me know if the drawing looks good to you and I will color and detail it out for you.
Thanks,
-Gary C.

Gary,
The drawing looks really nice, I can't wait to see how it looks in color! I think the uniform you picked looks the best out of all of them...
-Jay

Jay,
Here is the finished card, front and back in color. What do you think? Please re-check the story on the back and make sure everything is spelled correctly. I'd hate to print your grandfathers' first and only baseball card with his name misspelled! If it meets with your approval, I'll send it to the printer and you should have everything in a week.
Thanks,
-Gary C.

Gary,
I just received the cards today... THANK YOU SO MUCH! They look fantastic and I can't wait to give these to my relatives! THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!
-Jay