Monday, September 22, 2014

Who's Who in Baseball - 1967



I found this magazine recently at an antique store in Avalon, NJ. I collected several of these back in the 1960s, including (I’m sure) this one. I may still have them stashed in my house somewhere, but for $1.00 I couldn’t pass up this one.

I briefly leafed through the magazine in the store, and although you can find the stats and trades on Baseball-Reference.com, this mag also notes the dates of players’ trips to the disabled list, which is a plus.

I examined each page a few days ago, and discovered that every player (except Athletics’ pitcher Bill Edgerton) has a thumbnail pic next to his stats. (This surprised me, because I recalled that many rookies did not have photos in some years.) For some reason, EVERY photo showed the player in a blacked-out cap.

The mag has the career major and minor league stats for every major-league player active at press time (which seemed to be sometime in December 1966, because the off-season trades of Maury Wills to the Pirates and Mike McCormick to the Giants are noted).


Almost every player that had a card (and about 3 dozen players on "Rookie Stars" cards) in the 1967 Topps set was included in this magazine, but I was also surprised to see the following players without 1967 cards included (maybe they were not released or retired by press time):

Robin Roberts (includes “released by Cubs 10/4/66”)
Joey Jay
Jim Duckworth
Bill Edgerton
Sandy Koufax (includes “announced retirement 11/18/66”)
Joe Adcock (includes “appointed Indians manager 10/3/66”)
Junior Gilliam
Harvey Kuenn
Bob Lillis
Roy McMillan
Al Spangler
Dick Stuart


At the back of the book is a list of “10-year veterans who played in 1966 who are not on a major-league roster in 1967”:

Ed Bailey
Don Blasingame
Frank Bolling
Smoky Burgess (later re-signed by the White Sox, and given a ’67 card)
Wes Covington
Del Crandall
Joe Cunningham
Gene Freese
Lenny Green (later re-signed by the Tigers, but no ’67 card)
Eddie Kasko
Marty Keough
Hector Lopez
Jerry Lynch
Frank Malzone
Felix Mantilla (later re-signed by the Cubs, and given a ’67 card)
Bobby Richardson
Andre Rogers (later re-signed by the Pirates, and given a ’67 card)
Bob Skinner
Frank Thomas
Roger Craig
Bob Friend
Ray Herbert
Billy Hoeft
Johnny Klippstein (later re-signed by the Tigers, and given a ’67 card)
Jim Owens (later re-signed by the Astros, and given a ’67 card)
Bob Purkey
Steve Ridzik
Ed Roebuck


On the back cover, and inside the 2 covers are full-page photos of Juan Marichal, Gary Peters, and Matty Alou.  I didn't scan any inside pages, because I don't want to flatten the magazine on my scanner, fearing the pages will detach.

A nice little reference guide for roster geeks from back in the day!
 

2 comments:

Rumpleforeskin said...

The reason for the blacked out caps is that the publishing company did not have licensing rights to show cap logos. Sad really.

Douglas said...

About a year ago I got the Whose Who set from 1968 to 1992 for about the same price per issue? The DL dates are incredible information. Another thing eventually phased out were the asterisk show a league leading stat in both MLB and MiLB. Some guys who never had card showed up in Whose Who. Whose Who were a great source but not perfect source of information