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Posted By: Bob Manning

My first encounter came when I was given "Big-Time Baseball" (Harold Hart & Ralph Tolleris):



Published in 1950, it featured "The All-Star Team of All Time"

P Johnson
C Dickey
1B Gehrig
2B Hornsby
SS Wagner
3B Traynor
LF DiMaggio
CF Cobb
RF Ruth

and a "Second Team"

Mathewson
Cochrane
Sisler
Lajoie
Boudreau
J. Collins
Williams
Speaker
Musial

and a whole segment of history of the game in the previous fifty years: "Alexander pitched 16 Shut-outs in one season," "Eddie Collins stole 6 bases in a single game," "Frank Chance was hit by a pitched ball 5 times in one day" (Gee, I wonder why.) And two of the guys on the "All-Star Team ..." (Wagner and Traynor) still lived in Pittsburgh, where I lived! Here I was, collecting '50 Bowmans and suddenly discovering that Johnny Hopp, Clyde McCullough and Dale Coogan weren't the only guys ever to play the game, and that the baseball world was lots deeper and older then I'd thought. I read every page of that book at least a dozen times, and still have the copy I owned then. In many ways it's my time machine.

It would be many, many years before I ever heard of a T06 or a T3, and even more before I owned one, but I was hooked. The "ancients" had it all. And still do.

Bob