Thanks Mark. I thought I remembered two different sizes.

This 1962 Giants pennant is... strange. It is on the rare side and I have some questions about quality control. I bought the one on the bottom a week or so ago. My other two have some damage and this new one wasn't all that expensive. The first one I ever bought has the spine bleed. The second one is pretty nice, but it has a hole in it and very strange wrinkles. When I saw the third one (on the bottom) listed on ebay, it looked like it might be in better condition. It turns out that the ebay pic presented the pennant in a very favorable light and it was a kind of dirty. I've managed to clean it pretty well with a wet cloth.

When I put them all together, I noticed a few things. This new one is clearly a slightly different color, even after you take condition into account. And it is smaller (height and length). And the material is kind of different for each pennant.

But the strangest thing to me is that all three have some differences among the batters (see how many differences you can spot). Seems very strange for what was likely a very briefly made pennant. Not sure if this happened because of the screens being copied at some point? There being multiple versions of the same screen(s)? Or.... just natural variation from pennant to pennant when humans are involved.

Very strange, Marc. To me, the size difference is not a huge mystery - just a different piece of felt. Same with any color difference.

The different graphics are harder to explain. As far as I know (or guess), this is a “one off” pennant by an unknown maker. I would think (guess) they only had one screen. This is obviously not the case, since two bats are outlined and one is filled in. Maybe Kyle has previously opined on how many pennants a maker could get from one screen? Are you able to lay one pennant on another, with a bright light behind, to see if the batter dimensions are actually different? If you can’t do that, do measurements confirm they are different?

Weird.

edit: to my eye, the two batters with the outlined bat look the same. Are they not the same? The filled in bat version has some other differences to the batter.

This maker likely had multiple screens in use, at the time of production, to accelerate completion of this run given how little time they had to make these. That year, I believe, the Dodgers and Giants ended the season in a tie, forcing a best of three playoff. So, very little time to complete the job before game#1 of the world series, where these likely sold.

The differences in the artwork may just come down to the artist making multiple drawings, each with subtle differences, to test them to see what translated best on to felt. Apparently, they liked "hollow bat" variant best; but, could live with "solid bat"--especially if they could put his stencil into use and thereby speed things up??

The smaller pennant actually has smaller graphics. The batter is smaller than on the other two (my close up pics of the three batters likely messed up the scale). And there are some slight differences in the two hollow batter versions. Thus, multiple versions of the screen seems to make the most sense.

How common might this have been for something made by Trench, or some other larger company? I also assume the screens wore out after some time?

I should have been able to see that.

Excellent info, as always.

I like how you said you “believe” the 1962 season ended in a tie between the Giants and Dodgers. You know damn well it did and you know how that turned out! :p

Anybody seen these before? They qualified for my "if you haven't seen it before, you should probably buy it" rule so I took a flier. Can't find any info. Even reached out to Net54's resident Japan baseball expert and he hadn't seen and couldn't find any additional detail. 27" long. Sadaharu Oh and Shigeo Nagashima.

^^^ Almost looks like the original 60 year old plastic!

Yeah, it turned out about like the '51 season the previous decade....

...A Giant loss to the Yankees ;)