Washington DC Baseball

[GeoPoto]

Thank you, Rad Hazard, for posting two nice OJ cards featuring Washington players.

Player #75D: Howard S. "Howie" Shanks. Outfielder for the Washington Senators in 1912-1922. 1,440 hits and 185 stolen bases in 14 MLB seasons. His best season was 1921 with Washington as he posted an OBP of .370 with 81 runs scored and 69 RBIs in 647 plate appearances. He finished his career with the New York Yankees in 1925.

We finish from Shanks' SABR biography and his life and death road to the big leagues: “My boy, prepare for the finish. You ain’t got more than a couple of weeks to live.” That is what a doctor told Howard Shanks in 1910. Shanks was told he had consumption (tuberculosis). He had just finished his second year of professional baseball, playing at East Liverpool, Ohio. Barney Dreyfuss of the Pittsburgh Pirates was interested in him, but Shanks only weighed 130 pounds at the time, and someone saw something that concerned them regarding his overall health. When they saw the medical report, the Pirates lost interest. For his part, Shanks went home, to prepare for death or one of the greatest comebacks of all time. He went on to play 14 seasons of major-league baseball and, though he died at the relatively young age of 51, it would be safe to agree with Shanks that “Either that doc didn’t know his business or Monaca (his hometown) is some health resort.” . . .

. . . In 1911, having survived the diagnosis, and put on about 40 pounds, he played for the second-place Youngstown Steelmen and hit .291 with nine homers in 124 games, while committing only three errors. Clearly, he was healthy. He stood 5-feet-11 and is listed as weighing 170 pounds. As early as May, he was being looked over by Jimmy McAleer. “The lad is about the best young outfielder I have seen this year…I had been tipped off some time ago to this player, and so I thought I’d go down and look him over. The lad is marvelously fast in the field and seems to know just what to do with himself. I can have him if I want him, and most likely I’ll take him, too, after a few weeks.” McAleer was unable to act right away, because Shanks was so popular with Youngstown fans that manager Bill Phillips did not want to let him go. (Washington selected him in that year's Rule 5 draft.

Note: Here we feature a putative Howie Shanks card from 1921, the W461-1 issued in his name, which actually pictures Wally Schang of the New York Yankees. Schang, thus, is the only player in the set technically featured more than once.

https://www.net54baseball.com/attach...1&d=1673258889
https://www.net54baseball.com/attach...1&d=1673258892