Share Your Baseball Ostraca

[dbussell12]

Originally Posted by brianp-beme

Like I assume many of us Net54 folk, I had to look up ostraca and potsherd.

Here is my interpretative ostracadance performance using the medium of words. Hobby pioneer Buck Barker used the backs of vintage baseball cards to record biographical career data of the player pictured on the front, providing identifications that we are still utilizing within the hobby today.

Here is a 1925 Zeenut of a player identifed on the front by the last name of Haughy that Buck, while searching the archives of the Sporting News (in St. Louis I believe), could not pin down the player's identity, despite all his brainstorming efforts at searching last name alternatives. He would have done this research at the Sporting News probably sometime in the later 1970's or in the 1980's, because he also identified the name of the collector he received the card from (Weiss) and the year he obtained it from him (1975).


Brian

Wow Brian this is great! This makes me think of a lot of non-sport CDVs and postcards. I see this often in terms of biographies for scientists and historical figures or philosophers and the like.

Also makes me think of the backs of a fair bit of Type 1 photos from the early period of photojournalism in baseball. They are often just as interesting if not moreso than the photograph side due to the often descriptive annotation and stamping.

Wanted to take some liberties with the metaphor of 'ostraca' as scraps, remnants, fragments, writing. There's a lot of it in baseball history; I often find the fragments such as really powerfully/interestingly hand cut strip cards or pieces of old photos or documents to be just as interesting as anything else; again, often moreso than 'fully remnant' artifacts.


Cheers! This is very cool.