May pickups

[Dave Grob]

With the close of Heritage’s Auction, May has been a pretty good month with respect to picking up some styles for my exemplar jersey reference library.

1. c1947 Philadelphia Phillies Home Jersey: Classic short lived post-war era style by Wilson. A unique facet of construction on this jersey includes the fact that the sleeves are actually part of the body construction (not entirely unlike Raglan sleeves), lacking a joining seam across the chest and shoulder area. In addition, the underarm is without a gusset, but only features four venting holes. Lastly, the fabric panels are not a traditional front and back, but rather a left and right since the garment is joined in the rear center of the jersey. This same manner of construction can be found in Wilson jerseys provided to the Cleveland Indians in 1947 and 1948 as well.

2. 1950 Philadelphia A’s Home Jersey: Extremely rare and beautiful style. What I also love about this is it is an example of a jersey that features tagging for the manufacturer (MacGregor-Goldsmith) as well as the local distributor (Mitchell & Ness). The body of the garment features side panels and collar/sleeve areas made of typical wool blend flannel of the period, but the interior of body is a cotton/nylon durene with a much more open weave that the typical flannel products of the period. Back in 1936 Goldsmith of Cincinnati introduced a rather short lived open weave “Palm Beach” fabric. This particular “palm beach style” offering was produced by MacGregor-Goldsmith in limited numbers (not complete team orders) for teams from c1948-1950 and the teams included the Brooklyn Dodgers and Cleveland Indians, in addition to this Philadelphia A’s jersey.

3. 1954 Philadelphia A’s Road Jersey: Pretty tough one year style and the first time the team name would appear on the jerseys for the franchise. This is also the last year the A’s played in Philadelphia. Like the 1950 A’s home jersey, this features duel tagging as well for the manufacturer (MacGregor) as well as the local distributor (Pearson).

5. 1961 Los Angeles Angels Road Uniform (jersey & pants): First year team and style, and pretty tough to find from 1961.

4. 1960 Chicago White Sox Road Jersey: Nice style with sleeve “TV numbers”. Also features an example of a carry-over in manufacturers tagging by Wilson.

Dave Grob
DaveGrob1@aol.com