Brooks Robinson and the Baltimore Orioles

[BaltOrioles]

Brook Treakle was another photographer along the same lines as Mel Bailey and JD McCarthy, that took a lot of baseball photos and ended up producing postcards. My research shows he did MLB players, but much of his work involved the minor leagues. He was from the Virginia area.

Here's a post from Exhibitman from April 2019

"I've been doing some research over the past two years on these postcards. The photographer's name is Brook Treakle. He passed away in 1991, but he took a lot of photographs for the Peninsula Pilots in the Carolina League; in fact, his photographs were used for the two 1980 TCMA Peninsula Pilots sets with Julio Franco. ... Treakle's trademark is his immaculate hand-printing on the backs of the cards. When he passed away, his mother sold his collection. It was broken-down into three groups: photo postcards, negatives, and autographs. A lot of the autographed items have appeared on eBay. I found out the two collectors who purchased the negatives and the postcards. I don't know what quantities he produced the postcards in, but I have to believe it couldn't be more than a handful. He also took pictures of photographs in books and made postcards out of them, He referred to them as "photo negatives."


Years ago I picked up a couple groups of his photos that included B&W postcards (with postcard backs), postcard sized color photos and some larger 4x6 color photos. All of the photos were Rochester Red Wings from the late 70's through mid 80's. Photos included posed and action shots.

Here are some samples

Orlando Sanchez, Larry Sheets, Billy Ripken and Willie Royster

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Dallas Williams (twice), Steve Luebber and Jeff Youngbauer

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Example of the handwriting on the back

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