The SuperStar Project - No. 8

On regional bias (or not) and baseball gloves

When thinking about how to measure (super)stardom, I worry some about Stan Musial. Also Al Kaline and Rocky Colavito and Sam McDowell, maybe even Roberto Clemente a little. But mostly Stan Musial.

Musial spent his entire brilliant career, all 23 years of it, playing for the St. Louis Cardinals. Today we think of St. Louis (along with Kansas City and Chicago, probably) as bedrock Midwest — just look at a map, with Missouri dead in the center — but back in the old days, which is to say until the 1950s, St. Louis was both the westernmost and the southernmost city in the white major leagues. If you were a fan in Georgia in those years, you were probably a Cardinals fan; if you were a fan in Oklahoma, you were probably a Cardinals fan. Or at least you were more likely to follow the Cardinals than any other team, due to radio coverage. The Cardinals had vast reach, most notably with 50,000-watt KMOX, which on a clear night you could hear forever. Two generations of baseball fans from Atlanta to Dallas to Denver, thousands piled upon thousands of square miles, spent their summer afternoons and evenings listening to Harry Caray and Jack Buck call the Redbirds on the radio.

But of course St. Louis might as well have been a million miles away from the all the newspapers and publishing houses and national magazines and television networks and advertising agencies and all the rest of the white men deciding who got to be famous (to the degree that people can actually decide those things, which is certainly overrated, in sports anyway).

In some large sense, this doesn’t matter. The purpose of this project is essentially to measure fame — or stardom, if you prefer — by the metrics we have, or can devise, because … well, because they’re what we have. I wish that Baseball Magazine and The Sporting News had covered the great Negro Leagues. But they did not. We may assume that Satchel Paige was famous, because he made a good living pitching for crowds in probably every state in the Union over the course of roughly four decades. But all we can really say about Paige prior to the late ‘40s is that he was probably somewhat famous and should have been far more famous.

Musial was different; if he suffered from any sort of bias, it was regional rather than racial. Although it’s worth mentioning that The Sporting News was actually headquartered in St. Louis, and as the favored “western” and “southern” team the Cardinals did receive plenty of media attention. Still, he wasn’t going to get the same sort of attention that DiMaggio or Mays (in the ‘50s) or Mantle would get.

Again, though — my fundamental goal is not to determine who should have been superstars, and anyway we’ve got plenty of evidence that both Musial and Paige were superstars. If Paige had been white or Musial had played in New York, they might well have been bigger superstars. But, you know … they both did pretty well for themselves.

What worries me is the possibility of actually missing superstars because their fame isn’t measurable by the metrics easily at hand, which ultimately are New York- and (beginning in the 1960s) Los Angeles-centric.

I mean, isn’t it possible that children all around Ohio and Kentucky and West Virginia idolized Ted Kluszewski for a few years? Without word sifting back to the editorial offices in Manhattan? Sure seems possible. So maybe it makes sense to pay a bit more attention to The Sporting News and Baseball Digest (Chicago) and the engraved player endorsements in the baseball gloves and mitts for the kiddies? Maybe?

Then again, back in the old days pretty much everyone’s name was on a glove. I’ve sorta known this for a long while, but still was sorta shocked when I found a LUIS OLMO glove in an antique mall. Olmo was a major-league regular for all of two seasons (in one of which he led the N.L. with thirteen triples). I was sorta shocked when I found (and purchased) a DICK DROTT glove in a thrift store.

In 1957, McGregor advertised “Speedtrap Model” gloves endorsed with the signatures of (among others) Johnny Groth, Andy Carey, Alex Grammas, Don Liddle, Gus Bell, and Gus Zernial. If you recognized all those names, congratulations: You just tested out of Baseball History 101!

Legitimate stars (or former stars) Marty Marion, Johnny Pesky, Red Schoendienst, and Jackie Jensen all had gloves too. Not to mention Willie Mays. But you can hardly argue that getting your name on a glove for kids meant you were a superstar. Or (honestly) even a star.

So, yeah. You could get a Rocky Colavito glove, or an Al Kaline. You could also get a Bob Apromonte from a big player in the stores like Wilson Sporting Goods.

And without knowing how many gloves Wilson sold, respectively, it’s difficult to know how many “star points” should go to a player whose name was on a glove. I can imagine a sliding scale that would actually elevate a player like Colavito, whose status might be elevated if we found his gloves were outselling … say, Roger Maris’s in 1962 (unlikely, I know).

But in the absence of sales, figures … I dunno. Maybe the big companies — McGregor, Rawlings, Spalding, Wilson — have retained them, and would make them available to a persistent researcher. Absent those numbers, though, one’s best resource is probably those (and other) companies’ annual catalogs and broadsides, which at least include endorsements and prices, which should serve as a good proxy for player popularity (as you might guess, Willie Mays gloves usually cost more than Dick Drott gloves).

This is where my original thoughts on the subject, absent sales figures or comprehensive catalogs or pricing, petered out. But the research sure would be a good time, as the subject has hardly been explored in the literature yet.