Good thing I have a big head
Every once in awhile we collectors will encounter a mystery item, one that can’t immediately be identified. It’s both exciting and maddening at the same time! So we have to swap our collector’s hat for a researcher’s hat. For me it’s part of the fun of this hobby, so I thought I would recount the story of my most recent aqcuisitions, two balls from the Bi-State League.
The ball on the left is from 1936, the ball on the right from 1938.
The person from whom I obtained the balls got them from her grandfather, Bob Mason, a shortstop who played in the minors from 1935-1941. In ’36 and ’37 Bob played for the Bi-State League’s Danville-Schoolfield Leafs, of Danville, Virginia. She related how Bob made sure to get teammates, and sometimes players on opposing teams, to sign balls for him. She’d already done some research to identify all of the signatures.
My first step to verify these balls, as detailed in my Collector’s Guide (which you can get here), was to check the president’s stamp and look up the president’s tenure. The ’38 ball was easy: Joseph (Joe W) Garrett was league prez from 1938-1941. For the earlier ball, however, I immediately ran into a small mystery: Jake Wells was league prez in 1936, but J.P. Wells was listed as prez for 1941. My baseball thought to be from 1936 was stamped, “J.P. Wells”.
Similar names, but they’re listed differently in the Encyclopedia of Minor League Baseball (where most of the information on this site regarding league presidents was obtained), as well as the Wikipedia page for the league.
| Classification | Class D (1936–1942) |
|---|---|
| Sport | Minor League Baseball |
| Inaugural season | 1934 |
| Ceased | 1942 |
| President | J. Frank Wilson (1934) Dr. J.E. Taylor (1935) Jake Wells (1936) Win Clark (1937) Joseph Garrett (1938-1940) J. P. Wells (1941) Dr. T. S. Wilson (1942) |
To further complicate things, “Jake Wells (1936)” was a hyperlink to another Wiki page for an early 20th Century baseball player named Jake Wells, but he died in 1927, so clearly that link was in error, he couldn’t be the same guy.
Next up: baseball-reference.com, which refers to the presidents the same way (Jake in ’36 and J.P. in ’41) and had the same erroneous hyperlink to the same, wrong, Jake Wells.
I changed tack at that point and looked up the signatures on the ball, using baseball-reference.com again, to verify that these names were players on the 1936 Danville-Schoolfield Leafs. They checked out.
Still working on the assumption that Jake and J.P. were different people (perhaps father and son, it’s happened before: see the Florida State League’s George MacDonald and George MacDonald, Jr.), my next thought was that Bob Mason had a ball from 1941 and chased down his 1936 teammates to sign it. So the next step was to validate that the ball was indeed from 1936.
I started by examining the Goldsmith logo on the north panel of both balls.
1936 ball on the left, 1938 ball on the right
Note that the logos are nearly identical except for the slightly narrower and more elongated font on the ’38 ball. Referring to the Guide again, the elongated font was introduced in the late 1930s. That alone ruled out that the ball was actually a 1941 ball, but there were more clues to check.
Next I looked at the stamping on the front panel. Typical of baseballs used by the low minor leagues in the ’30s, ’40s, and into the ’50s, these were not made specifically for the league, but they are an off-the-shelf model with the league stamp added later, in this case on the east panel. Leagues that contracted with Goldsmith were provided with its “97 League” model.
The ’36 ball has “Official League Ball” on the front panel, with “No. 97” as part of the stamp on the south panel. The ’38 ball has “Official 97 League” on the front panel, using the same stamp design that Goldsmith would use for this model well into the 1950s. This was further confirmation that not only was the ball not from 1941, but did in fact pre-date the 1938 ball.
I was now almost certain that Jake Wells and J.P. Wells were the same person, and that his president’s stamps probably used the two names interchangeably. There was no other explanation that came to mind. After several fruitless internet searches I had hit a wall, there was no more research I could do on my own. So I reached out to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum via email, to see if their research department could help. I very quickly received a response from the Library Director, who’d done a brief search of newspaper archives and discovered one account that referred to Jake as J.P. So he was inclined to agree that the two Wells were one and the same. My baseball was a real 1936 baseball. Why the Encyclopedia has them listed differently is anybody’s guess. Wikipedia and Baseball-reference.com undoubtedly used the same sourcee that I did.
There you have it, my latest adventure in baseball dating. This was probably not as enjoyable to read as it was for me to do and to write, but I thought it might be interesting to give an example of how we collectors have to wear many hats, including those of researcher and historian.
So keep those hats handy and happy collecting!
-Tony Baseballs