Significant WaJo discovery and mystery
 

This picture of the 1905 Olinda Oil Wells baseball team with a 17 year-old Walter Johnson was recently sent to the Brea Historical Society by its owner, who was seeking any information they might have about the team, and they in turn forwarded it to me. Not long ago, I donated to the Historical Society my research papers and some memorabilia relating to Johnson's time playing semipro ball in Southern California during the years 1904-10. As the co-author of a lengthy article on the subject (http://cwcfamily.org/wj/cc0.htm) as well as his biographer, they figured I might be able to shed some light on it. Needless to say, I was blown away by this discovery, the only photograph I'm aware of capturing Johnson with one of the several SoCal semipro teams for whom he pitched prior to ascending to the American League in 1907. My cousin and co-author of the article, Chuck Carey, who lives in Anaheim, and I had each devoted countless hours in the search for just such a photo without success, and here it was! Not only that, it pictured the young Johnson with his FIRST professional outfit. Here's where the mystery comes in: I can't figure out where this picture came from, and that's important because the source of this picture might possibly picture some of the other semipro teams Johnson pitched for during this seminal period: Olive, Rivera, Anaheim, Santa Ana, and San Diego. The picture is in the style of the major baseball guides of the time: Spalding, Reach, Lajoie's, John McGraw's, and Wright and Ditson. All of those for the year 1906, which would have included 1905 teams, can be accessed online (http://www.seanlahman.com/2014/08/20...seball-guides/) and none picture semipro teams. The Wright and Ditson guide for this year is unavailable on the web, so I couldn't check that one, perhaps it was the source. An additional clue came from the owner of the picture, who said a team from Compton was on the other side, which makes me wonder if there was perhaps a West Coast version of one of the major guides, or a separate guide altogether for the coast teams. The owner, who also dated it 1905, was supposed to have long ago received it and gotten back to us with any further information, but has been silent so far, so I thought I would present the picture and mystery to the forum. There is another future big leaguer in the photo, by the way: Jack Burnett, who played in 59 games for the St. Louis Cardinals in 1907. It's amazing what's still out there waiting to be discovered, isn't it?

http://luckeycards.com/olinda.jpg

It's certainly a mystery!

I wonder if the significance has anything to do with a pickle...

Questionable post.

I read the original post & didn't see an image of the find?

It should be all fixed now.. The scan was too large. And the grainy look to it is the way it came over. (and a really cool discovery at that)

Great find! Thanks for posting it, and I hope you solve the mystery of its source.

Odd that his face is more obscured than the other players.

You wonder if at 17 he had any idea how good he was.

Here we are 110 plus years later, and he would still probably get more votes than anyone else as the greatest ever.

Did you forget about Mariano already?

At that point it was probably as much a surprise to him as it was to everyone else.

I'm 200 miles from the Bronx.

Seriously, I don't see how there's any debate that the Big Train is #1, but I wouldn't call you insane if you said Grove or Seaver or Clemens.

Very cool, thanks for sharing Hank.

I tried to dig around a bit and came across a 1922 bibliography of The Spalding Baseball Collection, online here:

https://books.google.com/books?id=9U...page&q&f=false

This shows at least two possibilities (there may be more):

Pg 6 Spalding's Official Pacific Coast Base Ball Book 1910-1911

Pg 23 Pacific Association of the Amateur Athletic Union of the United States 1910

I know someone at the HOF that has helped me research a few things - if we reach a dead end here shoot me an email and I can drop her a line.

Amazing find. These types of posts make this place terrific. Thank you for sharing.

It looks like something that was cut out of an old baseball guide, like the ones produced by Spalding or Reach. I'm not sure how early they did these, but I have an Oakland Oaks team photo clipped from a 1912 guide, and it's cropped and labeled the same way. There's lots of these clippings on eBay, and they don't sell for much, although some of sellers claim they are some kind of premium, or even, a card.

Yes, please do, Bryan, and thanks for your help. If there was a 1906 version of the "Spalding Pacific Coast Base Ball Book," that would be the most likely candidate. Or, if that 1910-1911 edition was the only one ever done, perhaps they filled it out with teams from earlier years. There were also Spanish-American and British editions of the Spalding guide for 1906, I wonder if those might have included some semipro teams not in the regular American edition.

Yes, it's definitely taken from a guide, and would have little or no value as such. However, the historical value of the only known--and previously thought not to exist--picture of Johnson at the very beginning of his professional career--is enormous. According to the link I provided with the listing of guides published, there were four of them in 1906: Spalding, Reach, LaJoie's, and Wright and Ditson. I went through the first three and not only didn't I find the Olinda team pictured, there weren't any semipro teams at all. I couldn't find a copy of the Wright and Ditson guide online, so I don't know about it. Perhaps the HOF or LOC has one. The page with the Olinda team picture is very much in the style of the guides I saw, as you pointed out.

IMO, there are at least a dozen, and maybe more like 15, that you can mount a credible case for.

There really were some great pitchers back in the day. Walter was certainly at or near the top, imo.
To the original first post, the discovery of this 1905 Olinda Oil Wells picture of him at 17 yrs old and in uniform, is a great way to start 2019!! Thanks for sharing it.



I was just reading his Wiki page and incidentally it has this other, much later picture of him there.

http://luckeycards.com/barrb.jpg

Not that much later, Leon, just four years. He's still only 21 years old in yours. Incidentally, do we know whether those postcards ever got sold, or are your prototypes all there is to that issue? And I'm still looking for the source of that Olinda picture, clearly some kind of guide similar to the Spalding and Reach guides of the period, but right now that's all I know.