Though my collection is primarily autographs, I've always been enamored with the lifetime passes.
Here's link to a page that shows the passes in my collection. There are pictures of 20 passes on the page. I've included 9 of them here.
The first pass below is from 19th century player
Sliding Billy Hamilton. These paper passes were the first MLB lifetime passes and good only for admission to NL game.
This link takes you to the page where three other Hall of Famers' paper passes are pictured.
The passes were so well received that the AL followed suit. The two leagues combined forces and gave out solid gold passes to players with 20+ years of service, and solid silver passes to guys who played at least 10 years. These passes were issued in 1935.
The second pass is one of the 17 original solid gold passes. This one was given to
Hall of Fame shortstop Bobby Wallace.
The next pass is a silver pass. This one is issued to
Tommy Bond the 234-game winner who earned MLB's first pitching triple crown in 1877. Bond was the last living player from the NL's inaugural year of 1876. There are three additional silver passes from Hall of Famers
here.
Al Simmons' gold pass is smaller in size than the original gold passes issued. Simmons completed his 20th year of MLB service in 1944.
The
Harvey Haddix pass is made of leather. These passes are harder to find. There are two leather examples on
this page.
The
Dave Parker pass is made of metal. You can surmise a date range of when the pass was issued by looking at the facsimile signatures of the league presidents at the bottom.
Joe Cronin's lifetime pass is kind of fun because his facsimile signature as AL president is on the pass. He issued it to himself.
The final pass for MLB games is the from
George "Boomer" Scott. This format is what the current players get.
The Hall of Fame lifetime pass belonged to
Yankee skipper Joe McCarthy. This one was issued by the Hall of Fame and is good for free lifetime admission. There's another HoFer's pass like this on
this page as well.
Finally, on t
his page there are four letters written by Hall of Famers thanking
Ford Frick for the passes. The letters were penned in 1935 and '36. The one example shown here is from
Honus Wagner. There's another letter on the site that's from one of the first five Cooperstown inductees.
If you collect autographs at all, there are pages for each Hall of Famer on the site and more than 300 guys not (yet) in Cooperstown. There's a little something for everyone. I hope you enjoy. Here's the
homepage.
If you have any season or lifetime passes to share, I sure would enjoy seeing them!
04-20-2021, 10:57 AM
Lifetime passes & thank you letters
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