Vintage Fridays: Dick Littlefield, 1954 Bowman #213

Take a look at this very old, very classic card. Does anything strike you as odd? If you know your Orioles history, you'll recognize 1954 as the year that the St. Louis Browns moved east and became the O's. Of course, that meant that the card companies had a bunch of photos of guys in Brownie uniforms that needed some airbrushing. Topps chose to present mostly blank jerseys and caps, but Bowman got a little creative, approximating a design closely akin to the uniforms that had been worn in recent decades by the International League Orioles. It's a pretty neat look, but the birds-on-bat design had already become identified with the St. Louis Cardinals. Besides, if you look closer, Bowman's mystery artist was guilty of one of my greatest pet peeves: apostrophe abuse. What's really odd about this phenomenon is that some of the Orioles cards in this set have grammatically correct, apostrophe-free jerseys. If you click the previous link, you'll also notice that Don Lenhardt's cap shows a bird facing right, while Dick Littlefield's cap above seems to have a bird facing left. A little uniformity would be nice, but not nearly as interesting.

In the case of Littlefield, bothering to put him in an Oriole uniform at all would prove to be much ado about nothing. He pitched all of six innings for Baltimore, allowing seven runs. In May the Birds dealt him to Pittsburgh for outfielder Cal Abrams in a move that proved mutually beneficial: Dick won 10 games and posted a 3.60 ERA as a Pirate while Abrams hit .293 to lead an offensively-starved O's team.