Vintage Fridays: Duane Pillette, 1955 Bowman #244

Mail Day! By gum, it's been a while. I'm not the only old-timer who's returned to card blogging while housebound. Earlier this week, Max of the Starting Nine blog touched base to let me know that he had some odds n' sods to send my way. I jumped at the offer, and today a messy mix of stuff (Max's words, not mine) arrived by post. My absolute favorite card in the bundle was this 1955 Bowman card of Duane Pillette, the ace starter of the inaugural Oriole squad. There wasn't stiff competition for that title, as the card back notes that his team-best record was 10-14. Still, that's a .417 win percentage for a team that only won 35% of their games overall. His 3.12 earned run average (115 ERA+) was 12th best in the American League, to boot. There were several other cards in Max's package that I can't wait to share with you, so stay tuned.

Vintage Fridays: Duane Pillette, 1954 Topps #107

Today's card is all about beginnings and firsts. It's the first 1954 Topps card in my collection. 1954 Topps was the first modern Major League Baseball card set (along with 1954 Bowman) to feature the Baltimore Orioles. The team had just moved east from St. Louis, bringing Charm City back into the American League for the first time since 1903, when the city's charter A.L. franchise was moved to New York. That's right, the Yankees were once the Orioles. Ugh. Anyway, the St. Louis club was the first pro sports team named the Browns to relocate to Baltimore from Middle America, but they wouldn't be the last.

At the time this card was designed, pitcher Duane "Dee" Pillette had yet to suit up for the O's - no one had. Topps was able to get a hold of the team's official logo, which is reminiscent of Heckle and Jeckle. But they had to do the best they could in approximating the new team's uniforms. For the headshot, Duane's cap has been colored in black with a reasonable facsimile of the scratchy-looking "realistic bird" that the club would wear in some capacity through the 1965 season. For the inset action pose, they decided that discretion was the better part of valor and just airbrushed out the Browns insignia on Duane's jersey and cap.

Pillette himself was involved in a couple significant "firsts" in baseball history. His father Herman, who won nineteen games for the Tigers the year Duane was born (1922), lost nineteen the following year to "lead" the American League. When Pillette the younger racked up fourteen defeats as a Brownie in 1951, he and his Pop became the first (and so far, only) father-son duo to lead their league in this dubious category. In brighter news, "Dee" was the first pitcher to win a game for the new Orioles, topping the host Tigers 3-2 in the Birds' second-ever game on Wednesday, April 14, 1954. Not a bad start, and certainly not a bad finish: the righty would wrap up the season as the Birds' first team leader in earned run average, at 3.12.