Vintage Fridays: Russ Snyder, 1967 Topps #405

Baseball Reference has given me another new toy! Now anyone can search for historical transactions by date. That's how I learned that on January 24, 1961, the Orioles completed a five-for-two deal with the Kansas City Athletics. The O's shipped out Bob Boyd, Al Pilarcik, Wayne Causey, Clint Courtney, and Jim Archer in order to obtain Whitey Herzog and Russ Snyder. Baltimore got seven solid years out of Snyder, including a career-best 126 OPS+ (.306 AVG, .368 OBP) in their World Series-winning 1966 season. The A's even sent "Scrap Iron" Courtney back to the Birds after a single game; he would play the final 22 games of his 11-season career in Charm City before the club released him in July. So anyway, there's your reminder than once upon a time, the Orioles actually acquired players during the offseason.

Vintage Fridays: Russ Snyder, 1962 Topps #64

You know, if I have an Orioles blog and I've written 1,300-plus posts and haven't gotten around to posting a Russ Snyder card, I expect somebody to call me on it. You guys are slacking on the job! Anyways, I'm boogeying up to Northeastern Pennsylvania in a few hours for a holiday weekend of R-and-R at the cottage, but I plucked a few cards from a pile in my living room to tide you over until I return on Monday.

We'll kick it off with a true keeper, the kind of card that is the pure essence of Vintage Fridays. You've got the timeless woodgrain border of 1962 Topps, the elegant home Orioles uniform with thin black piping, orange script and front jersey number, and the early smiling bird sleeve logo, and of course Russ Snyder showing off a classic home run swing. Russ may not have actually hit many longballs in his 7 years in Baltimore (26 total, with a season high of 9 in '62), but he was a solid contact hitter: .280 AVG as an Oriole. He led the club with a .305 mark in 1962.

Oh, I almost forgot the best part of this card! It's the rare vintage card with a photo taken within the lovely environs of 33rd Street. The grand old right-center field scoreboard at Memorial Stadium is visible over Snyder's left shoulder, with its telltale Hamm's Brewing Company advertisement on top. I know much more about this scoreboard than I did a month ago, and it's all thanks to a recent blog post at The Fleer Sticker Project. Fleerfan does a great job of sifting through photo archives and auction sites to unearth beautiful old pictures from Charm City's sporting past. In the post linked above, he offers an illustrated history of the scoreboards at Memorial Stadium. Since I never set foot in the ballpark until the late 1980s, I had no idea how cool that original scoreboard looked looming over the players at field level. You get to see a progression of local beer magnates, from Gunther (my great-grandmother's brew of choice) to Hamm's to Schaefer. Even when budgetary constraints saw the big old scoreboard replaced with a smaller model in left field in 1970, the National and National Bohemian (Natty Boh to you, hon) ads ensured that a Bawlmer flavor remained. As with most aspects of American life and culture, things went to hell in the 1980s. National head Jerry Hoffberger sold the O's, and billboards for Busch, Budweiser, and Toyota settled into place.

Say it with me: ain't the beer cold!