Cards of common players usually cost a fraction of the star cards, (110:1 ratio in the case of my Jackie Robinson card when compared to the price I paid for Eddie Lake's card).
One of the reasons that I respect the 1949 Bowman set so much is that it contains several ballplayers who weren't considered stars at the time and had little chance of ever rising to the status of star. At the time of this card's printing Eddie Lake had already been in the major leagues for 10 years and was with his 3rd and final team, the Detroit Tigers. With a career batting average of .211 Eddie probably draws few comparisons to some of his more prolific peers of the time such as Stan Musial, Ted Williams or the aforementioned Mr. Robinson.
However, digging a bit deeper into Mr. Lake's stats we see that he, like so many of the common ilk provided an invaluable service to his teams. Perhaps the reason that Bowman included Eddie in this set was due to his ability to get on base by drawing walks from the pitcher? Looking back at his stats we see that he had 3 consecutive seasons where he drew at least 100 walks, an admirable feat considering that he wasn't thought of as a power hitting threat that opposing coaches would intentionally walk.
I like to image Eddie grinding out those walks game after game, using his skills of depth perception and ability to track ball movement to put himself on base time and time again. When you think of it, it's the common guys like him who setup RBI opportunities for their hall of fame teammates such as George Kell, (who had 59 in '49) .
Like the faceless factory workers who have a 1:110 salary ratio to their CEO's I empathize with Eddie Lake who is obviously undervalued in terms of contribution vs. perceived value.
Ode to the common man:
Card #107 of a 240 card set that was issued in 1949 by the Bowman Gum Company.
This particular card is near-perfectly centered but has rough cut vertical edges on both sides. There is a minimal print flaw with slight overlapping of color slanting towards the upper-left side of the card. The back of the card is in near mint condition and 3 out of 4 corners are untouched.
Even with it's imperfections I'm a big fan of this card, unfortunately it hasn't aged as well as my Robinson card, the colors on the front show slight yellowing due to age.
1 comment:
I grew up in Detroit in the 50's. My brother took me to my first Tiger game in 1949, and I was hooked on baseball, the Tigers and baseball cards. I used to play a board baseball game and would put in some of the lesser known Tigers like Eddie Lake (uniform # 7) and Neil Berry (uniform # 8), because I wanted to give them a chance to play. I enjoyed the info on Eddie. Now I know what his real value to the team was.
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