1950 Winston-Salem Cardinals



This 11-3/16" x 8-3/4" team picture of the 1950 Winston-Salem
Cardinals has facsimile autographs on the back. Future Hall
of Fame manager Earl Weaver is third from left in the bottom row.

 The last National Sports Collectors Convention I attended was in 2005. It was in Cleveland, if I recall correctly. At the show my major purchase was a scrapbook of photos related to the Winston-Salem Cardinals of the Class B Carolina League.

The scrapbook was missing its cover, and a few of the pictures that had originally been there were gone, but as a fan of 1950s minor league baseball, it seemed like a worthy addition to my collection.

Less than a year later I left my full-time job as editor of the Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards and mothballed my collection for the next few years.

Recently, as the result of a posting on a vintage card collectors forum, I dug up the Winston-Salem sacrapbook for a closer look.

The book included team photos of the 1948-1951 squads, along with three partial sets of player portrait photographs, from 1950-1952.

The player photos were all the work of a Winston-Salem studio, Coppedge Piedmont Photo Finishers, Inc., whose advertising was rubber-stamped on the back of each picture. The photos are 4-1/4" x 5-1/2" with wide white borders.



Earl Weaver, from team photo

 It is not known how the photos were distributed, i.e., whether sold as a set, possibly with some type of album, or given out at selected games as an attendance incentive.

The scrapbook contained 18 individual portrait photos of the players. According to BaseballReference.com, there were 22 players (presumably those in 10+ games, except pitchers) on the roster of the 1950 Winston-Salem Cardinals.

The 18 players I have, plus future Hall of Fame manager Earl Weaver, who was a 19-year old second baseman on the team, seem to comprise the full set of these player photos.

There are no photos of Russell McGovern, Willie Osteen and John Romonosky, who were on the roster of the 1950 Winston-Salem Cardinals, probably joining the team later in the season.  

This past winter, the photo of Weaver showed up on a collectors' forum. I'd bet the Earl Weaver picture was taken out of this very scrapbook before I bought the rest of it in 2005. My reason for this presumption is that the name penned in blue ink in the bottom border of the Weaver photo is in the same hand that penned the names of the players on the other photos.

The pictures I have are: 

• Hal Atkinson
• Gene Barth
• Hoyt Benedict
• Bob Bills
• George Condrick
• J.C. Dunn
• Neal Hertweck
• Jack Huesman
• George Kissel
• Bill LaFrance
• Vinegar Bend Mizell
• Kenny Morgan
• Jim Neufeldt
• Lee Peterson
• Ed Polak
• Russel Rac
• Bobby Tiefenauer
• Dick Umberger

 Besides Weaver, Vinegar Bend Mizell is the best-known future major leaguer on the 1950 W-S Cardinals. He was also 19 at the time, and had a 17-7 record with a 2.48 ERA that season. Romonosky, who pitched in four games for W-S with no record, pitched in the majors for the St. Louis Cardinals in 1953, and for the Washington Senators in 1958-1959. Neal Hertweck had two games with the 1952 Cardinals, going 0-for-6 at the plate. Bobby Tiefenauer won 16 and lost eight for the 1950 W-S Cardinals. His major league career included 10 seasons as a reliever for St. Louis (1952, 1955, 1961), Cleveland (1960, 1965, 1967), Houston (1962), Milwaukee (1963-1965), the Yankees (1965) and the Cubs (1968).

  

Here's a scan (actually two scans put together because of the page size) of one of the scrapbook pages.

Tomorrow we'll look at the 1951 Winston-Salem Cardinala pictures.