A T218 Toehold

One of the pre-war sets I’ve long admired is the 1910–1912 T218 Champions set. The cards are double-sized compared to standard tobacco cards and much of the artwork is spectacular. Unfortunately, there are no baseball cards in the checklist—ruling out obvious samples to pursue and rendering the set mostly irrelevant to this blog.

However, there are a handful of toehold cards to choose from. The big name is alleged Black Sox bag man Abe Attell who features in the boxing portion of the checklist. But there are also Platt Adams, Frank Irons, and Abel Kiviat who as track and field athletes also ended up playing baseball in the 1912 Olympics.

Last month Jason generously sent me a well-loved Frank Irons card. I’m not sure he was aware of the baseball significance as much as he wanted to make sure I had a sample, any sample, of the set.* I don’t care that it’s mighty beat up, I just enjoyed the excuse to go chase down internet reference links about baseball in the 1912 Games.

*I’m generally incapable of getting rid of any cards once I have them.

In those games there was a baseball exhibition between a Swedish club and a US team made up of Track and Field athletes. The result of the game made it to newspapers across the US but it’s a pretty bare-bones story which is more interested in just listing which athletes took part. There is however a PDF of the official report of the 1912 Stockholm games which is much more interesting.

Not only is “Baseball” listed in the Table of Contents,* there’s a writeup of the game, a box score, and a half dozen photos. Not quite as much information as the RG Knowles book had but still a fun read. I’ve gone ahead and screenshotted the PDF so I can summarize here.

*Since the PDF page numbering is messed up due to bilingual pages sharing the same page number the fact that Baseball starts on page 823 doesn’t help you navigate the PDF a all.

Because this is an official report about the games, the summary centers the Swedish experience. This is actually awesome since baseball had only reached Sweden in 1910 and they were still grappling with some of the fundamentals—especially regarding pitching—two years later.

Specifically, they hadn’t figured out how to throw curveballs and were worried about their ability to hit them as well. They ended up borrowing three pitchers and one catcher from the US team in order to have a semblance of fairness in the competition. While they were concerned about hitting, they do appear to have been proud of getting five hits and took special pride in Wickman’s* double.

*I can’t find a first name for him anywhere.

Of the toehold guys, two played in this game. Frank Irons was the starting left fielder, went 1 for 2, and made one put out. Abel Kiviat meanwhile played the whole game at shortstop, going 2 for 4, hitting a triple, stealing a base, scoring twice, and making two put outs.* Platt Adams only played in a USA vs USA game** but his brother Ben was the starting pitcher for Sweden.

*There’s a more US-focused writeup of the game which goes more into Kiviat as the star of he game as well.

*Which didn’t make it into the official report and Wikipedia doesn’t have a source for the  second box score. Jim Thorpe also supposedly played in the second game (the first one was the same day as the decathlon competition); no idea if he had found his shoes by then.

A couple other items of note. I cannot express how much I enjoy Sweden bragging about being able to play ball until 10pm in the summer. The location of the game still exists as a sporting facility. And the umpire of the game was none other than Hall of Famer George Wright.

The report also has a half-dozen photos of the game. The team photo of the Swedish side is great and the other photos showing Swedish action in the game are a lot of fun too. As I noted earlier it’s clear that the Swedes took pride in their five hits since one of the four game highlights is Wickman’s double while another is Welin’s single.

I do wish we had more photos of the US players—or at least a team photo—but I can’t complain about what’s here.