I’ll admit that I don’t know much about Mike “King” Kelly. I do however know that when it comes to cool baseball cards, this might be the coolest ever done. It comes from 1888’s Goodwin Champions set, which was set to compete with Allen & Ginter.
What’s incredibly ironic is that Upper Deck will soon release 2009 Goodwin Champions to once again compete with Allen & Ginter, now a Topps Company brand. As for King Kelly, he was a great player who won the batting title twice, led the league in runs three times, and even had some pop (by 1800 standards).
Despite all those accolades, King Kelly was quite the bad ass. He often cheated by stealing bases when the umpire wasn’t paying attention and perfected the ‘King Slide’, which is now commonly done to break up double plays.
From Wikipedia:
“Baseball games had only a single umpire at the time, and Kelly would watch the umpire to see if he was watching the play at first base or looking to see if a ball landed fair or foul. When convinced the umpire’s back was turned, Kelly would immediately run across the diamond to the next base, skipping either second or third, in full view of thousands of fans.”
The King died just one year after his last game in 1894 after contracting Pneumonia. He left his wife and daughter with nothing and when he was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1945, no one could track down a single family member of Kelly.
The King was 36 at the time of his death.
I love that card.
I don’t see what is so creepy about this card, other than the fact that I would like to have it tattooed to the inside of my eyelids. King Kelly is quite the BMF. Half the original rulebook was written in response to his shenanigans. Like the time he was managing a team and when the opposing batter hit a pop foul towards the bench, he called himself in as a defensive replacement for the catcher and caught the ball for an out.
Cool background, and that card is nice.
that card is awesome! i wish they made more cards of that guy. he sounds like an entertaining player.
Now THAT is a baseball card.
Perhaps Mario meant creepy, in the so beautiful its SCARY sort of sense
yeah im with jamoke on that.
Nice looking card! Wow…died at 36. Bummer.
I guess that because you’re a Canseco slappy, you think that something other than the Canseco topless in tight jeans cards could ever be topped in terms of creepiness, but for the rest of us, that homoerotic Canseco card makes even homosexuals uncomfortable.
King Kelly was the most popular player of his day, and a notoriously hard partier. He spent most of the money he made on buying drinks for the entire bar after games. He and player/manager Cap Anson feuded often, since Anson didn’t drink. Kelly was famously known as the “$10,000 Beauty” as he was sold from Chicago to Boston for that amount, a huge sum of money in the 1880’s. Kelly was amazingly daring on the basebaths and even had a song written about his steals in “Slide, Kelly, Slide.” It’s too bad his hard drinking lead to his poor health and contributed to his premature death. The Goodwin Champions set is one of the most beautiful ever. Check out the Cap Anson from the set for another gorgeous tobacco card example.