Remembering Ol’ Bobo
Louis Norman "Bobo" Newsom was baseball's everywhere man, playing for dozens of teams during the mid-1900s. But over the years, he's been mostly forgotten — and cards are a reason why.
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“Bobo” Newsom should be a household name.
For collectors, Louis Norman Newsom is probably best known for his 1953 Topps card, No. 15. By that point Bobo was 45 years old, his hair thinning, looking more like a manager than a player. But he could still pitch. He would always pitch. All he needed was someone to give him a chance.
The back of the card hints at Bobo’s legendary story.
“Bobo” is one of the most fabulous characters in diamond history. He holds the record for playing on most Major League teams (9), and has worn the uniform of 6 of the 8 AL teams. A good many of his teammates and opponents were in the cradle when he played his 1st pro ball game in 1928. He’s a member of the exclusive 200-win club and yet has lost more ball games in the Majors than he has won. The A’s signed him in June of ‘52.
Jim McConnell — a California-based hobby pioneer who wrote for “The Trader Speaks,” an early collecting publication and spoke at the 1970 West Coast Sports Collectors’ Convention — wrote a book about Newsom, titled “Bobo Newsom: Baseball’s Traveling Man,” and he maintains a Newsom-focused Facebook page. I recently spoke to McConnell about Bobo and vintage cards.
"His family said that was his favorite baseball card,” McConnell said of the 1953 Topps card, which features an artistic depiction of a dignified, gray-haired Newsom.
Newsom signed a contract with the Senators just before the start of the 1952 season and later picked up with the Philadelphia Athletics. With Bobo nearing retirement, Topps exec Sy Berger promised him a card. Bobo also ended up getting a set of golf clubs out of the deal, according to McConnell.
“At the time the card was issued, it was questioned whether he was actually going to pitch that year for the A's. Turned out he actually did pitch a little bit. The card came out, and Bobo thought it was great. It kind of makes him look handsome,” McConnell said.
“He used to carry around a stack of those and give them out to kids and fans.”
Have arm, will travel
Bobo was like a mid-1900s Bartolo Colon, with Yoenis Cespedes’ hubris to match — he suited up for what seemed like a billion teams, playing wherever he was wanted; continued pitching deep into his 40s; understood and utilized the power of the media; wasn’t liable to report on time, or in the shape teams had hoped; didn’t mind publicly battling management; recognized and exercised his freedom during the era of baseball’s reserve clause; was largely respected by his peers; enjoyed having his fun; got into a fistfight or two along the way; and was always worth your attention.
The Hartsville, South Carolina native made his major league debut with the Brooklyn Robins in 1929. Newsom, also nicknamed “Buck,” bounced from team to team as he established himself, setting a pattern that would continue throughout his career. Two teams in 1929. Three teams in 1930. Little Rock in 1931. The Cubs for one game in 1932. The PCL's Los Angeles Angels in 1933 (he was 30-11 and voted the league’s most valuable player). By 1934, he was in the majors more or less to stay, going 16-20 for the St. Louis Browns. Then it was on to the Senators, the Red Sox, back to the Browns, and to the Tigers, where he would find the greatest personal success; back to Washington, and Brooklyn, and St. Louis, and Washington, and the Philadelphia Athletics ... the Senators, the Yankees for a world championship in 1947, to the Giants in 1948, to Chattanooga and Birmingham of the Southern Association, then back to Washington and then the Philadelphia Athletics for the final games of his long, mostly fruitful, endlessly fascinating career.
Newsom was never better than 1940, when he went 21-5 with a 2.83 ERA to lead the Tigers to the pennant. He was even better amid personal tragedy in the World Series against the Reds. After pitching a complete game win in Game One, he reconciled with his father Quill, with whom he had long been estranged. That friction, McConnell said, stemmed in large part from the death of Bobo’s mother Lillian years earlier in a suspicious car tragedy in which Quill was the driver. Bobo was 17 when his mother died.
With Game One at Crosley Field in Cincinnati, some 500-odd miles northwest of Hartsville, Bobo’s father decided to come see his son play for the only time of his big league career.
“They go out afterward, have a little party, and the family’s together,” McConnell said. “That night, the father has a heart attack and dies … As a result, Bobo kind of disappears. He’s gone for three days and this is the middle of the World Series, and they don’t know whether he’s going to come back.”
Bobo came back. He ended up pitching a masterpiece in Game Five, allowing three hits and going the distance in an 8-0 victory to put Detroit up 3-2 in the series. All these years later, the performance remains one of the most dominant outings in the history of the Fall Classic. He was back on the mound for Game Seven, and turned in another outing for the ages, but the Reds squeaked across two runs to win the championship.
Never back down
Detroit had dreams of winning another pennant in 1941, but Bobo showed up to camp out of shape, and his play suffered, and he ended up losing 20 games. Up and down and out of town, on the carousel he went. By 1942, after he declined a pay cut, his contract was purchased by the Senators, and later the Dodgers, and he pitched with Brooklyn until he and manager Leo Durocher reached an impasse. Bobo got into it with catcher Bobby Bragan over a dropped third strike, and Leo the Lip poured kerosene on the spark by suspending Newsom for “insubordination” (Brooklyn also wanted to avoid paying an ensuing bonus to Newsom).
The suspension provoked a mutiny among Dodgers players on July 11, 1943. Star infielder Arky Vaughan walked up to Durocher and gave him his uniform before the team’s game against the Pirates, and most of the players declined to take the field out of protest. When they finally did, 10 minutes late, Vaughan decided to sit in the stands next to Bobo. The Dodgers won the game 23-6.
GM Branch Rickey ended up choosing his manager over the well-traveled pitcher, trading Newsom to the Browns. Bobo initially stated he would not join St. Louis, and when he did, they probably wish he hadn’t — he went 1-6 with a 7.39 ERA.
In one episode recounted in “Baseball’s Traveling Man,” Newsom, then with Philadelphia, was getting hit hard during a 1944 game, and famed manager Connie Mack’s son Earle was filling in for his dad. Eventually Connie had enough and called on his son to remove Newsom. So Earle Mack walked to the mound.
“Daddy says you have to come out now,” Earle Mack said.
“Tell Daddy to go screw himself,” Newsom replied, and he stayed in the game.
A pitcher for all time
Newsom’s career overlapped with Babe Ruth’s and Mickey Mantle’s. He faced the Babe 17 times, holding him to 4 hits and 3 walks … in games that counted. On June 12, 1934, Ruth smashed a Newsom pitch into the stands, but the game was washed out by rain and the home run was wiped off the books.
While Newsom never faced the Mick in game action, he did pitch against or play with just about every other player from the 1930s, 1940s and early 1950s: Hack Wilson and Jimmie Foxx and Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio and Lou Gehrig and Stan Musial and Schoolboy Rowe and High Pockets Kelly and Soup Campbell …
To put Bobo’s longevity into context: he played for Connie Mack, whose major league days began as a player in 1886, and he pitched to Yogi Berra, whose major league days continued as a coach until 1989.
In 1934 with the Browns, one of the team’s coaches, Charley O'Leary, then 58, came out of retirement and pinch hit, getting a single. O’Leary was born in 1875. Near the end of his career, Bobo played on the Athletics with Bobby Shantz, who is 94 and the oldest living MVP.
Meaning Bobo played on teams with men whose lives have covered 145 years.
A baseball
I was drawn to Bobo’s story because of Shantz, one of my favorite players. I wanted to pick up a Shantz autograph on a William Harridge 1950s American League baseball dating to Shantz’s heyday with the Philadelphia Athletics, and I was lucky enough to find a signed ball featuring signatures of Shantz and some of his A’s teammates.
The ball dates to 1953, the year after Shantz’s breakout season. He signed the ball in blue ink on the sweet spot. The rest of the ball features a random collection of signatures. Some of the players achieved fame and success. Others only got half-sips of hot coffee in the majors.
Elmer Valo, a native of Czechoslovakia who played more than 20 seasons in the big leagues, and later spent decades as a coach and scout
Ferris Fain, a five-time all-star and two-time batting champ whose career was undone by bad knees and a bad temper
Carmen Mauro, an outfielder who played with three teams in 1953, his final MLB season
Ed “Rinty” Monahan, a reliever who pitched in four MLB games
Spider Wilhelm, who had seven career ABs (given his nickname, should have had eight), all with the 1953 Athletics
Gus Zernial, the slugging left fielder who swatted 42 home runs in 1953 and who is believed to have indirectly fueled Joe Dimaggio and Marilyn Monroe’s relationship
Tom Oliver, a coach who played for the 1930s Red Sox and hit zero home runs in 1,931 career at-bats
Ray Murray, a solid catcher who played in a career high 84 games in 1953
Wally Moses, a big league outfielder from 1935 to 1951 who won three World Series rings as a coach
3B Loren Babe, a longtime Yankees farmhand who played 17 games for New York in 1952-53 before finishing out the 1953 season with Philadelphia
On a side panel, all alone, is written Bo Bo Newsom, the signature of baseball’s everywhere man.
Final years and legacy
By 1954, Newsom was with the Baltimore Orioles, not as a pitcher, but as the host of “Bobo Newsom’s Knothole Gang.”
"The eccentric diamond wit and popoff, who talked his way off more major-league teams than any other player in history, has talked his way, this time, into his twenty-sixth baseball job — on the sidelines," the Baltimore Sun wrote.
Bobo died in 1962 — cirrhosis of the liver — and as the years have passed, his name has largely faded from focus.
The lack of Hall of Fame attention (he never garnered more than 9.4% of votes) certainly didn’t help. But for those who saw him pitch, Bobo was something special.
Fans like Richard Nixon. On June 22, 1972, President Nixon held an Oval Office press conference on domestic issues with members of the press. Nixon was up for reelection that year, and it was at that press conference, for the first time, that he was asked about a failed break-in at DNC offices five days earlier. “The White House has had no involvement whatever In this particular incident,” Nixon said of the crime and cover-up that would sink his presidency.
The press conference covered a range of topics. Meat-import quotas. Inflation. Higher education. Campaign finances. Immigration. Near the conclusion of the press conference, Cliff Evans of RKO General Broadcasting asked about a different topic: would Nixon be willing to name his all-time baseball team? Nixon rattled off the usual names — Gehrig, Robinson, Mantle, Williams — but within weeks he released a list of his top players from 1925 to 1945 and 1945 to 1970.
There, on the earlier list along with the timeless Satchel Paige and other legends, was Bobo Newsom. Nixon suggested Newsom might be a “surprise” pick but defended his choice. “I must admit some sentiment in this respect since he pitched in Washington during the lean years when I attended baseball games as a senator and congressman,” Nixon said. “His lifetime record shows slightly more losses than wins. But he had a great fighting spirit, a wide assortment of good pitches and was one of the most colorful players the game has ever known.”
In 1992, Nixon released a new list of his top players, and he kept Newsom on his 1925 to 1959 team.
Bobo’s cards
Bobo Newsom’s bad breaks as a player were often his own doing — and it seems his overlooked legacy, at least in terms of cardboard, was also the result of some unwitting self-sabotage. His constant moving didn’t make things easier for card companies. But there were other reasons why Bobo missed out on being included in some iconic sets.
His earliest cards include 1934 V94 O-Pee-Chee (Canadian Butterfinger), an oversized release from north of the border, and 1935 Exhibits Four-in-One W463-5.
“Goudey Gum out of Boston offered him a contract for like $10 to use his image on cards. He thought that was ridiculous, even for the depression, and didn't sign, and as a result he wasn't in 1933 or 1934 Goudey, which is too bad, because those are nice sets,” McConnell said.
He finally signed with Goudey by the mid-1930s and appeared in 1936 Goudey Black and White, smartly without a cap, along with products like Goudey Wide Pen Premiums and National Chicle Fine Pen Premiums. He also had a Wheaties box panel card.
But as far as Newsom was concerned, his contract with Goudey was “kind of a lifetime contract,” McConnell said. Gum, Inc. out of Philadelphia — later known as Bowman — approached Newsom about its upcoming 1939 Play Ball set. He passed, citing his agreement with Goudey.
“The one time in his life he honored a contract, and he doesn't sign with Play Ball,” McConnell said. So Bobo was left out of the 1939 to 1941 sets, and then World War II meant no one was making any widespread card releases.
Following the war, Bowman came calling again. Given his previous stint with the hometown Athletics, he would have been a desired subject for the company. “As far as I know, I’m still under contract with Goudey,” he said once again.
“So he doesn't sign with Bowman, and he's not in any of the Bowman sets, and that was too bad, because those are beautiful sets, especially 1953 and 1954,” McConnell said. “Those are really, really nice cards.”
Newsom got his card in 1953 Topps and his golf clubs. He also appeared in an Orioles uniform — one team he didn’t play for — for Esskay hot dog cards, and got a $100 check for Fleer’s all-time greats sets in 1960 and 1961.
Bobo continued to show up in reprint and historical sets following his death. But by the early 1990s, after he was included in Topps Archives and Conlon Collection, the card offerings all but dried up.
People forgot about Ol’ Bobo. But how can you forget?
The National Sports Collectors Convention Canceled
By Sooz
There will be no National Sports Collectors Convention in 2020.
The biggest card show in the country was initially postponed to December, but the organizers announced on Thursday that the show has been called off. The next one will be in 2021 in Chicago.
While the decision was a tough one, and the right one, it’s still disappointing. Due to everything going on the world with the coronavirus, I had no intention of attending the show this year, but do know many who were.
It’s still tough because it’s a reminder of all that we lost — big and small — this year due to the virus. Some of us lost friends and family members, a loss that cannot be replaced. Others lost jobs and money. Others still lost some of the joy they have found in this hobby but looked to things like the National as a respite in this disastrous year.
Hopefully, 2021 will bring a return of many things we hold dear, a new normal that looks a little like our old normal.
If we can do it safely, I hope to see everyone in 2021.
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