Some More Seattle Pilots Ephemera

Silly me, I once thought that "collecting the Seattle Pilots" meant "buy the Pilots cards from the Topps 1969 and 1970 sets, and you're done". How naive! The deeper I went into that Pilots rabbit hole - and no, I haven't quite completed that '70 set just yet - the more I learned about post-1970 card issues featuring Pilots players - or weirdly, guys who never played for the Pilots but who still got cards dressed up in their uniform (Ichiro Suzuki hadn't even been born when they spent their lone season in Seattle) - the deeper I needed to go.

Like Jim Bouton for example. He's the world's most famous Seattle Pilot, thanks to his book Ball Four that immortalized his year with the team. He never got an official Topps card of him in a Pilots uniform in 1969 nor in 1970 (he was traded to the Astros during the '69 season). You know what he did get, though? A 2004 Fleer Greats card, that's what. You see it here to your left. Bouton had two monster years for the Yankees as a starting pitcher in 1963 and 1964, winning 21 games in the former, but was mostly a "sloppy mopper" in the years that followed. I still call him a Fleer Great, though. So should you. He's got a Seattle Pilots card that I'm exceptionally proud to own.

Bouton also has a 1989 Swell "Baseball Greats"card, and it's a delight as well. I need to learn some more about the Swell brand. I can't say that it's all that much to look at, but there he is - Jimmy B, getting ready to kinda/sorta throw his teammates under the bus in 1969. Card #66 in the Baseball Greats series. Information on this series, please, fellow card collectors!

And listen - if you've never watched Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye, it's an outstanding film, as is virtually everything Altman made in the 1970s ("3 Women" is probably my favorite film of all time). Why is that relevant? Well, because Jim Bouton is in it - and not just for a minute, either. He's got quite a few key scenes. Anyway, that's your dose of Seattle Pilots card collecting ephemera for this time around.....as I pull together more weirdo Pilots odds & ends, you can be sure I'll share them with ya here.

The Pilots Cards That Came After The Pilots

I've made no secret of my affinity for the Seattle Pilots, a one-year MLB team from 1969 whom I've written about here, here, here and here. Given that they existed for a mere year, and had Topps cards for only two years, they are eminently collectable and an "easy win", as they say (though I haven't finished up that 1970 Topps set just yet).

Now I'm interested in the more goofball, post-1970 Seattle Pilots cards that exist. We already talked about the 1983 Renata Galasso set here, but some other Pilots cards have recently come to my attention, and so I'm sprung into action, by the proverbial hook or crook. First, how about this 1992 Leaf Heritage Series Paul Molitor, bedecked in a full Pilots get-up? As you may well recall, the Pilots turned into Paul's Milwaukee Brewers in 1970, where they remain to this day (albeit in the National League now). Paul's card says "The Seattle Pilots would prove to be mistake", which I guess is pretty much the general consensus on the team.

Now this next specimen is not a posthumous Pilots card, but rather a 1969 Don Mincher card that Milton Bradley put out. Milton Bradley, like the game people? Anyone know if this was part of a game? I'm getting the sense that it was, if you look at all the code at the bottom of the game, as well as on the card's back. Me, I got mine via a COMC order, and it was quite inexpensive to boot. I suppose it's because it's, you know, Don Mincher and not, you know, Hank Aaron.

We already covered Mincher and Tommy Harper's lovely 1970 Kellogg's cards here, and while I think I've found most everything that's card-sized (i.e. not stamps or posters) that came out while this team was still around - with the exception of this 1969 Tommy Davis Deckle Edge card I still need to grab somewhere - most of what's to still be collected is "post-Pilots".

Here's a good one: Ichiro Suzuki in a Pilots uniform. 2010 Topps National Chicle Diamond Stars, #538/999. It even lists him as being "on" the Pilots, while giving his birth year as 1973. Wait a minute, that's.....impossible....

Finally, I recently became aware of the 1989 and 1990 Pacific Trading Cards "Baseball Legends" series. Perhaps there are more editions as well - my left hand is tired of typing and I don't feel like looking right now. But check it out - there are some Pilots "legends" like Gary Bell and Diego Segui! Thanks very much to Nick for the Frank Crosetti card as well. 

That's it for this week's edition of Pilots roulette. We'll see if I can come up with another batch that'll be worthy of yet another post.

Really Couldn't Pass Up This '69 Pilots Set

Last week, as I was penning my short post about my 1970 Seattle Pilots acquisitions, I in turn discovered that there had been a 1983 "Renato Galasso" tribute set for the 1969 Seattle Pilots. You may recall that there were no 1970 Seattle Pilots - they moved to Milwaukee before the season started and became the Brewers - but thankfully there are '70 Pilots cards.

You'd think that'd be the end of it - and that's where you'd be wrong, my friend! There was this late 70s/early 80s outfit run by one Renata Galasso. She sold Topps sets out of her Brooklyn business in complete batches, back when that wasn't really a "thing" - and then moved on to create her own cards as well. Hey, what do I know about all this - I just read about it on the interwebs. Here's a good Shlabotnik Report post about some of her cards.

In 1983 the Renata Galasso organization decided to put out a tribute set to the 1969 Seattle Pilots. In 2020, the Card Hemorrhage blog decided to buy a complete 43-card version of said set on eBay. This is how I finally get to have a card of Jim Bouton in a Seattle Pilots uniform; even though his classic Ball Four book documents his year with the team, he appeared in neither the '69 nor '70 Pilots Topps sets (too late for one, and drummed off of the team in the wake of the controversial tell-all book for the other - or at least that's what I heard on a recent podcast from the author of this Bouton book).

So yeah! This 43-card set contains every player, coach and manager to be a part of that star-crossed, ill-fated 1969 Seattle Pilots team. It's a nice one - and jeez, somehow my set is in perfect condition, no doubt cared for by a fellow card nerd. The backs uniformly have an "Only Year in Existence" sobriquet, along with a bit of overall information about the player or coach's entire career - as you can see here with Tommy Davis - along with their stats on the '69 Pilots.

Let's take a look at the cards in this set, first in a few individual scans of cards, and then a nice sloppy photo of the entire set, laid out on a rug in my sun room.

Completed: The 1969 Seattle Pilots

One team I've been fascinated with for many years is the 1969 Seattle Pilots. That was their one and only year in existence, and my understanding of why that was so has long been incomplete. As a young lad, I read Jim Bouton's Ball Four, and it left a pretty deep mark on me, as it did so many others (there's a new book out now just about Bouton, by the way, and you can read about it here). Bouton pitched for the Pilots part of that year, and much of the "diary" that is the bulk of the book recaps the behind-the-scenes locker room shenanigans of that team.

I'm also a big fan of the city of Seattle, the second-greatest city in the US of A. I lived there from 1997-99 while in grad school, and I'd live there again in a country minute. Seattle in 1969 didn't really seem to me to be a big-league town quite yet, and the Pilots year there happened to also coincide with the hemorrhaging of jobs at Boeing, the city's largest employer. So yeah - it didn't go so well for these guys. Not only did they finish dead last in the brand-new American League West, they went bankrupt. Bankrupt! Their owners threw up their hands, then packed up and sold the team to a group in Milwaukee the next spring (but not before Topps got out some "1970 Seattle Pilots" cards, about which more next time). We now know them as the "Milwaukee Brewers".

I decided I needed to track down each and every one of the 26 Topps 1969 Seattle Pilots cards - and recently, I did just that. Most of them were procured at my local card shop, Lefty's Sports Cards in Burlingame, CA. The ones that remained elusive were bought on eBay. But I've got them, and this set is done, ladies and gentlemen.

Interestingly, Tommy Harper - above left - is probably one of the fellas you've heard of on the team, along with a couple of the folks below. Harper stole 73 bases for the Pilots that year, and despite a .235 batting average, he had a very healthy .349 OBP. The following year in Milwaukee he'd go on to club 31 homers while stealing 38 bases - his best year in the majors. Oh - and there's no real Jim Bouton card for the Seattle Pilots! Only customs that you can find online.

Here's an article about collecting the Pilots, and here are a few other cards from that '69 set.