What was this kid thinking?
It all starts with this baseball scorecard from 1965:
This has followed me around for fifty plus years , through I don’t know how many moves. I got curious and decided to carbon-date it. It had to be from 1965 or earlier since the Braves left Milwaukee in 1965. It couldn’t be much earlier than 1965 since that’s my cursive!
Luckily the internet is packed with data about baseball. All the box scores of major league games are available and you can get game logs for specific players. So I looked up Tony Cloninger (the Braves pitcher) and checked the box scores for all of his games versus the Giants in Milwaukee. For 1965. For 1964. For 1963.
Here’s where the story gets murky. This game does not exist. All the players were valid but there was no game with these lineups, with these pitchers and with this outcome. (Interesting sidebar: Hank Aaron didn’t have any games with four hits in 1965). I had apparently made this game up from whole cloth. That might help explain the lax bookkeeping too – for instance that second inning doesn’t appear to have three outs! Why would the nine year old Jim do that? Well, speaking as the 67 year old Jim, I have no idea. In my defense – my lineup is better than Bobby Bragan’s usual 1965 lineup!
But then, a breakthrough. Looking at the score card in more detail, I noticed a lot of erasures. For instance, you can clearly see Aaron written, and then erased, in the third batting slot. This led me to a new theory – that the erased game was the real game and the second entered game was the fictitious one. The most telling evidence was on the Giant’s side of the score book, where you could read three pitchers names (now erased).
Something to work with! It looks like Linzey, Henry, and Marichal (!). So I went back through the Giants-Braves game logs and looked for a game where San Francisco used those four pitchers. It was September 19th, 1965. Looks like a heckuva game – six Hall of Famers (Aaron, Mathews, Torre, Mays, McCovey and Marichal); just missed having all three of the Alou brothers (Felipe took the game off); Mays hit his 49th home run of the season and Juan Marichal got the save – one of only two he recorded in his whole career!
So that condenses the mystery. Why would nine year old Jim keep score of a game, then bring home the score book, erase it all and put a made-up game in its place? Still no answer.
Why does this matter? The other side of the coin, and literally the other side of the score sheet, explains why I kept it all those years. The Braves had a club (I think it was part of The Knothole Club, but at this point I’m certainly an unreliable narrator) where kids could go out to the bleachers and there was a tent where a couple of Braves would sign autographs before the game. Here’s the autographs I got that day:
You guessed it … Hank Aaron and Eddie Mathews. On the same piece of paper! I’m not a collector but I wonder how many of those are existence. Especially one acquired when they were still active? Especially one with an exact provenance – right down to the date of existence?
To close the loop. The Lieberts went to a Braves-Giants game on Sunday, September 19, 1965. It was an unseasonably hot September day in Milwaukee, with a high of 85. It rained slightly in the morning. The Braves lost 4-2 before 12,084 spectators. They would only play three more home games at County Stadium, departing to Atlanta at the end of the 1965 season.
