The story of Bill Salkeld, an ordinary man

Translated by Pepe Latorre

There should be more baseball cards. It may seem like an absurd comment at a time when Topps launches 30 different series a year, each with its own variations, chrome finishes, rainbow glitter, series with colored borders and Easter eggs and pumpkins and cancer ribbons and traces of radioactive thorium. And although there are many options among the photographs of Rowdy Tellez [sic] (There are, and it is not a number that I have invented, 1,700 Tellez cards [sic] licensed), we have practically nothing that represents the Tellez of yesteryear.

Of course, every once in a while a baseball card company releases a collection that catalogs the greats of the past. He Sporting Newsbetween 1991 and 1995, launched a series of collections consisting of a total of 1,430 brilliant black and white photographs taken during the first half of the 20th century. Other companies have turned to legends when they couldn’t get an MLB license, such as Fleer in the 60s and Pacific in the late 80s. But these collections never sold well among young people, and collectors have always rejected anything other than the (expensive) original. And those collections almost always focused on Hall of Famers, players who didn’t need a photo to be recognized. Every decade or so Topps released a collection of reprints of its early history, making glossy versions of its 1952, 1953 and 1954 editions. But these were mostly pure vanity projects and the practice died out after 1994.

That’s a shame, because baseball cards still offer something that a computer screen and a chart of statistics don’t: They provide a sense of tangibility, of permanence.

Bill Salkeld He had two Major League cards in the collections Bowman from 1949 and 1950. The first is a faded photo then painted with watercolor, while the second is painted with a little more care and sketches a smile. Both can be had for about $10, although no one would do it unless they wanted to complete a collection. The name Salkeld wouldn’t even be familiar to anyone, except perhaps in the Pacific Northwest, where his grandson was once a first-round draft pick by the Mariners.

Salkeld the Elder was a promising young catcher with a knee injury so severe that not only did it not respond to treatment, it almost had it amputated. He was retired for two years, selling furniture, before getting a call to coach Tucson in Class-D. He was brave enough to put himself in the lineup when his knee wasn’t bothering him too much, hit .303 and revived his career. When the United States entered the war, Salkeld spent the next five years watching players go to the front (he himself was rated 4-F thanks to that knee) and waiting for an opportunity. And it arrived just as the war was ending. He joined the Pirates and began a brief career as a journeyman catcher. At 33 years old, that knee of his took him out.

Meanwhile, and by a very specific set of standards, he was one of the greatest hitters in baseball history.

The knee, which prevented him from withstanding the rigors of daily work (in an era when suddenly everyone is complaining about one-knee receivers, Salkeld extended his leg to the side and caught 35% of runners doing so ), also weighed him down on the bases. But he was a pretty good hitter with a reasonable amount of power, and he walked at basically the same pace (17.4%) as Mickey Mantle o Eddie Yost. In total, he finished his career with a 128 OPS+, which puts him alongside names like Bobby Abreu, Goose Goslin, Sammy Sosa y Jim Rice.

It had its good moments. In his rookie year, he and his co-catcher, Al Lopez, earned last-place MVP votes. He used one of the two triples of his career to hit a cycle. And he made, as quietly as possible, his only postseason appearance with the Boston Braves in 1948. His team lost in six games, but his home run against Bob Feller in Game 5 to tie the game in the sixth is often used as an example of the unlikely hero, although given his statistics he wasn’t that unlikely. He finished the series batting just .222; the other two-thirds of the batting line were .500 and .566.

Little more to say about Bill Salkeld; the only video is of his grave at Forest Lawn, and we have radio narration of his full return stick in game five against Feller. Most of his photographs are actually of more famous runners sliding into the plate in front of him, including a famous photo of Jackie Robinson stealing home as Salkeld leans over, frozen and off balance, taking a wild pitch.

Does he deserve anything more? And any of us? The fact that we have overlooked most of the details of Salkeld’s greatness is tragic, but only to the extent that we have managed to save others, the lucky few who were in front of the cameras for the longest. Bill Salkeld was a pretty good baseball player. For a while it seemed like it would be better, and then it seemed like it would be less. The work remains, even when the man and the life in it fade away. But his portrait lives on the Met collectionlabeled “ephemeral.” There are worse legacies.