Baseball in Color
Starting with several newspapers in the 1930s, color-tinted baseball photos captured the imagination of kids, giving them something else to collect. Throughout the 1940s and into the 1950s, The Sunday News produced a wonderful series of images of varying sizes, mostly of New York players. Sport Magazine joined the party in 1946, and Sports Illustrated followed in 1954. Many of the former were taken by Ozzie Sweet, who captured the post-WWII era better than anybody. Scrapbooks from the era are filled with these pictures, and that's where I found many of these. Over the years, I've gathered is a treasure trove of images that bring alive baseball in the mid-20th century in glorious technocolor.
In 1938, The Sunday News — the Sunday edition of the New York Daily News — issued beautiful color supplements of Johnny Vandermeer and Hank Greenberg, both of which are pictured below. In 1939, the Sunday News began producing images of Yankees, Giants and Dodgers. Included are pictures of both an ailing Lou Gehrig and Babe Dahlgren — the latter would sadly replace the former in the Yankees' lineup literally weeks later. Over the next quarter century, the publication came out with many more baseball-related images, but they became smaller over time.
Nobody did color photography better than Sport Magazine, which came out in 1946. Nearly every issue through the 1970s has a full page baseball image, and many have more than one. Ozzie Sweet took many of the photos displayed here. According to the New York Times, "Sweet's signature images from the 1940s through the 1950s and into the 1960s, many in the fierce hues of increasingly popular color film that emulated the emergent Technicolor palette of American movies, helped define — visually, anyway — an era."
Sports Illustrated arrived on the scene in 1954, and while baseball was rarely its focus, the slick new magazine published color baseball images from time to time, and when they did, they rivaled those produced by Sport Magazine. The magazine emphasized action shots over the posed pictures that were so popular at time. One of my favorite photos pictured below shows an Ebbets Field hot dog vendor plying his trade in the bleachers on a warm summer day.
In 1955 and 1956, The Cincinnati Enquirer produced a series of color supplements of the Redlegs. The team went on a tear in 1956, winning 91 games, typing an NL record with 221 home runs and finishing just 2 games behind the pennant-winning Dodgers. The line-up included Frank Robinson (batting in the lower right), who tied the NL record for home runs as a rookie with 38. Also pictured are (from the left) Ed Bailey, Roy McMillan, Johnny Temple, Birdie Tebbetts, Wally Post, Smokey Burgess and Joe Nuxhall — the latter is shown peaking over Tebbett's shoulder.
The first photograph displayed below comes from 1939. The image is hand-colored, and shows the Pyramid DeMolay semi-pro team at Glen Park in San Francisco. After World War II, snapshots began to appear in color, although it wasn't until the early 1960s that they surpassed black and white snapshots in the market. The
earliest color snapshot shown here comes from the late 1940s, and pictures two players on the Rockford Peaches. The next one captures first baseman Frank Leja of the New Orleans Pelicans — a year before the team was kicked out of organized baseball over its failure to integrate. Also pictured here are three Larry McWilliams photos of Oakland A's from the early 1970s.
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