#463 Baseball Thrills... Kaline Becomes Youngest Bat Champ

Meh, it's a Baseball Thrills subset card. I like the idea but I'm not crazy about the execution of these. If I'm keeping track correctly this is the last one. Yippee!

Hey, it's not Al Kaline's fault. I love Al Kaline. He's a superstar (and a very undervalued one at that if a 'superstar' can be 'undervalued'), an extremely nice guy from all accounts and best of all for me, a Baltimore native!

You can read the details of his winning the title on the card back which I'm showing in a larger size. Kaline is making his fourth appearance on a featured card here. Or his fifth is you include the Tiger Team card (you shouldn't, it's one of the uglier cards in the '59 set). We've seen his All Star card, the Pitchers Beware card he shared with Charlie Maxwell and best of all, his terrific regular card. 

The best thing about these Thrills cards has been trying to track down the source of the colorized photo they used. It was particularly fun to venture down the 'rabbit hole' presented by the Colavito Thrills card. That took a lot of twists and turns before I found my answer. 

The more recently featured Ernie Banks card was fairly easy. So was the Mickey Mantle. The Kaline card's original shot has eluded me. But I'm fairly certain it came from a sequence that included this photo:

The uniforms, catcher's posture and the way his cap sits, the ump's silhouette, the cut of the grass. All of that points to a likely match. BTW... Corbis ID's the Yankee catcher as Charlie Silvera. And that can be a '9' visible on his back (Silvera wore "29"). It could also be an '8', i.e. Yogi Berra, although it doesn't appear to be him, at least to me.

Let's call it a probable match.