Baseball Champion Fruit Label

From out of nowhere* comes a lithographic surprise. It is an image that long-time west-coasters may have seen before, but it’s new to me. The image is very unusual in early 20th Century California, since baseball players appear in only four other fruit labels that I have seen from pacific coast growers. A North Ontario, California packer was promoting the Champion brand apricots using a ball player wearing a 1870s style uniform, which makes it more unusual. But best of all, the artist was very good, and the Western Lithographic Company of Los Angeles did a fine job with the lithography. The label is not dated, but I would guess 1910.Since this label, with our batter wearing an Ontario Base Ball Club uniform (was there ever such a team?), is for apricots, the boxes and labels for which are smaller than for oranges. There were very likely few of them printed, and only a few survive. The California Baseball League was going strong in the 1800s, and the early Pacific Coast League made sure that Southern California well represented. Vernon even had a team for a few short years. But despite baseball’s popularity baseball and sports in general were seldom advertising subjects in the fruit label business. Nevertheless, the hunt will continue.So, it should now be clear that photographs are not the only new baseball arrivals to The Rucker Archive. I am always looking for older baseball imprints, advertisements, sheet music, anything, in fact, with great color and informative imagery. And, when a piece appears in a genre where everything baseball is supposedly already known, in this case the genre of fruit labels, smiles are certain to appear.• Nowhere, California to be exact.