This is not just another baseball team photo on a postcard!

This is not just another team photo on a real photo postcard, a genre which contains hundreds and thousands of examples. Way back when baseball was everything in America and every jerkwater town had a baseball team, postcards with players, teams and ballparks were criss-crossing the continent. The Electrics of Pittsfield, Massachusetts appear in their 1913 team portrait on a photographic postcard, like so many others, but what makes this shot so great is the camera the photographer used. What a lens!The Pittsfield Electrics played in the Eastern Association and finished seventh in a league of nine teams. No Hall of Famers here, but four men who played some, but not much, in the majors. Jock Somerlott, Art Nichols, Lew Wendell, and Polly Wolfe are the names of those who would see the show, but I could not tell you who stands where. But, there is another player here who keeps appearing throughout my years of baseball investigations and acquisitions. The guy floated around minor league baseball for at least a decade, showing up in two circa 1910 tobacco card sets - In the Old Mill and Contentnea Cigarette sets playing for Greensboro in the Carolina League. Way back in the early 1980s a trunk containing Hammersley's uniforms turned up near Saratoga Springs, New York where I was living. The life of an itinerant ballplayer came to life with that trunk, containing three different uniforms from three different leagues, none of which were Greensboro, nor Pittsfield. Hammersley appears in the photo just to the left of the manager, Mr. J. Zeller, who stands up front in this chevron arrangement of players. Zeller has no baseball record at all, and I speculate that he was appointed to run the team by the sponsor, and that must have been the General Electric Company, whose turbine manufacturing plant operated in Pittsfield. Mr. Zeller would look more at home behind a desk than in uniform, I think.You can see the years of the pro baseball grind on the face of Hammersley, and the camera here allows us to see the widely varying countenances of all the players. What a crew of characters! Each face tells a story all its own, and we only see it because a photographer named Powell in Pittsfield, Massachusetts invested in a quality lens with which to do his work.