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 Old Baseball Endorsement Ads Photo Gallery
Click on any image below to see photos in full size and to start Photo Gallery:

Another Edition of

“From the Lighter Side!”

Fun With Old Baseball Ads, Part One

“You shoeless sonofagun you!” –A fan yelling at 20-year old Greenville Spinner outfielder, Joseph Jackson, who was playing that day in his stocking feet.

…And the rest, as they say, is history. The name stuck, and the young outfielder soon became known forevermore to posterity as “Shoeless” Joe Jackson.

One of our readers recently sent me this neat poster of “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, in which Joe is depicted swinging a bat in  – you guessed it! – his bare feet. Not only is Joe “Shoeless”…but he’s also “Sockless!”

I guess capitalism was alive and well even back in the 1910s. In the featured ad above, we see Joe “cashing in” on his well-known nickname with an endorsement for Selz Shoes. As the ad says, “When he wears ‘em, Joe Jackson wears Selz shoes;” and then the hilarious subtext, “Make your feet glad,” illustrated with two laughing “glad feet.” In the bottom right, there’s something about “oranges,” and “Jackson, California.” Not sure what all that has to do with shoes or feet, but there must be some connection.

Doing just a little research, I soon discovered a whole slew of old baseball ads from days gone by, some of them really funny. I guess we have to keep in mind that back in the not-too-distant-past, baseball players weren’t pampered multi-millionaires like they are today. Most of them worked during the off-season to make ends meet,  so a $500 advance for lending your name to a simple product endorsement was a big payoff, and possibly meant the difference between working during the off-season and taking it easy with the wife and kids back home.

I thought it might be fun to take a look back at some of these old baseball ads. I also discovered that there seemed to be no end to the range of products that ballplayers endorsed, many of them staples of American life from days gone by. The shortlist would include:

Many brands of cigarettes (Luckies, Chesterfields, Camels), Champ Cigarette lighters, pipe tobacco (Granger, Velvet), tobacco chews (Redman, Tuxedo), beer (Budweiser, Falstaff, Rheingold, Old Style), Carling’s ale, hard liquor and booze, cereals (Shredded Wheat, Cream of Wheat, Wheaties, Puffed Rice, Kelloggs’s Corn Flakes), candy, metal box cars, assorted toys, Whirly Bird Play Catch game, shoes (PF Flyers, Converse), Cracker Jack, baseball equipment (Louisville sluggers and Spaulding bats, mitts), Alaga breakfast syrup, gum (Beach-nut, Wrigley’s Doublemint), automobiles, Iron Man batteries, Yoo-Hoo chocolate drinks, soda (Coke, Red Rock, and Moxie), Carnation Milk, toothpaste (Ipana, Colgate), Alemite lubricants (not what you’re thinking!), garter belts, pizza, bread, baseball board games, razor blades (Gem and Gillette).

And the players doing the endorsements read like a who’s-who of the games biggest names, covering all eras:

Willie Mays, Micky Mantle, Ted Williams, Stan Musial, Lou Gehrig, Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Hank Aaron, Walter johnson, Warren Spahn, Christy Mathewson, Yogi Berra, Harry Heilmann, Johnny Mize, Dizzy Dean, Lou Brock, Frankie Frisch, Whitey Ford, Mel Ott, Paul Waner, Allie Reynolds, Ty Cobb, Jimmie Foxx, Sandy Koufax, Ernie Banks, Lefty Grove, and Jackie Robinson. 

So let’s go over a couple of them and see what we find. I’ll feature them here, and then I’ll put a bunch in the gallery above for you to enjoy.

Here’s a good one. That’s Monte Irvin and Willie Mays endorsing Chesterfield cigarettes. Can you imagine anything like this today? Do they still make Chesterfield cigarettes? Maybe someone can tell us. The older guys out there will remember them from our youth.

This one is real interesting. That’s Ty Cobb and Christy Mathewson endorsing “Hassan Cork Tip cigarettes (whatever that means) in an elaborate, artistic three-paneled triptych. It even includes Charles Conlon’s classic photo of Cobb sliding hard into Jimmy Austin at third. This one took a lot of thought and effort to put together.

Here’s a neat one of Johnny Mize getting a piece of the action with an endorsement for Red Man tobacco, America’s Best Chew. Not only that, you can get a free baseball cap “For you or your boy!”I guess you had to send in for it.

Be sure to check out the others in the gallery above. Since there are so many ads to feature, I plan on making this a two-part series. Stay tuned for the next installment. 

Gary Livacari

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