That's a Nice Card

Those who are familiar with the Christmas culture of Chicago have surely heard of the Christkindlmarket.  The annual festivity is held throughout the month of December, in Daley Plaza, under the shadow of the Cook County Courthouse, and provides the city folk with a square full of kitschy specialty shops hawking German food, spirits, wares, and Christmas decorations.  All in all, if you're not from the Windy City, I'm sure it's similar to whatever holiday bazaar you might find in your area.  With admission to the square being free, it's become quite the popular destination for suburbanites to plan a weekend trip to the city around.

My wife and our friends are no exception to that last statement; a lot of us have pretty deep German roots too.

The joint was even more packed that here in this photo from the Chicago Mayor's Office

At just a train ride away, we've made it up to the market before and always had ourselves a good time - any event that serves me toasty gluhwein is a-ok in my book and their hand-made glass ornaments are divine.  Plus, this year, the weather was absolutely perfect on the day we decided to make the trip... which actually turned out to be more of a problem than a plus.  With temperatures hovering around the fifties, the square was absolutely packed beyond capacity...  it felt more like I was shuffling around the Union Stockyards than the Christkindlemarket!

Thus, after we got my commemorative mug of hot, spiced wine and a box of fresh-made strudel, and agreed to a later meeting place for drinks with our group, my wife and I headed for the hills - if we hadn't our Christmas spirit would have soon been turned into holly-jolly rage.  With a sudden block of time to fill and the weather being so temperate, a stroll down State Street seemed to be in order; we had to get away from the jam-packed mass of humanity that was the market square before my wife tackled ANOTHER man (that's right, I said another).

That meeting spot was the Christmas Tree in Millennium Park

I know what you're thinking, at this point:  "Tony, what does any of this word vomit have to do with baseball or baseball cards?"  I mean, this is a baseball card blog after all, right?  So, your confusion is absolutely warranted.  Please allow me to elaborate - I had to set up the scene!

You see, at the corner of State Street (that great street) and Jackson, there's a Barnes and Noble bookstore housed by DePaul University.  With my wife being a certified book fiend and my remembering a certain find that I made in that location a couple of years previous, this seemed like the perfect place to divert our attention for a few minutes.  Plus, Sam realllllllllllly had to use the restroom.  With that in mind, we made our way inside as our friends were still literally rubbing elbows (and shoulders and arms and what have you) with strangers in Daley Plaza.

Once inside, my wife booked it to the bathroom and I immediately caught a glimpse of what I had been searching for:

Greeting cards?.... Tony, you fool, those are the wrong kind of cards!  Clearly your brain was deprived of oxygen being stuck in that small space with so many people.

Wrong!  Well, maybe right on the latter point...

These pieces of ephemera are produced by The Nice Card Company, based out of my home city. Founded in 1992, they have since been using classic, black and white images to produce these beautiful greeting cards (also, magnets, notepads, puzzles, etc.) as an appreciation of  the local culture and historical photography. The source of these awe-inspiring images appears to be the Chicago History Museum, which I must make more of an effort to visit one of these days.

With Chicago being steeped in baseball history and playing host to two of the most historic clubs in the majors, it was only natural that Wrigley Field and old Comiskey Park would show up on this revolving rack, mixed in among the snapshots of Marshall Fields, The Tribune Tower, The Museum of Science and Industry, and the Stockyards which resembled the market:

I love looking through old photography, getting a glimpse at what everyday life was like in my home city before I entered into this plane of existence... especially when that aspect of everyday life is baseball-related!

As if the old-time images of Chi-Town's historic ballparks wasn't enough, there were even a couple of solo shots featuring Chicago baseball players from the days of yore:

Like Swede Risberg, one of the infamous 1919 Black Sox...

...and George "Lefty" Tyler, who pitched for the World Series bound 1918 Cubbies.  In fact, it was this very greeting card which drove me to re-visit this particular Barnes and Noble that night.

You see, longtime readers of this blog right actually remember this card, as I posted about Mr. Tyler a little less than two years ago.  While making a trip to Millennium Park to ice skate in 2015, my wife and I had also wandered into this Barnes & Noble, in search of warmth rather than shelter from a mob scene.  It was then that I first discovered The Nice Card Company and their wonderful greeting cards.  I was absolutely elated to find Tyler's exhibit, seeing as he and his 35 career Cub wins had, at that point, unrepresented in my Cubs All-Time Roster Collection binder  With the cardboard options for an obscure, middling hurler from 100 years ago not exactly being plentiful, I made the decision to include the greeting card in my baseball card collection.  You gotta do what you gotta do!

Thus, with that experience buzzing around the back of my brain, I was truly hoping to come across another Cubs player from the past who lacked a more traditional baseball card presence; perhaps I could even uncover a totally new name for my CATRC tome?

Luckily for me, there was, in fact, one more "Nice" baseball player made available by the card company and he just so happened to be a North Sider:

Of course, at that time, Larry Cheney was a West Sider, but that's another story.

After the gradual breakup of the Tinker to Evers to Chance dynasty, Larry Cheney emerged as the staff ace for the Cubs of the early teens.  In his rookie year of 1912, Cheney led the league with 26 wins and 28 complete games.  He was about as durable as a pitcher can be, racking up over 300 innings from 1912-14.  However, the live-armed hurler was also as wild as a loose fire-hose:  he still holds the Cubs' single season record for wild pitches in a season  (26 in '14) and he lead the league in errant tosses for six of his first eight seasons.  Although, this can almost be expected when you consider his main choices of attack were the spit ball and the knuckle ball.

Making this greeting card feel even more like a baseball card that just happens to open up in the middle is the fact that it provides a brief write-up on it's subject on the backside.  It's here that the Nice Card Company makes a pretty bold statement about Cheney's knuckler.

For those who can't read that tiny text, allow me to transcribe:

"From a potentially life-threatening accident came the invention of one of baseball's most baffling pitches. Toward the end of the 1911 season, Larry Cheney, who had just been called up from the minors, deflected a line drive that was headed toward his face with his pitching hand, driving his thumb into his nose and breaking both. The next year he couldn't grip the ball tightly and changed his delivery, digging his fingernails into the leather and giving birth to the "knuckleball." With it, Cheney went 26-10 in 1912, tying for the league lead in wins and racking up a league-high 28 complete games."

That's right, just like the previous ace of the Cubs' staff, Three-Finger Brown, Cheney's pitching success came as the result of a disabling accident.  Losing most of the mobility of his right thumb, he Cheney was forced to alter his grip and delivery, which gave his breaking/spitballs more movement and lead to his use of the knuckle ball.   However, the bold part of this write-up is the fact that they gave credit to Larry for inventing the famous and mystifying pitch.  I do not believe this to be accurate.

I think Mordecai had it a little worse of than Cheney

First of all, newspaper accounts from the era mention the knuckler by name prior to Cheney's debut in 1912, one such article from the Reading Eagle stating, "While the evolution of the ‘knuckle ball’ is claimed for Nap Rucker, of Brooklyn, Lew Moren, of the Phila. Nationals, and Cicotte, of Boston, it is asserted that the ‘knuckle’ is nothing more or less than the old ‘floater,’ or ice cream ball, that melted before it reached the plate."  Again, Cheney had yet to even take a Big League mound.

Where the Nice Card Company or the Chicago History Museum got the idea that Larry Cheney invented the knuckle ball is a mystery to me - he certainly helped to perfect the art but he definitely was not the first to make use of it.

Otherwise though, I love everything about this oddball find!

The insides of these greeting cards are left blank, so that the purchaser may write whatever salutation they would like.  Seeing as I'll be treating mine as a baseball cards, I think I'll be leaving the inside of Cheney in the pristine condition it came in.

While it was definitely exciting to again find a rarely-discussed Cubs player on the Nice Card Company rack inside DePaul's Barnes and Noble, it was not quite as thrilling as it was the first time.  You see, when I came across the George Tyler card in 2015, Tyler was entirely new to my Cubs All-Time Roster Collection.  In the case of my 2017 Larry Cheney find, even though he's fairly obscure, there was already an unbeatable representative in his slot of said binder:

That right there is an authentic 1914 Polo Grounds Game card... as "Nice" as the greeting card oddball is, there's no beating 103 year old antiquities!  Even if they're a touch stained.

Even so, I gladly purchased the Cheney greeting card for a buck and some change, along with a bottle of water and gummy worms for my wife (because we're children), and we hurried on our way to the Christmas tree in Millennium Park, four blocks away.  While the Cheney may not have been a needed item for my marquee collection, I was't going to pass up a cheap oddity... especially because I think my wife would have killed me if I didn't purchase something after dragging her all that way.

All in all, we had ourselves a lovely night on the town, even if the Christkindlmarket was a more akin to stockyards than a festive holiday experience.  We had good company, gourmet food, plentiful wine and German beer, beautiful weather, and an oddball baseball card rediscovery to keep our spirits lifted and our hearts full of Christmas spirit.  That being acknowledged, if you plan on ever attending the event yourself, that you do so on a weekday or when the weather is a tad less spring-like.

Unless your ultimate goal is make it to the local Barnes and Noble, that is!