Vintage Scorecards from Mom

 During my last visit to my parents' house my mom handed me a file folder from her youth. Mom & Dad have been making their way through the many boxes housed in their storage space in their basement. I actually have a stack of boxes, from my childhood, which I need to retrieve, but today's post will focus on some baseball related content from Mom's childhood.  

First up is a couple of pages from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch from July 12, 1966. 

Thousands of "A" students had their names published in the paper. Hey, look! There's my mom!

Also, within the paper are messages from the MLB Commissioner, the AL and NL presidents, and August A. Busch, Jr., the president of Anheuser Busch.

14,545 students were given a ticket in the reserved seating area for the efforts in the classroom. Very cool.

Next up is a St. Louis Cardinals score card from the 1965 season. 

The first thing I noticed when opening up the scorecard were the penciled in attendance numbers at the top of the page, "22,003 people - 8,100 A Students."

Other things to note are some of the names from the game on August 18th, 1965, which include Felipe Alou, Hank Aaron, Joe Torre, Lou Brock and Curt Flood. Unfortunately, all of those honors students went home disappointed as the Milwaukee Braves defeated the Cardinals 5-3 on this day. Lastly, check out the "special plays" section at the bottom of the score card. I've never seen anything like that before. 

Here's another scorecard from the same year, but this one drew my interest a little more as the Cubs visited St. Louis.

Billy Williams, Ron Santo and Ernie Banks came to town and defeated the Cardinals 12-4, on June 25th, 1965.

Inside the scorecard was a 50+ year old relic: 

Aren't peanuts around $4 in a stadium these days?

Here's a slightly older scorecard from August 24th, 1964.

The Cardinals were able to turn the Pirates away, by the score of 5-1.

The Pirates had Roberto Clemente, Willie Stargell and Bill Mazeroski in the lineup, but the late Bob Gibson put together this line: 9 innings, 6 hits, 1 earned run, 2 walks and 12 strikeouts. Wow. 

One more side note: The Cardinals began the day in 4th place (65-58) and 11 games behind the Phillies in the NL, but they would rally the last month of the season and eventually defeat the Yankees in the World Series. 

There were four more scorecards in Mom's file folder.

June 17th, 1966 - Phillies 6 and Cardinals 5. The Phillies had Dick Allen and Bob Uecker in the lineup.

June 29th, 1966 - Cardinals 2 and Giants 1. The Giants started Juan Marichal, Willie Mays and Willie McCovey. 

July 8th, 1966 - Astros 6 and Cardinals 1. Jim "The Toy Cannon" Wynn and Rusty Staub were the big names in Houston's lineup, which handed Bob Gibson the loss.

July 13th, 1967 - Pirates 8 and Cardinals 5. The Pirates bested Steve Carlton in this match-up. The Pirates' lineup was loaded with recognizable names, Clemente, Stargell, Maz, Manny Mota and Maury Wills. 

The Cardinals were a force to be reckoned with during the middle part of the 60's, winning it all in 1964 and 1967, but they only managed to win two games of the seven my mom attended during this time. Sometimes that's the way it goes I guess. 

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with these scorecards, but I sure did enjoy flipping through them and seeing my mom's handwriting throughout. 

Thanks for stopping by!