Project Durham Bulls #46- Charlie Grimm

1917 Durham Bulls 

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There were not a lot of statistics kept for the Minor Leagues back in 1917, but Charlie Grimm played one season for the Bulls while the team was in the North Carolina State League.  The prior season he had played for the Philadelphia A's as a 17 year old.  He would play a handful of games for his hometown St. Louis Cardinals in 1918 before settling in with the Pirates in 1919.  Grimm was known as an elite fielder, Bill James rates him as the best fielding first baseman of all-time, while playing 20 years in the Majors.  The majority of his time was spent with the Pirates and the Cubs.  He played on two National League Champion teams with the Cubs in 1929 and 1932.  Grimm ended his career with more than 2,000 hits, a .290 batting average, and more than 1,000 RBIs.  

While Grimm was a good player, his contributions to game as a manager were even more important.  His managerial career started when he took over as a player/manager for the Cubs.  Grimm finished the second half of the 1932 season at the helm of the team, which lost in the World Series to the Yankees.  After his retirement as a player, Grimm stayed with the Cubs as their manager and led the team to two more National League titles in 1935 and 1945.  Both World Series were lost to the Tigers.  

Grimm eventually was fired by the Cubs and ended up working as the manager of the Braves in the early 1950s.  While he never won a pennant with the Braves he made some significant personnel contributions to the franchise which helped the team after he was dismissed.  The most important decision he made was to replace 35 year old outfielder Sid Gordon with a 20 year old Hank Aaron at the beginning of the 1954 season.  Aaron had shown a lot of pop the prior year in the South Atlantic League.  Grimm would eventually pair Aaron with young third baseman Eddie Matthews and catcher Del Crandall to form the core of the Braves 1957 World Series winner. 


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All of the Project Durham Bulls cards that I have posted over the past two years have been autographed.  These cards have been fun to post, never a problem with adding more autographs to the collection.  However, the Bulls are an old franchise that have been around since 1902.  There are a lot of great former Bulls players who have no certified autographs, but that does not mean that I am not interested in their cards.  At some point, I knew I was going to have to just start finding cool cards of players, especially the older ones, that were not autographs.  Grimm was in Durham for one year, but he was a good player and manager.  Certainly worthy of a spot in my collection. 

Like all things vintage, if you go for something that is really clean and pristine, you are going to pay a pretty penny for it.  I had the choice of trying to find a 1950s manager card of Grimm with the Braves, or go with an older card, see more expensive, to find him as a player with the Cubs.  I split the difference and picked up a 1934 Goudey, which would have been the end of his playing career, but he was managing the team at this point. 

It's got some creasing in the middle of the card.  It's not perfectly centered.  The corners are round.  The borders have a gray hue.  I love this card and I am glad that I finally added an older, non-autographed card to my collection that was added for this series of posts.