Around The Card Room, Take 9

For a team that is 120 years old, the Durham Bulls can be really bad at history.  

I say this as a person who grew up attending Cardinals games. The Cardinals have a museum, statues of players outside the stadium, multiple places where the retired uniform numbers are displayed, and all the National League and World Series pennants are also prominent while watching the game. The Cardinals are an old franchise who have won a lot, had a lot of great players, and they are not afraid to tell you about it.  

The Durham Bulls have a banner for the past 20 years of division and league pennants on the side of the stadium, along with a display of their selected retired numbers. The retired numbers do include Joe Morgan and Chipper Jones, a movie character, Jackie Robinson, and their two best Triple A managers.  

These are the retired numbers:  

The Triple A pennants are displayed, but in all the Durham Bulls have won their division 35 times, including years where the division title was rewarded for first-half and second-half winners, their league title 17 times, and their level National Championship 4 times.  

The National Championships are all recent, Minor League baseball did not play those games prior to the early 2000s. I am not even sure they award a National Champion in the lower Minors, just Triple A. I think.  

While it is not immediately clear that the Durham Bulls are a really old, highly successful Minor League franchise by walking around their stadium, they have been wearing some throwback uniforms over the past few years which are borrowed from really old teams.  

This year, the Bulls wore their 1913 uniforms.  

A few years back, the Bulls wore their uniforms from 1902. In between the two, they wore a few different uniforms that borrowed designs from those highly successful late 1990s Devil Rays teams.  in 1902, the Bulls were known as the Tobacconists. Seems like a good name for a 1900s professional sports team from North Carolina.  

Beyond the Tobacconists uniforms, the Durham Bulls also gave away a Tobacconists bobblehead. They gave the bobble an old fashioned appearance. No specific player was used for the bobble.  

Here is the front.    

Turn it around......

Here is the back of the bobble.  

This is a little bit of an odd bobblehead in my opinion. It's the only nondescript, non-player specific bobblehead in my collection. We couldn't get Otis Stocksdale or George Brucker?  

Otis was a dapper fellow.  

This Durham Bulls giveaway is a knock-off of the 1950s/1960s team bobbleheads, which have never really been my thing.  I know there are a lot of bobblehead collectors who love those types of things, but I guess I am not a die-hard. More of a casual bobblehead collector.  I ended up designating a portion of one shelf for my oddball Durham Bulls giveaways, which is where this guy resides.  

It currently has a population of two. 

Jose Oquendo is not odd, but the Derek Jeter statue is definitely an odd choice for a giveaway from the Durham Bulls.  Jeter needs his own post.