Project Durham Bulls #56 - Ben Chapman

1950 Durham Bulls 

Background-

I wrote a bit about Chapman a few weeks back while I was working on some 1950s cards of former Durham Bulls players.  I am not going to rehash the whole post, but Chapman has sort of a dubious history in the game for some of his on field antics.  As a player, he was one of the greatest trash talkers of all-time.  As a manager, he was noted for his clashes with Jackie Robinson while he was managing the Phillies in the late 1940s.  

The Bulls had been managed by former Duke baseball/football star, also Pro Football Hall of Famer, as a player manager during the 1949 season.  I am not sure exactly why Chapman was brought in to manage the Bulls in 1950, they were the Tigers Carolina League affiliate, but he led them to a 74-78 season before departing for a job managing in a Minor League team in Florida.  Chapman would not last much longer in baseball, leaving the sport in the mid 1950s to sell insurance in Alabama.  

Card-

This is from the 1935 Diamond Stars set.  I know it's a really old card, the type that I do not post on here very often.  I am fairly certain that I have a few Cardinals and Browns cards from this set that I picked up somewhere, at some point, for not very much.  Chapman is likely the best card that I have from this set.  

Here is the back of the card.  

 I do not mind its imperfections, this is just a good classic baseball card.  There is a crease along the bottom, the corners are rounded, and I would not have it any other way.

Nice Card. Not A Nice Person.

I am down to my last few days of summer break.  It seems like school just ended, but my workdays start up again next week, and I have a new set of students in two weeks.  Still have a few more older Durham Bulls players to post before the new school year starts. 

My post today is actually a former manager of the Bulls Ben Chapman, who was a very good player with the 1930s Yankees.  Chapman is also one of the more infamous villains in the sport of baseball, whose notoriety has been renewed by a recently released movie.  The card is actually a coach card, but it is from one of the all-time great sets.

Love the 1952 Topps set.  

I picked this up at a small antique store while wandering the countryside during my break from school.  I actually had to go look this card up and make sure that there was not another Ben Chapman when I first saw this card.  Chapman looks young in the picture, I had my doubts that this was the same person.

This is well past his playing days, and also after his wildly unsuccessful stint as the manager of the Phillies during the late 1940s.  If you have ever seen the movie "42", he was the racist manager of the Phillies.  According to players from his era, Chapman could make "make Ty Cobb blush" with the level of trash talk he engaged in on the field.  Given the changing demographics of the game during that era, it's of little surprise that Chapman never got a Major League managing job after the Phillies fired him.   

The Reds hired him as a third base coach for the 1952 season, after he had managed a few years in the Minors.  The Bulls are not mentioned by name on the back of the coaches card, but he worked in Durham in between his stint with the Phillies and the Reds.  

Chapman did not last a full season coaching with the Reds.  He resigned in early August when Rogers Hornsby decided to manage and coach third base at the same time.  Chapman went on to spend the majority of his time after baseball selling insurance in Alabama.  

As for his attachment to Jackie Robinson, I think that perhaps Mr. Chapman learned to be a better person somewhere along the way. According to some different interviews and articles floating around, he was a different person later on in life.  He volunteered to talk to minority groups around Alabama about baseball, and seemed proud of the fact that he had raised his own children to have a different view point of the world than his own.  We can only hope.