Forgotten Treasures: Ferris Fain's Bat Ad

There I was, browsing through an antique store, helping my wife hunt for used frames our daughter plans to use for something at her wedding reception this fall, when I ran across this fabulous old magazine ad for Louisville Slugger bats:

There’s 10 Hall of Famers listed in this ad, but the Louisville Slugger folks focused on Ferris Fain.

I’ll admit that I didn’t recognize many of the names in that ad. Jim Fridley, for instance, sounds like a fake name generated by the makers of a computer game who were too cheap to license with the player’s union for the right to use the names of real players. But I looked him up, and sure enough he was an actual major leaguer for parts of three seasons, each with a different team. He never had an OPS+ above 100 and had a career mark of 89, so I’m not sure he was a good choice to represent a bat manufacturer.

He was one of several players I had to hunt for, like Tom “Buckshot” Brown, Neil Berry, and Clyde Klutz, leading me to suspect that some of baseball’s biggest stars weren’t willing to use Lousville Slugger bats at that time, or at least weren’t willing to advertise for them. Still, there were quite a few prominent players included, like Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, Eddie Mathews, and Nellie Fox. A total of ten future Hall of Famers are listed, and that doesn’t include Dick Williams, who was elected as a manager.

And yet it was Ferris Fain who was the focus of the ad, and at some point someone got him to autograph it.