Brown: Reading old baseball letters from 1894

From SABR member Craig Brown at Threads of our Game on May 28, 2018:

Uniform letters, that is.

This week I have studied an 1894 photo collage of the Brooklyn National League team, shown below. This collage was printed in the Spalding Baseball Guide of 1895, and was comprised of 16 individual portraits of players dressed in uniform. Across each player’s chest was the word Brooklyn in arched block lettering. But this lettering spells out more than just the city name.

If you look closely, you will see that each “Brooklyn” was not like the other. In fact, one can detect four subtle yet distinct variations. I’ve indicated these variations with red boxes.

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Originally published: May 29, 2018. Last Updated: May 29, 2018.