Rare Seattle Pilots spring training photos rediscovered

From Casey McNerthney at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on September 13, 2012:

Some forgotten gems showing Seattle’s baseball past were recently uncovered by the Museum of History and Industry.

Longtime Seattle baseball fans will remember the Seattle Pilots – the city’s first Major League Baseball team that was here only for the 1969 season. They left us to become the Milwaukee Brewers.

In most previous stories about the Pilots, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ran only a few photos. That’s because the prints of the game photos disappeared from the newspaper’s archives decades ago, and only a few Pilots images remained – mostly player headshots and a few stadium pictures.

This summer, we found dozens of Pilots images that had been tucked away in the same negative sleeves from spring 1969.

Our partners at MOHAI scanned those images – dozens of which we’re publishing here for the first time. Thousands of P-I negatives have been carefully preserved at the museum since the newspaper’s first donation there in 1976.

View the photos and read the full article here: www.seattlepi.com/local/article/Seattle-Pilots-forgotten-photos-uncovered-3860654.php

Related link: Listen to our SABR 36 Seattle Pilots Panel featuring Jim Bouton in 2006 (MP3)



Originally published: September 13, 2012. Last Updated: September 13, 2012.