Baseball gift displays signatures from PONY League era

A recent gift by Bradfordian George Songer to the Hanley Library evokes a magic year in the city's sports history - the year the Bradford Blue Wings won the PONY League pennant.

Songer donated a baseball signed by 11 of the 20 team members of the winning 1949 team, which was a D-league affiliate of the Philadelphia Phillies playing in the Pennsylvania-Ontario-New York league.

It was the final year the team, which was founded in 1944, competed as the Blue Wings before becoming the Bradford Phillies from 1950 to 1955.

The signature of two future major-league players, pitcher Elroy “Roy” Face and second baseman Dick Young, appear on the ball, which Songer said came from his uncle, Francis Holleran who owned a cigar store near the current TOPS Friendly Market at Main and Davis streets.

Players would hang out at the store, and Holleran had them sign a ball for his nephew.

The average age of the players was 24, and the average age of the pitching staff that year was 20.5 years, according to Baseball-Reference.com, a home to complete statistics for every player who's ever stepped foot on a professional baseball diamond.

It was Face's first year as a professional after being signed by the Phillies as an amateur free agent. He had a 14-2 record in that first year for Bradford. Eventually, he would go on to play 16 years as a major league relief pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates, Detroit Tigers and Montreal Expos.

Face is probably most remembered for his remarkable 1959 season, when he went 18-1 in relief for the Pirates, the highest single-season winning percentage ever for a pitcher. The following year, he saved games one, four and five in the Pirates' 1960 World Series win over the New York Yankees.

The team's other eventual major-leaguer, Dick Young, was a second baseman signed by the Phillies as an amateur free agent in 1948.

After playing the 1948 season for Klamath Falls' (Ore.) D-league Gems, he played with the Blue Wings for only a portion of the 1949 season before moving up rapidly to the B-Leagues in Terra Haute, Ill., and Wilmington, Del.

He played parts of the 1951 and 1952 seasons with the Philadelphia Phillies, but bounced up and down from A-league to AAA-league until 1960, not making it again to “The Show.”

Other signatures on the ball are

Andrew Bratkowitz, a right-handed pitcher from Cleveland who went 15-16 with Bradford in 1949 and continued to play five more seasons in AA and AAA leagues,
Emil Carlini, an outfielder who played eight seasons in the minors from 1945 to 1954,
James Deery, second baseman from St.  Louis, who played two of his 10 seasons in the minors in Bradford,
Bert Freeman, who played two seasons in the D-leagues,
Alex Hoyle, a right-handed pitcher who went 12-11 with Bradford in 1949, the second year of his four-season career in the minors,
Tom Mankey, who was already a veteran of five other teams when he came to the Blue Wings at 20 years old in 1949. He finished out the season with the B-league Phillies in Terra Haute, Ind.,
Charles Saverine, who was a catcher playing his first year in Bradford, where he batted .300. He went on to make it as far as the A-league Schenectady Blue Jays in 1953 and 1954,
John Seltenreich, an outfielder who bounced up and down through the minor leagues from the D-leagues to the B-leagues from 1946 through 1952,
Ed Zeidler, a right-handed pitcher who went 16-4 with Bradford that year as a 20-year-old.

The ball will be on display twice a year to celebrate opening day and the World Series. However, the ball can be viewed in the Friends of Hanley Library archives room. Appointments can be made by contacting Marietta Frank, director of Hanley Library, at 814-362-7614 or marietta@pitt.edu or Dianna Beaver, acquisitions and special collections specialist at 814-362-7618 or dbeaver@pitt.edu.