1888 Spalding Baseball World Tour Promotional Poster....

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The finest baseball poster known!

1888 Spalding Baseball World Tour Promotional Poster. While it's undeniably a bold statement to assign this poster the distinction of the finest survivor in the history of our national pastime, it's not a determination we assign lightly. We've seen some real beauties over the years, notably the Old Judge tobacco cards advertising sign of the identical vintage which we sold for $210,000 in August 2022. While the two pieces share the same artistic hallmarks of the nineteenth century game, we'd be inclined to give the edge to the subject poster for its connection to the first multi-national barnstorming tour in the history of the sport, even before recalling that the Old Judge poster had been restored.

The offered poster has never felt the touch of a conservator, nor would it benefit from anything other than perhaps a professional linen backing, a decision we will leave to the discretion of the winning bidder. It currently presents in 100% original and unaltered condition, a miracle of survival as improbable as that of German teenager Juliane Koepcke, who dropped two miles from a disintegrated passenger jet into the Amazon rainforest in 1971 and walked out alive eleven days later. At forty-two inches in height and twenty-eight inches in width (42x28"), this is the most astonishing eight square feet of paper ever to appear upon the Heritage auction block.

Hall of Fame player turned sporting goods magnate Albert Spalding was the man responsible for the famed 1888-89 Baseball World Tour, having been bitten by the international barnstorming bug as a player traveling to England in 1874. As the language at upper right indicates, the Land Down Under had been the intended target, but the journey turned into a global circumnavigation that began on October 20, 1888 in Chicago before various domestic stops during a westward train journey, leading to a November 18, 1888 departure from San Francisco en route to Australia.

The teams would play a dozen games on the continent before continuing west to Ceylon, Egypt, Italy, France, England and Ireland before crossing the Atlantic. They would then tour the Major League cities before a final game in Chicago six months to the day after that first game. Those baseball historians well-versed in the Tour will recall photos of the teams standing atop the ruins of the Sphynx and the Coliseum along the way.

The Chicago team was owned by Spalding and managed by Adrian "Cap" Anson, the first member of the 3,000 Hit Club, and each appears prominently at upper left along with All-American team captain and fellow future Hall of Famer John Montgomery Ward, a reigning World Champion with the New York Giants. The tour's business manager and superintendent of transportation are the only others depicted in civilian clothing. Collectors of 19th century trading cards will recognize many of the player poses as those which appear in the N172 Old Judge issue.

There's a great wealth of information about the Tour at the website "Chicagology" [simply search for that with the added terms "1888-89 World Tour of Baseball"] that provides the chronology and final rosters for the teams, and this poster demonstrates that the latter was not finalized at the time the poster was created. At center left, for example, we find the legendary Mike "King" Kelly in his Boston Beaneaters uniform, although he didn't ultimately make the journey. The last pictured Cooperstown immortal, Ned Hanlon, was indeed a participant, and grips a distinctive Spalding ring bat in his personal rectangular vignette. Marvelous images of the Australian coat of arms, an idyllic baseball scene and the ship bearing the flags of Australia and the USA complete the design by "Orcutt Litho. Co, Chicago."

Original storage folds appear, with toning, chipping and light tears at the borders. A thin strip of paper that was apparently affixed over the lower two inches of the poster remains, to little distraction. This may be removable, as most glue of this era was water-based, but we cannot be certain. Again, this is such a magical rarity that such minor condition concerns seem almost preposterous to mention. Few pieces in our decades of service to the sports collectibles community have surprised and excited us this much. The only other known example of this poster resides in the permanent collection of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.