Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Limited Edition Pete Hill Card!


As a bonus for Pre-Ordering the Pete Hill card set you will also receive this additional Pete Hill card depicting him in the distinctive flannels worn by the 1906 Philadelphia Giants. This card is not part of the Pete Hill card set and is only available as a special offer!

Pete Hill was the complete ballplayer, an excellent fielder and a hard hitter who rarely struck out. He was most compared to Ty Cobb for his natural ability and fiery play. His skill on the basepaths was unrivaled. Hill played for some of the greatest early negro teams starting with the Pittsburgh Keystones, then the Philadelphia Giants from 1904 to 1907 and the Leland Giants from 1907 to 1910. He also played 6 winters in Cuba. With Rube Foster’s American Giants in 1911 Pete hit safely in 115 of 116 games and he won the Cuban batting title that same year with a .365 batting average. Hill was captain of the American Giants and Foster considered him his "field general.” In 1919 and took over as manager of the Detroit Stars, and batted .391 in 1921. Hill finished up his career in 1925 as the player-manager of the powerful Black Sox of Baltimore. Pete Hill died Buffalo in 1951 and was inducted to the Hall Of Fame in 2006.

Just in time for the Holidays! Joining forces with famed Negro League researcher Gary Ashwill and Pete Hill's great nephew, Major Ron Hill I am proud to bring to you a beautiful 15 card tribute to one of the greatest black ballplayers of all time - PETE HILL. Many of you are familiar with Pete's career which spanned the first quarter of the 20th century. Each of the cards picture Pete on one of the many teams he played for - The Philadelphia Giants, Havana Reds, Chicago American Giants, Leland Giants, Baltimore Black Sox, Detroit Star, Cuban X Giants - and many more - Pete Hill's baseball odyssey found him playing on some of the greatest blackball teams of the dead-ball era. The illustrations I did for this set are some of the best ones I've done and the amount of research I put in trying to make each uniform as accurate as possible is something I'm really proud of. Working on this set I was so tempted to slip one or two into the website to show them off, but I held myself back in order to make all 15 of these illustrations new to everyone. The back of each card tells the life story of this talented Hall of Famer, all written and painstakingly researched by Gary Ashwill. Besides the narrative Gary has also gone so far as to compile Pete's statistics for his career in the Negro and Cuban Leagues as well as his career totals against Major and Minor League competition.


I can't tell you how unique this card set is, as far as I know no one has ever attempted to do something like this before and speaking for myself, I'm proud to be part of it! The first run will be of 1000 numbered sets for $25 each.












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